The 1913 census of the population of the Russian empire lists. Population of the Russian Empire (1897-1917)

Since the question of the economy of the Russian Empire for 1913 pops up regularly, I have long wanted to collect good statistics for this period somewhere.
I managed to come across a selection of materials. I am posting a revised version (the original was unsuitable for the Internet). There are typos in the text, so you need to monitor the "adequacy" of the numbers. But this is the best thing that I came across on the net on this issue. In the future, I plan to bring the material to a more readable form.
I would like to hear the comments of economists, especially on the budget of the empire.
I cannot establish who the author of this material is, in case someone indicates it, I will be happy to insert a link to it.

Russia 1913

Indeed, the pre-war five-year period is the time of the highest, last take-off of pre-revolutionary Russia, which affected all
the most important aspects of the country's life. The demographic situation in the empire was quite
favorable, although the average annual population growth decreased slightly (in
1897-1901 it was 1.7%, in 1902-1906. - 1.68%, in 1907-1911. -
1.65%), which, however, is typical for all urbanizing countries. In connection with
rapid urban growth specific gravity citizens noticeably
increased, amounting, however, to the eve of the war only about 15%
population. The development of industry proceeded at a high rate. Having overcome
the consequences of the severe economic crisis of 1900-1903. and followed
him depression, during the years of the pre-war economic boom (1909-1913)
almost 1.5 times increased the volume of production. Moreover,
reflecting the ongoing industrialization of the country, heavy industry
in terms of growth rates it significantly exceeded the easy one (174.5% versus 137.7%). In terms of the total volume of industrial production, Russia ranked 5-6th
place in the world, almost equal to France and surpassing it in a number of
the most important indicators of heavy industry.

The production of agricultural products has significantly increased, before
all cereals and potatoes, as well as a number of industrial crops: cotton, sugar
beets, tobacco. This was achieved mainly by increasing the area
cultivated land on the outskirts of the empire - Siberia, Central Asia, but in some
measure and by increasing yields, wider use of machines,
improved implements, fertilizers, etc. Increased in absolute
in terms of livestock numbers, although per capita rates continued
shrink steadily. The formation of modern and infrastructure continued -
ways of communication, means of communication, credit system... The Russian ruble was considered one
hard convertible currencies, its gold backing was one of the most
durable in Europe.

Finally, in the field of culture, the government has made great efforts to
overcoming a grave affliction of Russian society - low literacy level: spending on the Ministry of Public Education has increased since 1900
almost 5 times, accounting for 14.6% of budget expenditures in 1913.

: <авансы>Of Russia

The rate of economic and cultural development of the country, structural
changes in the national economy seemed so impressive that the chairman
the syndical chamber of Paris stockbrokers M. Verneil,
who came to St. Petersburg in the summer of 1913 to clarify the conditions for granting Russia
another loan, predicted the inevitable, as it seemed to him, during
the next 30 years, a tremendous rise in Russian industry, which can
will compare with the colossal shifts in the US economy in the last third of the XIX
century. The French economic observer actually agreed with him.
E. Teri, who also met on the instructions of his
governments with the state of the Russian economy. His conclusion, made in the book "Russia in 1914. An Economic Review",
read: "... The economic and financial situation of Russia in the present
the moment is excellent ... it depends on the government to make it even better. "
Moreover, he warned: "If the majority
European nations, things will proceed in the same way between 1912 and 1950, as
they went between 1900 and 1912, then by the middle of this century
Russia will dominate Europe both politically and
economic and financially". Professor Berlin
Agricultural Academy Auhagen, who examined
1912 - 1913 a number of provinces of central Russia for the study of the course
agrarian reform, concluded his analysis as follows:
opinions on the likely success of the government's case, agreeing with
opinion of an outstanding farmer, a native of Switzerland, managing about
40 years of one of the largest estates in Russia in the Kharkov province, that
"another 25 years of peace and 25 years of land management - then Russia will become different
country ".

These predictions and predictions came true only partly and
not at all in the same way and in the form as suggested by the cited above
authors. History did not give Russia the necessary years of tranquility and peace -
internal and external. And there are many reasons for this - economic, social,
political, which should be the subject of special study. Important when
it is correct to assess this as the general trends in the development of the country at the beginning of the 20th century and
especially in the pre-war five years, and the specific parameters of the level of this
development in the most important spheres of the life of Russian society. Make it very
not easy, and above all - due to the lack of a compact and affordable
source base.

: Russian statistics are on top

Russian statistics are one of the most complete in
the world - in general, it adequately reflects the main trends
economic, socio-political and cultural life of society. However, with
it should be borne in mind that statistical data were collected by various departments: first of all, the Central
Statistical Committee of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, statistical services
other ministries, local government bodies (zemstvos, city
Duma), scientific and public organizations, etc. Methodology
and technique of collecting information, as well as the territorial scope of surveys
sometimes varied significantly. For this reason, in
statistical publications sometimes provide various numerical indicators,
sometimes dealing with the same aspects of society, which requires special
attention of researchers to assessing the reliability and completeness of the
sources. It is these circumstances, apparently, to a large extent explain
factual inaccuracies and errors occurring in some modern
publications affecting certain important issues stories
pre-revolutionary Russia, including the most relevant and controversial
issues related to the present.

Departmental disunity, scattered and
the inaccessibility of statistical materials is also represented by considerable
difficulties for researchers. Relatively few reference publications
complex content ("Statistical Yearbook of Russia" - edition
CSK MVD, "Statistical Yearbook" - publication of the Council of Congresses
representatives of industry and trade) are incomplete, and besides, in our time, all
more become rarities. Reprints of pre-revolutionary reference books in
there was practically no Soviet time.

The purpose of this publication is to bring together
statistical and reference materials characterizing the most important aspects
life of Russian society on the eve of the First World War and thus give
an opportunity for readers interested in the national history of this period,
to get an idea of ​​the level of socio-economic, political
and cultural development of the country, as well as - if possible - the dynamics of this
development at the beginning of the XX century. For this purpose, pre-revolutionary
reference publications, materials of various kinds of departments and public organizations,
both published and archived, as well as press, regulatory
acts and some research. In the introductory overviews to the sections and in the notes to
the tables contain the source study characteristics of the published materials. Some indicators are taken from sources unchanged, some
calculated by the compilers of the collection.

In an effort to avoid imposing their conceptual
representations, compilers as analytical materials, giving, as it were
key to the interpretation of statistical tables, used documents
government agencies (e.g. government control, department
police) and public organizations (Council of Congresses of Industry Representatives
and trade). Where sources allowed,
comparison of indicators for Russia with the corresponding data for other
countries or group of countries.

The handbook is divided into two parts. The first one presents materials
mainly devoted to demographic and socio-economic issues; in
the second - to the socio-political and cultural spheres of the life of Russian society
the eve of the first world war.

The compilers do not claim to comprehensively cover all aspects
life of Russia of this time and will be grateful to experts for criticism of omissions
and for possible additions that could be used in the subsequent
publication of a handbook, if it is useful and attracts attention
readers.

I. TERRITORY AND POPULATION OF RUSSIA

By the eve of World War I, the length of the Russian Empire with
north to south was 4383.2 versts (4675.9 km) and from east to west - 10,060
versts (10,732.3 km). The total length of land and sea borders was measured at 64
909.5 versts (69,245 km), of which the former accounted for 18,639.5 versts
(19 941.5 km), to the share of the oceans and outer seas - about 46 270 versts (49 360.4
km). These data, as well as figures for the total area of ​​the country, calculated according to topographic
maps back in the late 80s of the XIX century, Major General of the General Staff I.A.
Strelbitsky (See: Strelbitsky I.A., Surface calculus and the Russian Empire
in its general composition during the reign of Emperor Alexander III and adjacent to Russia
Asian states. SPb., 1889. С.2-3), with some subsequent clarifications
(See: Jubilee collection of the Central Statistical Committee of the Ministry of Internal Affairs.SPb., 1913.
Sec. II. C.5) were used in all pre-revolutionary publications. Supplemented
materials of the Central Committee of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, they give a fairly complete picture of the territory,
administrative division, location of cities and settlements Russian
empire.

Table 1 Space, administrative divisions and placement
settlements of the Russian Empire on January 1, 1914

Source: Statistical Yearbook of Russia. 1914 Edition
CSK MVD. Pg., 1915. Department 1.P. 1-25.

Administratively, the Russian Empire was divided into
99 large parts - 78 provinces, 21 oblasts and 2 independent districts.
Provinces and regions were subdivided into 777 counties and districts (in Finland on
parishes - 51). Counties and parishes, in turn, were divided into camps, departments and
plots - 2523 (and 274 forestry in Finland).

Along with this, there was a vicegerency, special administrative
subdivisions - governors general, in large cities - city governments.

Viceroyalty: Caucasian (provinces, regions, districts: Baku,
Batumi, Dagestan, Elisavetpolskaya, Kars, Kuban, Kutaisi,
Terskaya, Tiflis, Black Sea, Erivan; Zagatala and Sukhumi districts
and Baku city administration).

At the time in question, only one general meeting was held in Russia.
population census (January 28, 1897), which most adequately reflected
the number and composition of the inhabitants of the empire.

: As a result, the CSK data somewhat overestimated
population size, and this circumstance should be borne in mind when
the use of these materials (See: Kabuzan V.M.On the reliability of the population census
Russia (1858 - 1917) // Source study of Russian history. 1981 M.,
1982. S. 112, 113, 116; Sifman R.I. Dynamics of the population of Russia for
1897 -1914 // Marriage, fertility, mortality in Russia and the USSR. M., 1977.
P.62-82).

Table 2 The number of resident population of the Russian Empire by
data of the Central Committee of the Ministry of Internal Affairs in 1897 and 1909-1914. (as of January, thousand people).

Significantly overstated population

According to the corrected calculations of the Office of the Chief Medical Officer
inspector of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the population of Russia (excluding Finland) at the middle of the year
was: 1909 - 156.0 million, 1910 - 158.3 million, 1911 - 160.8 million, 1912
-164.0 million, 1913 - 166.7 million. (Ni: Sifman
R.I. Ukaz z. Op. P. 66).

According to the calculations of the Office of the Chief Medical Officer
inspectors of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, which were based on fertility data and
mortality, population of Russia (excluding Finland) on January 1, 1914
was 174,074.9 thousand people, i.e. by about
1.1 million people less than the data of the Central Committee of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. But the Office considered this figure too.
overpriced. The compilers of the "Report" of the Office for 1913 noted that
"total population according to local statistical committees
is exaggerated, exceeding the sum of the population figures from the 1897 census and
digits of natural increase for the elapsed time. "According to the calculation
compilers, the population of Russia (excluding Finland) in the middle of 1913
was 166 650 thousand people. (See: Report on the state of public health and medical
aid in Russia in 1913. Pg., 1915.S. 1, 66-67, 98-99).

Table 2a Calculation of the population of Russia (excluding Finland) for
1897-1914

Summer heat and political coolness make it possible to step back a little from the hustle and bustle and look at our problems from some distance, from some perspective.

It is always interesting to somehow assess the "path of Russia" over the past 100 years. Usually, such general assessments boil down to emotional and empty chatter, with the eternal search for the guilty and the preaching of salvation truths known in advance. But there is a way to avoid the temptation of such childish games. To do this, you need to turn not to emotions, but to FACTS AND NUMBERS. Real data, not rigged to fit a ready-made answer, give a reason not to "sound like a bell on a veche tower", but to think ...

Let's take one of the main, integral resources of any state - population. This is what the last 100 years of our country's development look like if you look at them from this angle.

In 1914, the population of the Russian Empire was, according to some estimates (data from our State Statistics Committee), 166 million people, according to others (the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the empire) - 178 million. The population of the Earth was then equal to 1,782 million people. That is, the Russian Empire included about 10% of Humanity. For comparison: the population of the United States then - about 100 million. The Russian Empire was the third largest country in the world - after China and India. As for the population of Russia within its current borders, on the eve of the First World War it was equal to 90 million people. - more than half of the inhabitants of the Empire, 5% of the world's population.

Now the Russian Federation - 143 million people. - gives a little more than 2% of the world's population, Russia is the 9th country in the world in terms of population. At the same time, if you imagine a country within the borders of that Russian Empire - that is, the USSR plus Finland and most of Poland - then its population would be 316 million people, approximately 4.5% of the world's population, it shares 3-4th place. by the number of residents from the United States.

With all the conventionality of such "calculations", the question invariably arises: is it good or bad?

The public consciousness in our - and, I think, not only in our - country still lives according to the principle "more is better than less!" Hence - all the ahs about the lost Big Country, imperial nostalgia, "the catastrophe of the collapse of the USSR."

Meanwhile, for any pleasure you have to pay.

For example, in the Russian Empire-1914 over 70% of the population were Orthodox (Russians - about 45%, Ukrainians, Belarusians), 11% - Muslims, about 15% Catholics and Lutherans, 4% Jews.

Today, almost 80% of the population of the Russian Federation is Russian (about 114 million out of 143 million) and a little more than 10% are Muslims. But as part of the Great Empire, the Russians (all in the territory the former USSR there are about 130 million of them) would make up just over 40% of the population. But the share of Muslims in comparison with the Empire-1914 would have increased from 11 to 30% - about 90 million people. (the population of Central Asia has tripled in 100 years). Would such a Russian-Muslim Eurasia become a stable state or would it be fraught with collapse?

Perhaps the collapse of the USSR itself objectively became a price to pay for the SALVATION of Russia as a state of Russian culture (not to be confused with the racist slogan "Russia for the Russians"). It would be difficult to maintain the dominance of Russian culture in the country for a long time, despite the fact that Russians make up no more than 40% of the country's population. (By the way, references to the United States are not very convincing - firstly, there are generally different traditions, and secondly, "English culture" and "Anglo-Saxon elite" do not dominate the modern United States.)

What can be said about the "demographic hole" that the 20th century, with its wars and terror, is often said to have become for Russia?

100 years ago, the population of England was 45 million, France - 39 million, Germany - 65 million.

Now, respectively, England - 61 million, France - 64 million, Germany - 82 million. Growth from 60% (France) to 30% (Germany). The population of Russia within the unchanged borders of the Russian Federation has grown by 60%. Can this be considered a demographic disaster compared to other European countries?

These numbers, it seems to me, destroy our overestimated (positively or negatively) self-esteem.

It turns out that any volitional efforts are insignificant in comparison with the inaudible demographic "ELEMENT": the authorities are noisy, bursting, puffing, heroically destroying the people, and women give birth to themselves. And the ship of the state floats with the current, and not the current obeys the motor of the ship.

Until the 1960s-1970s, high, peasant-patriarchal birth rates remained in Russia. Only in 1960, more than half of the population of Russia became city dwellers (in Europe this happened dozens of years earlier, and in England in the 19th century). Now only 25% of the population of the Russian Federation live in villages. The peasant civilization has ended - the birth rate has gradually changed (by the way, in the countryside too) - now they amount to 11.1 births per 1000 population. For comparison, in France - 12.4 per 1000 (partly due to the Arabs), in England - 10.6, in Germany - 8.2. Accordingly, population growth began to decrease, and after 1991, due to a sharp increase in mortality in conditions of social turmoil, negative growth began. In terms of mortality - 16 deaths per 1000 people, Russia is located between Nigeria and Chad. Mortality in old Europe: in France 8.6 per 1000 people, in England 10, and in Germany 11 people. by 1000.

As a result, the population of Russia is declining, although not as dramatically as they write: from 1991 to 2010 - by 7 million, or less than 5%.

Of course, the growth of the population of Russia in the twentieth century by 60% was far from uniform. Not just people flowed from village to city. The population density has changed dramatically in different regions.

Thus, the number of inhabitants of Siberia and the Far East has tripled: from 10 million at the beginning of the 20th century to about 30 million at the beginning of the 21st. You can say - "there was no happiness - misfortune helped." This growth is an obvious "involuntary" result of forced resettlement: exile during collectivization, evacuation during the war years, terror with millions of prisoners, many of whom settled in a new place. Nevertheless, these lands remained sparsely inhabited: "vastness, vain without inhabitants" (Lomonosov). This especially applies to the Far East: the population density is about 1 person. per kilometer! If this were the case throughout the country, the population of Russia would be 17 million, and if the density in the Far East was the same as in the Central District (about 56 people per kilometer), then more than 350 million people would live there!

The greatest growth in this century, of course, fell on Moscow. In 1914 - 1,763,000 people, in 2010 - about 11 million only permanent residents, an increase of more than 6 times (and with temporary and unregistered Muscovites - almost 8 times). All this has made Moscow the largest and most unbearable metropolis in Europe for living ... (By the way, the population of St. Petersburg has only doubled over the years.)

On the other hand, the backward, "Central Russian" Russia has become completely depopulated. For example, in the Smolensk region, within the modern borders in 1926, there were 2,166,000 people, now - 966,000. In the Kostroma province in 1914, the population was 1,800,000, now - 692,000. These are typical examples. One-story Russia, from where the roots of Russian culture grow, has almost disappeared. And a largely different country arose in the same place ...

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Let's try with numbers in hand to prove the inconsistency of most of the myths about tsarist Russia

In this article from the cycle "Pre-revolutionary Russia" we will discuss a number of aspects related to the standard of living of our people a hundred years ago.

Property stratification is an essential social parameter. Many people think that the fruits of Russia's achievements were enjoyed by a few percent of the population, who were drowning in luxury, while the rest of the people lived in poverty. For example, the thesis has long been circulating in journalism that in the late 19th - early 20th centuries, 40% of peasant recruits for the first time tried meat only in the army.

What can you say here? The tenacity of even the most implausible statements is amazing.

Judge for yourself. According to the directory "Russia 1913", in 1905 there were cattle - 39 heads, sheep and goats - 57, pigs - 11 per 100 people of the rural population in 1905 - 107 heads of livestock per 100 people. Before joining the army, the peasant son lived in a family, and, as we know, the peasant families of those times were large, with many children. This is an important point, because if there were at least five people in a family (parents and three children), then on average there were 5.4 heads of cattle. And after that we are told that a significant part of the peasant sons in their entire pre-conscription life, neither in their families, nor with relatives, nor with friends, nor on holidays, anywhere and never tasted meat!

Of course, the distribution of livestock by yards was not the same: some people lived richer, others poorer. But it would be quite strange to assert that in many peasant households there was not a single cow, not a single pig, etc. By the way, Professor B.N. Mironov in his fundamental work "Welfare of the Population and Revolution in Imperial Russia" showed how many times the incomes of 10% of the wealthiest strata of the population exceeded the incomes of 10% of the poorest population in 1901-04. The difference turned out to be small: only 5.8 times.

Mironov points to another eloquent fact that indirectly confirms this thesis. When, after the well-known events, the expropriation of private estates took place, then in 36 provinces of European Russia, where there was just a significant private land ownership, the fund of peasant land increased by only 23%. The notorious "class of exploiters" did not have that much land.

When dealing with pre-revolutionary statistics, one must always make allowances for how much the realities of that era differed from our 21st century. Imagine an economy in which the lion's share of trade takes place without cash registers and for cash, or even for barter. In such conditions, it is very easy to underestimate the turnover of your economy with the old goal of paying less taxes.

It should be borne in mind that the absolute majority of the country's population lived in the countryside a hundred years ago. How can you check how much the peasant raised for his own consumption? Incidentally, the collection of data for the compilation of agricultural statistics proceeded as follows: the central statistical committee simply sent out questionnaires to the volosts with questions for peasants and private landowners. To say that the information received turned out to be approximate and underestimated is to say nothing.

This problem was well known to contemporaries, but in those years there was simply no technical opportunity to establish accurate accounting. By the way, the first all-Russian agricultural census was carried out in 1916. It was unexpectedly found that, compared with 1913, the number of horses increased by 16%, cattle - by 45%, small - by 83%! It would seem, on the contrary, that during the war the situation should have worsened, but we see the exact opposite picture. What's the matter? Obviously, the 1913 data were simply grossly underestimated.

When it comes to the diet of a resident of the Russian Empire, one should not discount fishing and hunting, although, of course, the situation in these areas can only be judged on the basis of rough estimates. I will again use Mironov's work "Welfare of the Population and Revolution in Imperial Russia." So, in 1913, commercial hunting in 10 European and 6 Siberian provinces produced 3.6 million wild birds. By 1912, in 50 provinces of European Russia, the annual catch of fish for sale was 35.6 million poods. At the same time, it is obvious that the fish was caught not only for trade, but also for personal consumption, which means that the total catch was much larger.

Before the revolution, research was carried out on the nutrition of the peasants. Information on this account covers 13 provinces of European Russia for the period 1896-1915. and characterize the consumption of the following set of products: bread, potatoes, vegetables, fruits, dairy, meat, fish, cow oil, vegetable oil, eggs and sugar. Mironov's study says that peasants in general received 2,952 kcal per capita per day. At the same time, an adult man from the poor strata of the peasantry consumed 3182 kcal per day, the middle peasant - 4500 kcal, from the rich - 5662 kcal.

Work in the countryside was paid as follows. In the black earth zone, according to data for 1911-1915, during the spring sowing period, an employee received 71 kopecks a day, a female employee - 45 kopecks; in the non-chernozem zone - 95 and 57 kopecks, respectively. During haymaking, the payment increased to 100 and 57 kopecks in the black earth zone, in the non-chernozem one - 119 and 70 kopecks, respectively. And, finally, for harvesting grain they paid as follows: 112 and 74; 109 and 74 kopecks.

The average salary of workers in European Russia for all groups of industries in 1913 was 264 rubles a year. Is it a lot or a little? To answer this question, you need to know the order of prices of those times.

Here are the data from the reference book "Russia 1913":

The payment to a carpenter for one day of work in Moscow in 1913 was 175 kopecks. With this money he could buy:
- wheat flour, I grade, gritty - 10.3 kg
or
- wheat sieve bread - 11 kg
or
- beef, I grade - 3 kg
or
- granulated sugar - 6 kg
or
- fresh bream - 3 kg
or
- sunflower oil - 6.1 kg
or
- hard coal (Donetsk) - 72.9 kg

Many workers had land before the revolution. Unfortunately, we do not have the relevant information for all regions of the country, but on average in 31 provinces the share of such workers was 31.3%. At the same time, in Moscow - 39.8%, in Tula province - 35.0%, Vladimir province - 40.1%, Kaluga province - 40.5%, Tambov province - 43.1%, Ryazan province - 47.2%. (data taken from the book by A. G. Rashin "Formation of the working class in Russia").

Interesting statistics on the incomes of the pre-revolutionary intelligentsia are given in the works of S.V. Volkova "The intellectual layer in Soviet society" and "Why the Russian Federation is not yet Russia." The salaries of junior officers were 660-1260 rubles per year, senior officers - 1740-3900, generals - up to 7800. In addition, apartment money was paid: 70-250, 150-600 and 300-2000 rubles, respectively.

Zemsky doctors received 1200-1500 rubles a year, pharmacists - an average of 667.2 rubles. University professors received at least 2,000 rubles a year, and an average of 3,000-5,000 rubles; secondary school teachers with higher education earned from 900 to 2500 rubles (with 20 years of experience), without higher education- 750-1550 rubles. The directors of the gymnasiums received 3000-4000 rubles, the real schools - 5200 rubles.

The empire paid special attention to the state of the railway transport, and salaries in this area were especially high. For the heads of the railways, they amounted to 12-15 thousand rubles, and for the officials who supervise the construction of railways - 11-16 thousand.

At first glance, it may seem that these figures contradict Mironov's thesis about the relatively small differentiation of income between the poorest and richest strata in tsarist Russia, but this is not the case. Mironov compared the 10% of the richest with the 10% of the poorest inhabitants of the country, and Volkov's numbers refer to a very narrow group of the population of the Russian Empire. There were very few ministers, governors and other major representatives of the ruling elite. The highest ranks, who made up the first four classes of the imperial Table of Ranks, numbered about 6,000 people.

Prosecutors of the Russian Empire, trying to prove the “degradation of tsarism,” like to argue that the average height of soldiers in the empire was decreasing. The logic is simple: they began to eat worse, get sick more often, etc., and this is the result: more and more frail and undersized people enter the army. Where, they say, have disappeared Suvorov's "miracle heroes"?

And here are the real data provided by the largest Russian specialist in the field of historical anthropometry, Professor Mironov:

The recruit was born in 1851-1855; height - 165.8 cm
The recruit was born in 1866-1870; height - 165.1 cm
The recruit was born in 1886-1890; height - 167.6 cm
The recruit was born in 1906-1910; height - 168.0 cm

For comparison: the growth of a recruit in Germany in 1900 was 169 cm, and in France - 167 cm, that is, Russia was on this indicator at the level of the most developed and prosperous countries in Europe. By the way, in Suvorov's times, the average height of recruits was about 161-163 cm, which is much lower than the growth of a recruit during the reign of Nicholas II, therefore the thesis about Suvorov heroes, allegedly superior to their descendants in height, is not supported by figures.

By the way, manipulation with growth is a stereotyped technique of black PR. As one would expect, the last tsar personally got it on this part. They call him almost a dwarf. Yes, Nikolai's height was 167-168 cm, which is not much by today's standards, but he was born in 1868, and then the growth of recruits was about 165.1 cm. And we must not forget that they tried to take people taller and stronger into the army. And since Nikolai was above the average recruit, then all the more his height exceeded the average height of men of his generation. Moreover, the previous generations of men were even lower, that is, the last tsar of Russia was noticeably higher than the overwhelming majority of the population of our country.

Go ahead. Assessing the economic and social indicators of the Russian Empire, one cannot but mention one frequently encountered statistical focus. When the per capita indicators of our country are compared with the achievements of other states, then in Russia the entire population is taken into account, while in other countries only the population of the metropolises is taken into account. A typical example is the British Empire, which was then home to about 450 million people. The colonies were a gigantic market for English goods, besides, they supplied raw materials to the metropolis, and when the First World War began, the inhabitants of the colonies fought on the side of Britain.

That is, how to use the colonies in their own interests, it is all one country, but when it comes to calculating per capita indicators, the colonies immediately become "strangers." Remember the children's fairy tale about a man who shared tops and roots with a bear? This is it, and the same reasoning applies to France and Germany.

In addition, comparing the per capita indicators of countries with different age structures is incorrect: after all, a small child does not make any contribution to the economy, therefore, the more children in society, the lower the per capita indicators. It is more correct to divide the absolute gross indicators not by the entire population, but only by the able-bodied population, or by the number of households. In this regard, it should be borne in mind that at the beginning of the 20th century, there was a demographic rise in Russia, and there were many children.

The total population of the country in 1913 was about 170 million people, and the increase was about 1.7% per year. And this is also an important indicator, but it should be discussed separately, which we will do in subsequent articles.

By the eve of World War I, the length of the Russian Empire from north to south was 4383.2 versts (4675.9 km) and from east to west - 10,060 versts (10,732.3 km). The total length of land and sea borders was measured at 64,909.5 versts (69,245 km), of which the former accounted for 18,639.5 versts (19,941.5 km), the oceans and outer seas - about 46,270 versts ( 49 360.4 km). These data, as well as the figures for the total area of ​​the country, calculated from topographic maps back in the late 80s of the XIX century by Major General of the General Staff I.A. during the reign of Emperor Alexander III and the Asian states adjacent to Russia. SPb., 1889. P.2-3), with some subsequent clarifications (See: Jubilee collection of the Central Statistical Committee of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. SPb., 1913. Section II. P.5 ) were used in all pre-revolutionary publications. Supplemented by materials from the Central Statistical Office of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, they give a fairly complete picture of the territory, administrative division, location of cities and towns of the Russian Empire.

Table 1

Space, administrative division and location of settlements of the Russian Empire on January 1, 1914

Source: Statistical Yearbook of Russia. 1914 Published by TsSK MVD. Pg., 1915. Department 1.P. 1-25.

Administratively, the Russian Empire was divided into 99 large parts - 78 provinces, 21 regions and 2 independent districts. Provinces and regions were subdivided into 777 counties and districts (in Finland - 51 parishes). Counties and parishes, in turn, were divided into camps, departments and sections - 2523 (and 274 leismania in Finland).

Along with this, there were governorship, special administrative divisions - general governorships, in large cities - city governments.

Viceroyalty: Caucasian (provinces, regions, districts: Baku, Batumi, Dagestan, Elisavetpol, Kars, Kuban, Kutaisi, Tersk, Tiflis, Black Sea, Erivan; Zakatala and Sukhumi districts and Baku city administration).

General Governorship:

Moscow (Moscow and Moscow province). Varshavskoe (9 Privislyansk provinces). Kievskoe (Kiev, Podolsk and Volyn provinces). Irkutsk (Irkutsk, Yenisei provinces, Trans-Baikal and Yakutsk regions). Priamurskoe (Amurskaya, Kamchatka, Primorskaya and Sakhalin regions) Turkestan (Transcaspian, Samarkand, Semirechenskaya, Syr-Darya and Fergana regions). Finland (8 Finnish provinces). Military Governorship - Kronstadt City Governments:

St. Petersburg, Moscow, Sevastopol, Kerch-Yenikalskoe, Odessa, Nikolaev, Rostov-on-Don and Baku.

In addition, the empire was subdivided into departmental districts, consisting of a different number of provinces and regions: military (13), judicial (14), educational (15), postal and telegraph (30), districts of the Ministry of Railways (9) and customs (9 ).

At the time in question, only one general population census was carried out in Russia (January 28, 1897), which most adequately reflected the number and composition of the inhabitants of the empire. Usually, however, the Central Statistical Committee of the Ministry of Internal Affairs carried out the registration of the population, mainly by mechanical calculation of data on births and deaths provided by the provincial statistical committees. These data, published in the Statistical Yearbook of Russia, fairly accurately reflected the natural population growth, but did not fully take into account migration processes - both internal (between different provinces, between town and country) and external (emigration and immigration). If the latter, given their relatively small scale, did not have any noticeable effect on the total population, then the costs due to the underestimation of the factor of internal migration were much more significant. Since 1906, the Central Committee of the Ministry of Internal Affairs tried to adjust its calculations, introducing amendments to the expanding resettlement movement. But still, the practiced population counting system did not allow to completely avoid the repeated registration of migrants - at the place of permanent residence (registration) and place of stay. As a result, the CSK data somewhat overestimated the population, and this circumstance should be borne in mind when using these materials (See: Kabuzan V.M. ., 1982. S. 112, 113, 116; Sifman R. I. Dynamics of the population of Russia for 1897-1914 // Marriage, fertility, mortality in Russia and the USSR. M., 1977. P.62-82) ...

This handbook contains the data of the Central Statistical Office of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, given that it was on them that official materials and calculations used in a number of tables were based. At the same time, other calculation materials and attempts to correct the statistics of the CSK are indicated.

table 2

The resident population of the Russian Empire according to the Central Statistical Committee of the Ministry of Internal Affairs in 1897 and 1909-1914. (as of January, thousand people).

Sources: General collection on the empire of the development of the data of the first general population census, carried out on January 28, 1897. St. Petersburg, 1905. Vol. 1. P.6-7;
Statistical Yearbook of Russia. 1909 St. Petersburg., 1910. Dept. I S. 58-59;
Also. 1910 St. Petersburg., 1911. Dept. I. S. 35-59;
Also. 1911 St. Petersburg., 1912. Dept. I. S.ZZ-57;
Also. 1912 St. Petersburg, 1913. Ooa. I. S.ZZ-57;
Also. 1913 St. Petersburg., 1914 Ooa. I. S.ZZ-57;
Also. 1914 Pg., 1915. Dept. I. С.ЗЗ-57.

(1) - Data without the Kholmsk province, included in 1911 in Russia.

According to the adjusted calculations of the Office of the Chief Medical Inspector of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the population of Russia (excluding Finland) at the middle of the year was: 1909 - 156.0 million, 1910 - 158.3 million, 1911 - 160.8 million, 1912 −164.0 million, 1913 - 166.7 million. (Ni: Sifman R.I. Uka z. Soch. P. 66).

Table 2a

Calculation of the population of Russia (excluding Finland) for 1897-1914

Source: Sifman R.I.Population dynamics in Russia for 1897-1914 aa. // Marriage, fertility, mortality in Russia and the USSR. M., 1977.S.80.

Table 3

The number, composition and density of the population of the Russian Empire on January 4, 4914 by provinces and regions (thousand people)

Will bend a quarter of you from gladness, pestilence and sword.
V. Bryusov. Bled Horse (1903).

APPEAL TO READERS.
First of all, it is necessary to clarify that from the end of 1917 to the autumn of 1922, the country was ruled by two leaders: Lenin, and then immediately Stalin. The tales composed during the years of Brezhnev about a certain period of the reign of a friendly or not too friendly Politburo, which dragged on almost until the congress of winners, have nothing to do with history.
“Comrade Stalin, having become general secretary, concentrated immense power in his hands, and I’m not sure whether he will always be able to use this power with sufficient caution,” Lenin writes with horror on December 24, 1922. Collected Works, vol. 45, p. 345. Stalin held this post for only 8 months, but Ilyich, experienced in politics, had enough time to understand what happened ...
In the preface to Trotsky's Archives (in 4 volumes) there is a significant remark: "In 1924-1925, Trotsky was actually completely alone, finding himself without like-minded people."
Thanks to all readers who have wished to help me by criticizing or providing additional information to supplement the stated facts. I ask you to indicate the exact sources where the data was obtained from, indicating the author, title of the work, year and place of publication, pages on which a specific quote is located. Respectfully yours - the author.

"Accounting and control is the main thing that is required for the correct functioning of a communist society." Lenin V.I. PSS, vol. 36, p. 266.

The losses of Russia as a result of 4 years of the First World War and 3 years of Civil War amounted to more than 40 billion gold rubles, which exceeded 25% of the total pre-war wealth of the country. More than 20 million people died or became disabled. Industrial production in 1920 decreased in comparison with 1913 by 7 times. Products and services Agriculture amounted to only two-thirds of the pre-war. The poor harvest, which in the summer of 1920 gripped many grain regions, further exacerbated the food crisis in the country. The difficult situation in industry and agriculture was aggravated by the collapse of transport. Thousands of kilometers of railroad tracks were destroyed. More than half of the locomotives and about a quarter of the carriages were out of order. Kovkel I.I., Yarmusik E.S. History of Belarus from ancient times to our time. - Minsk, 2000, p. 340.

Researchers of Soviet history know that there is not a single national statistics in the world that is as false as the official statistics of the population of the USSR.
History teaches that civil war is more destructive and deadly than a war with any enemy. It leaves behind widespread poverty, hunger and devastation.
But the last reliable censuses and records of the population of Russia end in 1913-1917.
After these years, complete falsification begins. Neither the population census in 1920, nor its census in 1926, nor the "rejected" census of 1937 and then - "adopted" - in 1939 are reliable.

We know that on January 1, 1911, the population of Russia was 163.9 million souls (together with Finland, 167 million).
According to the historian L. Semennikova, "according to statistical data, in 1913 the population of the country was about 174,100 thousand people (it included 165 peoples)." Science and Life, 1996, No. 12, p.8.

TSB (3rd ed.) The total population of the Russian Empire before the First World War is 180.6 million people.
In 1914, it increased to 182 million souls. According to the statistics of the end of 1916, 186 million lived in Russia, that is, the increase in 16 years of the XX century amounted to 60 million. Kovalevsky P. Russia at the beginning of the XX century. - Moscow, 1990, No. 11, p. 164.

At the beginning of 1917, a number of researchers raised the total population of the country to 190 million. But after 1917 and until the 1959 census, no one knew for sure, except for the elected "rulers", how many inhabitants there were on the territory of the state.

The extent of the violence, maiming and murder, and the loss of its inhabitants are also hidden. Demographers only guess about them and estimate them approximately. And the Russians are silent! But how else: printed works and testimonies disclosing this slaughterhouse are not known to them. For the most part, what is known from school textbooks is not facts, but propaganda inventions.

One of the most confusing is the question of the number of people who left the country during the years of the revolution and civil war. The exact number of fugitives is unknown.
Ivan Bunin: “I was not one of those who were taken by surprise by it, for whom its size and atrocities were a surprise, but still the reality surpassed all my expectations: what the Russian revolution soon turned into, no one who did not see it would understand. This spectacle was a complete horror for everyone who did not lose the image and likeness of God, and from Russia, after the seizure of power by Lenin, hundreds of thousands of people fled, who had the slightest opportunity to escape "(I. Bunin." Cursed Days ").

The newspaper of the Right Social Revolutionaries "Volia Rossii", which had a good information network, provided such data. On November 1, 1920, there were about 2 million emigrants in Europe from the territory of the former Russian Empire. In Poland - one million, in Germany - 560 thousand, in France - 175 thousand, in Austria and Constantinople - 50 thousand each, in Italy and Serbia - 20 thousand each. In November, another 150 thousand people pulled up from the Crimea. Subsequently, emigrants from Poland and other countries of Eastern Europe were drawn to France, and many to both America.

The question of the number of emigrants from Russia cannot be resolved on the basis of sources located only in the USSR. At the same time, in the 1920s and 1930s, the issue was considered in a number of foreign works based on foreign data.

At the same time, we note that in the 1920s, extremely contradictory data on the number of emigrants, compiled by charitable organizations and institutions, appeared in foreign émigré publications. This information is sometimes mentioned in modern literature.

In the book of Hans von Rimschi, the number of emigrants is determined (based on data from the American Red Cross) at 2,935 thousand people. This figure included several hundred thousand Poles who repatriated to Poland and registered as refugees with the American Red Cross, a significant number of Russian prisoners of war who were still in 1920-1921. in Germany (Rimscha Hans Von. Der russische Biirgerkrieg und die russische Emigration 1917-1921. Jena, Fromann, 1924, s.50-51).

The data of the League of Nations for August 1921 determine the number of emigrants at 1,444 thousand (including 650 thousand in Poland, 300 thousand in Germany, 250 thousand in France, 50 thousand in Yugoslavia, 31 thousand in Greece, 30 thousand in Bulgaria). It is believed that the number of Russians in Germany reached its highest point in 1922-1923 - 600 thousand throughout the country, of which 360 thousand in Berlin.

F. Lorimer, considering the data on emigrants, joins E. Kulischer's written estimates, which determined the number of emigrants from Russia at about 1.5 million, and together with repatriates and other migrants - about 2 million (Kulischer E. Europe on the Move: War and popular changes. 1917-1947. NY, 1948, p. 54).

By December 1924, there were about 600 thousand Russian emigrants in Germany alone, in Bulgaria there were up to 40 thousand, in France about 400 thousand, in Manchuria - more than 100 thousand. True, not all of them were emigrants in the exact sense of the word: many served on the CER even before the revolution.

Russian emigrants also settled in Great Britain, Turkey, Greece, Sweden, Finland, Spain, Egypt, Kenya, Afghanistan, Australia, and only in 25 states, not counting the countries of America, primarily the USA, Argentina and Canada.

But if we turn to Russian literature, we will find that estimates of the total number of emigrants sometimes differ by a factor of two or three.

IN AND. Lenin in 1921 wrote that at that time there were from 1.5 to 2 million Russian emigrants abroad (Lenin V.I. PSS, vol. 43, p. 49, 126; vol. 44, p. 5, 39, although in one case he named the figure of 700 thousand people - v. 43, p. 138).

V.V. Comin, claiming that there were 1.5-2 million people in the white emigration, relied on the information of the Geneva mission Russian society Of the Red Cross and the Russian Literary Society in Damascus. V.V. Komin The political and ideological collapse of the Russian petty-bourgeois counter-revolution abroad. Kalinin, 1977, part 1, p.30, 32.

L.M. Spirin, stating that the number of Russian emigration was 1.5 million, used data from the refugee section of the International Labor Office (late 1920s). According to these data, the number of registered emigrants was 919 thousand. LM Spirin. Classes and parties in the Russian Civil War 1917-1920. - M., 1968, p. 382-383.

S.N. Semanov cites the figure of 1 million 875 thousand emigrants in Europe alone on November 1, 1920 - Semanov S.N. Elimination of the anti-Soviet Kronstadt rebellion in 1921 M., 1973, p. 123.

Data on the eastern emigration - to Harbin, Shanghai - are not taken into account by these historians. The southern emigration to Persia, Afghanistan, India is also not taken into account, although there were quite numerous Russian colonies in these countries.

On the other hand, clearly understated information was cited by J. Simpson (Simpson Sir John Hope. The Refugee Problem: Report of a Survey. L., Oxford University Press, 1939), determining the number of emigrants from Russia on January 1, 1922 at 718 thousand in Europe and the Middle East and 145 thousand in the Far East. These data include only officially registered (who received the so-called Nansen passports) emigrants.

G. Barikhnovsky believed that there were less than 1 million emigrants. Barikhnovsky G.F. The ideological and political collapse of the White emigration and the defeat of the internal counter-revolution. L., 1978, p. 15-16.

According to I. Trifonov, the number of repatriated in 1921-1931. exceeded 180 thousand. Trifonov I.Ya. Elimination of the exploiting classes in the USSR. M., 1975, p. 178. Moreover, the author, citing Lenin's data on 1.5-2 million emigrants, with regard to the 20-30s, calls the figure 860 thousand. Ibid, pp. 168-169.

Probably, only about 2.5% of the population left the country, that is, about 3.5 million people.

On January 6, 1922, the newspaper Fossiche Zeitung, respected in the circles of the intelligentsia, published in Berlin, brought up the problem of refugees for discussion by the German public.
The article "The New Great Migration of Peoples" said: "The Great War caused a movement among the peoples of Europe and Asia, which may be the beginning of a great historical process of the great migration of peoples. A special role is played by the Russian emigration, similar examples of which are not found in recent history. Moreover, in this emigration we are talking about a whole complex of political, economic, social and cultural problems and it is impossible to solve them either by general phrases or by immediate measures ... For Europe, the need has ripened to consider Russian emigration not as a temporary incident ... But it is precisely the common destiny that has created this war is for the vanquished, prompts one to think, apart from the momentary hardships, about future opportunities for cooperation. "

Looking at what is happening in Russia, the emigration saw: any opposition is being destroyed in the country. Immediately (in 1918) the Bolsheviks closed all opposition (including socialist) newspapers. Censorship is introduced.
In April 1918 the anarchist party was defeated, and in July 1918 the Bolsheviks severed relations with their only allies in the revolution - the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries, the party of the peasantry. In February 1921, the arrests of the Mensheviks began; in 1922, a trial took place over the leaders of the Left Socialist-Revolutionary Party.
This is how the regime of the military dictatorship of one party arose, directed against 90% of the country's population. The dictatorship was understood, of course, as "violence not limited by law." Stalin I.V. Speech at Sverdlovsk University June 9, 1925

The emigration was dumbfounded to draw conclusions that had seemed impossible to her yesterday.

Paradoxical as it may sound, but Bolshevism is the third phenomenon of Russian great power, Russian imperialism - the first was the Moscow kingdom, the second was the Petrine empire. Bolshevism is for a strong centralized state. The will for social truth was combined with the will for state power, and the second will turned out to be stronger. Bolshevism entered Russian life as a highly militarized force. But the old Russian state was always militarized. The problem of power was the main one for Lenin and the Bolsheviks. And they created a police state, in its methods of government very similar to the old Russian state ... The Soviet state has become the same as any despotic state, it acts by the same means, violence and lies. Berdyaev N.A. The origins and meaning of Russian communism.
Even the old Slavophil dream of transferring the capital from St. Petersburg to Moscow, to the Kremlin, was realized by red communism. A communist revolution in one country inevitably leads to nationalism and nationalist politics. Berdyaev N.A.

Therefore, when assessing the size of emigration, it is imperative to take into account: a large part of the White Guards who left their homeland later returned to Soviet Russia.

In "State and Revolution" Ilyich promised: "... the suppression of the minority of exploiters by the majority of yesterday's wage slaves is so comparatively easy, simple and natural than suppressing the uprisings of slaves, serfs, wage workers, that it will cost mankind much cheaper" (Lenin V.I. PSS, vol. 33, p. 90).

The leader even ventured to estimate the total "cost" of the world revolution - half a million, a million people (PSS, vol. 37, p.60).

Fragmentary information on population losses in individual specific regions can be found here and there. It is known, for example, that Moscow, in which 1580 thousand people lived by the beginning of 1917, in 1917-1920. lost almost half of its inhabitants (49.1%) - this is stated in an article about the capital in 5 volumes. ITU, 1st ed. (M., 1927, stb. 389).

In connection with the outflow of workers to the front and to the countryside, with a typhoid epidemic and general economic devastation, Moscow in 1918-1921. lost almost half of its population: in February 1917 in Moscow there were 2.044 thousand, and in 1920 - 1.028 thousand. In 1919, the mortality rate especially increased, but since 1922 the population decline in the capital began to decrease, and its number increased rapidly. TSB, 1st ed. t.40, M., 1938, p. 355.

Here is what data on the dynamics of the city's population was named by the author of the article in a survey collection about Soviet Moscow, which was published in 1920.
“As of November 20, 1915, there were already 1,983,716 inhabitants in Moscow, and the next year the capital surpassed the second million. On February 1, 1917, just on the eve of the revolution, 2,017,173 people lived in Moscow, and on the modern territory of the capital (with the inclusion of some suburban areas, annexed in May and June 1917), the number of Moscow residents reached 2,043,594.
According to the census in August 1920, there were 1,028,218 inhabitants in Moscow. In other words, since the census on April 21, 1918, the population decline in Moscow amounted to 687,804 people, or 40.1%. This population decline is unparalleled in European history. Only St. Petersburg has overtaken Moscow in the degree of its depopulation. Since February 1, 1917, when the population of Moscow reached its maximum, the number of residents of the capital fell by 1,015,000 people, or almost half (more precisely, by 49.6%).
Meanwhile, the population of St. Petersburg (within the city government) in 1917 reached, according to the estimates of the city statistical office, 2,440,000 people. According to the census on August 28, 1920, only 706,800 people were present in St. Petersburg, so that since the revolution the number of St. Petersburg residents has decreased by 1,733,200 people, or 71%. In other words, the population of St. Petersburg was declining almost twice as fast as Moscow. " Red Moscow, M., 1920.

But in the final figures there is no exact answer to the question: how much did the population of the country decrease from 1914 to 1922?
And why - too.

The country silently listened to Alexander Vertinsky cursing her:
- I don't know why and who needs it,
Who sent them to their death with an unwavering hand,
Only so merciless, so evil and unnecessary
They lowered them into eternal rest ..

Immediately after the war, sociologist Pitirim Sorokin reflected on the mournful statistics in Prague:
- The Russian state entered the war with a population of 176 million.
In 1920, the RSFSR, together with all the union Soviet republics, including Azerbaijan, Georgia, Armenia, etc., had only 129 million people.
For six years, the Russian state has lost 47 million subjects. This is the first payment for the sins of war and revolution.
Anyone who understands the importance of population size for the fate of the state and society, this figure says a lot ...
This decrease of 47 million is explained by the separation from Russia of a number of regions that have become independent states.
Now the question is: what is the situation with the population of the territory that makes up the modern RSFSR and the republics allied with it?
Has it decreased or increased?
The answer is given by the following figures.
According to the 1920 census, the population of 47 provinces of European Russia and Ukraine has decreased since 1914 by 11,504,473 people, or 13% (from 85,000,370 to 73,495,897).
The population of all Soviet republics declined by 21 million, which is 154 million, representing a loss of 13.6%.
War and revolution devoured not only all those who were born, for nevertheless a certain number continued to be born. It cannot be said that the appetite of these individuals was moderate and their stomachs were modest.
Even if they gave a number of real values, it is difficult to recognize the price of such "conquests" as cheap.
But on top of that, they absorbed 21 million victims.
Of the 21 million, the following falls on direct victims of the world war:
killed and dead from wounds and diseases - 1,000,000 people,
missing and taken prisoner (most of whom returned) 3 911 000 people. (in the official data, the missing and taken prisoners are not separated from each other, therefore I give a general figure), plus 3,748,000 wounded, in total for direct victims of the war - no more than 2-2.5 million. The number of direct victims of the civil war.
As a result, we can take the number of direct victims of war and revolution to be close to 5 million. The remaining 16 million are accounted for by their indirect victims: increased mortality and declining birth rates. Sorokin P.A. State of the art Russia. (Prague, 1922).

“Cruel time! As historians now testify, during the civil war, 14-18 million people died, of which only 900 thousand were killed at the front. The rest became victims of typhus, Spanish flu, other diseases, and then the white and red terror. "War Communism" was partly caused by the horrors of the civil war, and partly by the delusions of an entire generation of revolutionaries. Direct withdrawals of food from peasants without any compensation, rations for workers - from 250 grams to a pound of black bread, forced labor, executions and prison for market operations, a huge army of homeless children who lost their parents, hunger, savagery in many parts of the country - such was the harsh price for the most radical of all revolutions that have ever shaken the peoples of the earth! " Burlatsky F. Leaders and Counselors. M., 1990, p. 70.

In 1929, the former Major General and Minister of War of the Provisional Government, and at that time a teacher of the Military Academy of the Red Army Headquarters A.I. Verkhovsky published a detailed article on the threat of intervention in Ogonyok.

His demographic estimates deserve special attention.

“The dry columns of figures cited in statistical tables usually pass by the ordinary attention,” he writes. - But if you look closely at them, then there are sometimes terrible numbers!
The Publishing House of the Communist Academy published the compiled by B.A. Gukhman "Basic questions of the USSR economy in tables and diagrams".
The 1st table depicts the dynamics of the population of the USSR. It shows that on January 1, 1914, 139 million people lived on the territory now occupied by our Union. By January 1, 1917, the table estimates that the population was 141 million. Meanwhile, the population growth before the war was about 1.5% per year, which gives an increase of 2 million people per year. Consequently, from 1914 to 1917 the population should have increased by 6 million and amounted to not 141, but 145 million.
We see that 4 million is not enough. These are the victims of the world war. We consider 1.5 million of them killed and missing and 2.5 million should be attributed to the decrease in the birth rate.
The next figure in the table refers to August 1, 1922, i.e. covers 5 years of civil war and its immediate consequences. If the development of the population proceeded normally, then in 5 years its growth would have been about 10 million, and, consequently, the USSR in 1922 should have totaled 151 million.
Meanwhile, in 1922 the population was 131 million people, that is, 10 million less than in 1917. The Civil War in killed, missing and died of hunger and disease, as well as the decline in population growth cost us another 20 million people, that is, 5 times more than the world war. " Verkhovsky A. Intervention is not allowed. Ogonyok, 1929, No. 29, p. 11.

The total human losses suffered by the country during the world and civil wars, interventions (1914-1920) exceeded 20 million people. - History of the USSR. The era of socialism. M., 1974, p. 71.

The total losses of the population in the civil war on the fronts and in the rear from hunger, disease and terror of the White Guards amounted to 8 million people. TSB, 3rd ed. The losses of the Communist Party at the fronts amounted to over 50 thousand people. TSB, 3rd ed.

There were diseases, there were.
At the end of 1918 - beginning of 1919. the worldwide flu pandemic (it was called "Spanish flu") in 10 months affected about 300 million people and claimed up to 40 million lives. Then a second, albeit less powerful, wave emerged. The malignancy of this pandemic can be judged by the number of deaths. In India, it killed about 5 million people, in the United States in 2 months - about 450 thousand, in Italy - about 270 thousand people; In total, this epidemic claimed about 20 million victims, while the number of diseases also amounted to hundreds of millions.

Then a third wave came. Probably 0.75 billion people have been ill with Spanish flu in 3 years. The population of the Earth at that time was 1.9 billion. The losses from the "Spanish flu" exceeded the mortality rate of the 1st World War on all its fronts combined. Up to 100 million people died in the world at that time. The "Spanish flu" seemed to exist in two forms: in elderly patients, it usually actually manifested itself in severe pneumonia, death occurred in 1.5-2 weeks. But such patients were few. More often, for some unknown reason, young people from 20 to 40 died from the "Spanish flu" ... Basically, people under the age of 40 died of cardiac arrest, this happened two to three days after the onset of the disease.

Young Soviet Russia was at first lucky: the first wave of the "Spanish disease" did not touch her. But at the end of the summer of 1918, an epidemic flu came from Galicia to Ukraine. Only in Kiev alone, 700 thousand cases were recorded. Then the epidemic through the Oryol and Voronezh provinces began to spread to the east, to the Volga region, and to the northwest - to both capitals.
Doctor V. Glinchikov, who at that time worked at the Petropavlovsk hospital in Petrograd, noted that in the first days of the epidemic, of the 149 patients with "Spanish flu" delivered to them, 119 people died. In the city as a whole, mortality from complications from influenza reached 54%.

During the epidemic, over 2.5 million cases of Spanish flu were registered in Russia. The clinical manifestations of "Spanish flu" are well described and studied. There were clinical manifestations that were completely atypical for influenza, characteristic of brain lesions. In particular - "hiccupping" or "sneezing" encephalitis, sometimes occurring even without a typical flu fever. These painful diseases are damage to certain areas of the brain, when a person hiccups or sneezes continuously, for quite a long time, day and night. Some died from this. There were also other monosymptomatic forms of the disease. Their nature has not yet been established.

In 1918, simultaneous plague and cholera epidemics suddenly began in the country.

In addition, in 1918-1922. in Russia there are also several epidemics of unprecedented forms of typhus. During these years, more than 7.5 million cases were registered with typhus alone. More than 700 thousand people probably died from it. But it was impossible to take into account all cases.

1919. "Due to the extreme overcrowding of Moscow prisons and prison hospitals, typhus became epidemic there." Anatoly Mariengof. My century.
A contemporary wrote: “Whole carriages are dying out from typhus. Not a single doctor. No medicine. Whole families are delirious. There are corpses along the road. At the stations of the pile of corpses. "
It was typhus, not the Red Army, that destroyed Kolchak's troops. “When our troops,” wrote the People's Commissar of Health N.A. Semashko, - they entered beyond the Urals and into Turkestan, a huge avalanche of epidemic diseases (typhus of all three types) moved on our army from the Kolchak and Dutov troops. Suffice it to mention that out of the 60,000-strong enemy army that came over to our side in the very first days after the defeat of Kolchak and Dutov, 80% turned out to be infected with typhus. Typhus on the Eastern Front, recurrent mainly on the South-Eastern Front, rushed towards us in a stormy stream. And even typhoid fever, this sure sign of the absence of elementary sanitary measures - at least vaccinations, spread in a wide wave over the Dutov army and spread to us "" ...
In the captured Omsk, the capital of Kolchak, the Red Army found 15 thousand abandoned sick enemies. Calling the epidemic "the legacy of the whites," the victors fought on two fronts, the main one against typhus.
The situation was disastrous. In Omsk, 500 people fell ill every day and 150 died. The epidemic engulfed the Bezhensky orphanage, the post office, the orphanage, the workers of the hostel, the sick were lying side by side on bunks, on rotten mattresses on the floor.
Kolchak's armies, retreating to the east under the onslaught of Tukhachevsky's troops, took everything with them, including the prisoners, and among them there were many patients with typhus. First, they were driven in stages along the railway, then they were put on trains and taken to Transbaikalia. People were dying in trains. The corpses were thrown out of the carriages, tracing a dotted line of rotting bodies along the rails.
So by 1919 the whole of Siberia was infected. Tukhachevsky recalled that the road from Omsk to Krasnoyarsk was the kingdom of typhus.
In the winter of 1919-1920. the epidemic in Novonikolaevsk, the capital of typhus, led to the deaths of tens of thousands of people (no exact registration of victims was kept). The city's population was cut in half. At the Krivoshchekovo station there were 3 piles of 500 corpses each. Another 20 carriages with the dead were nearby.
“All houses were occupied by Chekatif, and Chekatrup ruled in the city, who built two crematoria and dug miles of deep trenches for the burial of corpses,” the Chekatif report says, see: GANO. F.R-1133. Op. 1.D. 431v. L. 150.).
In total, during the days of the epidemic, 28 military and 15 civilian medical institutions functioned in the city. Chaos reigned. The historian E. Kosyakova writes: “At the beginning of January 1920, in the overcrowded Eighth Novonikolaevsky hospital, the patients were lying on beds, in the aisles, and under the beds. In the infirmaries, despite the sanitary requirements, double bunks were arranged. Typhoid patients, therapeutic patients and wounded were housed in the same room, which in fact was not a place of treatment, but a source of typhoid infection.
It was strange that this disease affected not only Siberia, but also the North. In 1921-1922. out of 3 thousand of the population of Murmansk, 1,560 people fell ill with typhus. Cases of smallpox, Spanish flu and scurvy have been reported.

In 1921-1922. and in the Crimea epidemics of typhus and - in noticeable proportions - of cholera raged, there were outbreaks of plague, smallpox, scarlet fever and dysentery. According to the People's Commissariat of Health, in the Yekaterinburg province at the beginning of January 1922, 2 thousand patients with typhus were recorded, mainly at train stations. The typhus epidemic was also observed in Moscow. There, as of January 12, 1922, there were 1,500 patients with relapsing fever and 600 patients with typhus. True, no. 8, January 12, 1922, p. 2.

In the same year, 1921, an epidemic of tropical malaria began, which seized the northern regions. The mortality rate reached 80%!
The causes of these sudden violent epidemics are still unknown. At first it was thought that malaria and typhus came to Russia from the Turkish front. But the malaria epidemic in its usual form cannot hold out in those regions where it is colder than +16 degrees Celsius; how it penetrated into the Arkhangelsk province, the Caucasus and Siberia is not clear. Until now, it is not clear where the cholera bacilli came from in Siberian rivers - in those regions that were almost never inhabited. It was hypothesized, however, that in those years bacteriological weapons were used against Russia for the first time.

Indeed, after the landing of British and American troops in Murmansk and Arkhangelsk, in the Crimea and Novorossiysk, in Primorye and in the Caucasus, outbreaks of these unknown epidemics immediately began.
It turns out that in the years of the 1st World War in the town of Porton Down near Salisbury (Wiltshire), a top-secret center, the Experimental Station of the Royal Engineers, was created, where physiologists, pathologists and meteorologists from the best universities in Britain were conducting experiments on humans.
During the existence of this secret complex, more than 20 thousand people became participants in thousands of trials of pathogens of plague and anthrax, other deadly diseases, as well as poisonous gases.
At first, the experiments were carried out on animals. But since in experiments on animals it is difficult to find out exactly how the effect of chemicals on human organs and tissues occurs, in 1917 a special laboratory appeared in Porton Down, intended for experiments on humans.
Later it was reorganized into the Microbiological Research Center. CCU was located at Harvard Hospital in West Salisbury. The subjects (mostly soldiers) voluntarily agreed to the experiments, but almost no one knew what risk they were taking. British historian Ulf Schmidt told the tragic story of the Porton Veterans in Secret Science: A Century of Poison Warfare and Human Experiments.
In addition to Porton Down, the author also reports on the activities of the Edgewood Arsenal, a special unit of the chemical forces of the US Armed Forces, organized in 1916.

The black plague, as if it had returned from the Middle Ages, caused a particular fear of doctors. Mikhel D.V. The fight against the plague in the South-East of Russia (1917-1925). - On Sat. History of Science and Technology. 2006, No. 5, p. 58–67.

In 1921, Novonikolaevsk experienced a wave of cholera epidemic that came along with the flow of refugees from starving regions.

In 1922, despite the effects of the famine, the rampant infectious epidemics in the country decreased. So, at the end of 1921 in Soviet Russia more than 5.5 million people suffered from typhus, typhoid and relapsing fever.
The main foci of typhus were the Volga region, Ukraine, the Tambov province and the Urals, where a fatal epidemic struck, first of all, the Ufa and Yekaterinburg provinces.

But in the spring of 1922, the number of patients dropped to 100 thousand people, although the turning point in the fight against typhus came only a year later. So, in Ukraine, the number of typhus infections and deaths from it in 1923 decreased by 7 times. In total, the number of diseases in the USSR decreased 30 times over the year.

The fight against typhus, cholera and malaria continued until the mid-1920s. American Sovietologist Robert Gates believes that during the reign of Lenin, Russia lost 10 million people from terror and civil war. (Washington Post, 4/30/1989).

Stalin's defenders vehemently dispute this data, inventing fake statistics. For example, here is what the chairman of the KIPFF Gennady Zyuganov writes: “In 1917, the population of Russia within its present borders was 91 million people. By 1926, when the first Soviet census was carried out, its population in the RSFSR (that is, again in the territory of present-day Russia) had grown to 92.7 million people. And this despite the fact that only 5 years earlier the destructive and bloody Civil War ended. " Zyuganov G.A. Stalin and the Present. http://www.politpros.com/library/9/223.

Where did these figures come from, from which particular statistical collections, the main communist of Russia does not stutter, hoping that they will believe him without proof.
Communists have always used someone else's naivety.
And what really happened?

An article by Vladimir Shubkin "A Difficult Farewell" (Novy Mir, No. 4, 1989) is devoted to the population losses of the times of Lenin and Stalin. According to Shubkin, during the reign of Lenin from the fall of 1917 to 1922, Russia's demographic losses amounted to almost 13 million people, of which emigrants must be subtracted (1.5-2 million people).
The author, referring to the research by Yu.A. Polyakova, points out that the total human losses from 1917 to 1922, taking into account the failed births and emigration, amount to about 25 million people (Academician S. Strumilin estimated losses from 1917 to 1920 at 21 million).
During the years of collectivization and famine (1932-1933), the human losses of the USSR, according to V. Shubkin's estimates, amounted to 10-13 million people.

If we continue to study arithmetic, then during the 1st World War for more than four years, the Russian Empire lost 20 - 8 = 12 million people.
It turns out that the average annual losses of Russia during the First World War amounted to 2.7 million people.
Apparently, this also includes civilian casualties.

However, these figures are also disputed.
In 1919-1920, the publication of a 65-volume list of the killed, wounded and missing lower ranks of the Russian army in 1914-1918 was completed. Its preparation was started back in 1916 by the staff of the General Staff of the Russian Empire. Based on this work, the Soviet historian reports: "For 3.5 years of war, the losses of the Russian army amounted to 68,994 generals and officers, 5,243,799 soldiers. This includes the killed, wounded and missing." Beskrovny L. G. Army and Navy of Russia at the beginning of XX century. Essays on the military-economic potential. M., 1986.S. 17.

In addition, it is necessary to take into account those who were taken prisoner. At the end of the war, 2,385,441 people were registered as Russian prisoners in Germany, 1,503,412 in Austria-Hungary, 19,795 in Turkey and 2,452 in Bulgaria, a total of 3,911,100 people. Proceedings of the Commission for the Investigation of the Sanitary Consequences of the War of 1914-1920. Issue 1, p. 169.
Thus, the total amount of human losses in Russia should be 9,223,893 soldiers and officers.

But from this one must subtract 1,709,938 wounded who returned to service from the field hospitals. As a result, minus this contingent, the number of those killed, died from wounds, seriously wounded and prisoners will be 7,513,955 people.
All figures are given according to information from 1919. In 1920, work on the lists of losses, including to clarify the number of prisoners of war and missing, made it possible to revise the total military losses and determine them at 7,326,515 people. Proceedings of the Survey Commission ... p. 170.

The unprecedented scale of the 1st World War, indeed, led to a huge number of prisoners of war. But the question of the number of servicemen of the Russian army who were in enemy captivity is still controversial.
Thus, in the encyclopedia "The Great October Socialist Revolution" more than 3.4 million Russian prisoners of war are named. (M., 1987.S. 445).
According to E.Yu. Sergeev, a total of about 1.4 million soldiers and officers of the Russian army were taken prisoner. Sergeev E.Yu. Russian prisoners of war in Germany and Austria-Hungary // New and modern history. 1996. No. 4, p. 66.
Historian O.S. Nagornaya calls a similar figure - 1.5 million people (Nagornaya O.S. Another military experience: Russian prisoners of war of the First World War in Germany (1914-1922). M., 2010. S. 9).
Other data from S.N. Vasilyeva: "by January 1, 1918, the Russian army lost prisoners: soldiers - 3 395 105 people, and officers and class officials - 14 323 people, which amounted to 74.9% of all combat losses, or 21.2% of the total number of mobilized" ... (Vasilyeva S.N. Prisoners of war in Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia during the First World War: Textbook for a special course. M., 1999. S. 14-15).
Such a discrepancy in figures (more than 2 times) is apparently a consequence of poorly organized registration and registration of prisoners of war.

But if you delve into the statistics, all these figures do not look very convincing.

“Speaking about the losses of the Russian population as a result of two wars and a revolution,” writes the historian Y. Polyakov, “a strange disparity in the population of pre-war Russia is striking, which, according to various authors, reaches 30 million people. This discrepancy in the demographic literature is explained, first of all, by the territorial discrepancy. Some take data on the territory of the Russian state in the pre-war (1914) borders, others - on the territory within the boundaries established in 1920-1921. and existed before 1939, the third - on the territory within the modern borders with retrospection for 1917 and 1914. Calculations are sometimes carried out with the inclusion of Finland, the Emirate of Bukhara and the Khiva Khanate, sometimes without their exception. We do not use data on the population in 1913-1920, calculated for the territory within the current borders. These data, important for showing the dynamics of the growth of the current population, are not very applicable in historical studies devoted to the First World War, the October Revolution and the Civil War.
These figures indicate the population in the territory that exists now, but in 1913-1920. it did not correspond to either the legal or the actual borders of Russia. Recall that according to these data, the population of the country on the eve of the First World War was 159.2 million people, and at the beginning of 1917 - 163 million (USSR in figures in 1977. - M., 1978, p. 7). The difference in determining the size of the pre-war (at the end of 1913 or the beginning of 1914) population of Russia (within the boundaries established in 1920-1921 and existed before September 17, 1939) reaches 13 million people (from 132.8 million to 145.7 million).
Statistical collections of the 60s determine the population at this time at 139.3 million people. Confusing data are given (in relation to the territory within the borders before 1939) and for 1917, 1919, 1920, 1921, etc.
An important source is the 1917 census. Much of its material has been published. Studying them (including the unpublished archives) is quite useful. But the census materials do not cover the country as a whole, the conditions of the war affected the accuracy of the data, and in determining the national composition, its information has the same defects as all pre-revolutionary statistics, which made serious mistakes in determining nationality, based only on language affiliation.
Meanwhile, the difference in determining the size of the population, according to the citizens' own statement (this principle is adopted by modern statistics), is very large. A number of nationalities were not taken into account at all before the revolution.
The 1920 census also, unfortunately, cannot be named among the basic sources, although its materials should undoubtedly be taken into account.
The census was carried out in the days (August 1920) when there was a war with bourgeois-landlord Poland and the front and front-line areas were inaccessible to scribes, when Wrangel still occupied Crimea and Northern Tavria, when counter-revolutionary governments existed in Georgia and Armenia, and significant territories Siberia and the Far East were ruled by the interventionists and White Guards, when nationalist and kulak gangs were operating in different parts of the country (many scribes were killed). Therefore, the population of many outlying territories was calculated according to pre-revolutionary information.
The census also had shortcomings in determining the national composition of the population (for example, the small peoples of the North were united in a group under the dubious name "Hyperboreans"). There are many contradictions in the data on population losses in the First World War and the Civil War (the number of people killed, killed by epidemics, etc.), on refugees from the territories occupied by Austro-German troops and the front-line territories in 1917, on the demographic consequences of crop failure and hunger.
Statistical collections of the 60s give figures of 143.5 million as of January 1, 1917, 138 million as of January 1, 1919, 136.8 million as of August 1920.
In 1973-1979. at the Institute of History of the USSR, under the leadership of the author of these lines (Polyakov), a method was developed and implemented for using (using computers) the data of the 1926 census to establish the population of the country in previous years. This census, with an unprecedented accuracy and scientific degree in Russia, recorded the composition of the country's population. The materials of the 1926 census were published widely and in full - in 56 volumes. The essence of the methodology in general form is as follows: based on the data of the 1926 census, primarily based on the age structure of the population, the dynamic series of the country's population for 1917-1926 is restored. At the same time, data on the natural and mechanical movement of the population for the indicated years contained in other sources and in the literature are recorded and taken into account in the computer memory. Therefore, this method can be called a method of retrospective use of census materials, taking into account a set of additional data at the disposal of the historian.
As a result of the calculations, many hundreds of tables were obtained that characterize the movement of the population in 1917-1926. for different regions and the country as a whole, determining the number and proportion of the peoples of the country. In particular, the number and National composition population of Russia in the fall of 1917 on the territory within the borders of 1926 (147 644.3 thousand). It seemed to us extremely important to carry out the calculation on the actual territory of Russia in the fall of 1917 (i.e., without the areas occupied by the Austro-German troops), because the population behind the front line was then excluded from the economic and political life of Russia. The definition of the actual territory was carried out by us on the basis of military maps fixing the front line for the autumn of 1917.
The population in the actual territory of Russia in the fall of 1917 without Finland, the Bukhara Emirate and the Khiva Khanate was determined at 153 617 thousand people; without Finland, including Khiva and Bukhara - 156 617 thousand people; with Finland (together with the Pechenga volost), Khiva and Bukhara - 159,965 thousand people ”. Polyakov Yu.A. Population of Soviet Russia in 1917-1920 (Historiography and sources). - On Sat. Problems of the Russian social movement and historical science. M., Nauka, 1981.S. 170-176.

If we recall the figure of 180.6 million people named in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, then which of those mentioned by Yu.A. Polyakov does not take the numbers, then in the fall of 1917 the deficit of the population of Russia will not be 12 million, but will fluctuate between 27 and 37.5 million people.

What can these numbers compare to? In 1917, the population of, for example, Sweden was estimated at 5.5 million people. In other words, this statistical error is 5-7 Sweden.

The situation is similar with the loss of the country's population in the civil war.
"The countless victims in the war against the White Guards and the interventionists (the country's population from 1917 to 1923 decreased by 13 million people), were justly attributed to the class enemy - the culprit, the instigator of the war." Polyakov Yu.A. 20s: the mood of the party vanguard. Questions of the history of the CPSU, 1989, No. 10, p.30.

In the reference book by V.V. Erlikhman "Population losses in the XX century." (Moscow: Russian Panorama, 2004) it is said that in the civil war of 1918-1920. about 10.5 million people died.

According to the historian A. Kilichenkov, "in three years of fratricidal civil massacre, the country lost 13 million people and retained only 9.5% of the previous (before 1913) gross national product." Science and Life, 1995, No. 8, p.80.

Professor of Moscow State University L. Semyannikova objects: "the civil war, which is extremely bloody and destructive, took, according to the estimates of Russian historians, 15-16 million lives." Science and Life, 1995, No. 9, p. 46.

The historian M. Bernshtam in his work "Parties to the Civil War" tried to draw up a general balance of losses of the population of Russia during the war years of 1917-1920: Russia and not included in the USSR, amounted to 146,755,520 people. - The administrative-territorial composition of the USSR as of July 1, 1925 and July 1, 1926, in comparison with the pre-war division of Russia. The experience of establishing a connection between the administrative-territorial composition of pre-war Russia and the modern composition of the USSR. Central Statistical Administration of the USSR. - M., 1926, p. 49-58.

This is the initial figure for the population, which since October 1917 found itself in the zone of the socialist revolution. On the same territory, the census on August 28, 1920, together with those in the army, finds only 134,569,206 people. - Statistical Yearbook 1921. Issue 1. Proceedings of the CSB, vol. VIII, no. 3, M., 1922, p. 8. The general population deficit is 12.186.314 people.
Thus, the historian sums up, during the incomplete first three years of the socialist revolution on the territory of the former Russian Empire (from autumn 1917 to August 28, 1920), the population lost 8.3 percent of its original composition.
Over the years, emigration was supposedly 86,000 people (Alekhin M. White emigration. TSE, 1st ed., Vol. 64. M., 1934, stb. 163), and natural decline - the excess of mortality over birth rate - 873 623 people (Proceedings of the Central Statistical Bureau, vol. XVIII, M., 1924, p. 42).
Thus, the losses from the revolution and civil war in the first incomplete three years of Soviet power, without emigration and natural loss, amounted to more than 11.2 million people. Here it should be noted, - the author comments, - that “natural decline” requires a reasonable interpretation: why decline? Is the term "natural" accepted in science appropriate here? It is clear that the excess of mortality over birth rate is an unnatural phenomenon and refers to the demographic results of the revolution and the socialist experiment. "

However, if we assume that this war lasted 4 years (1918-1922), and the total losses are taken as 15 million people, then the average annual loss of the country's population for this period amounted to 3.7 million people.
It turns out that the civil war was more bloody than the war with the Germans.

At the same time, the size of the Red Army by the end of 1919 reached 3 million people, by the fall of 1920 - 5.5 million people.
The famous demographer B.Ts. Urlanis in his book "Wars and the Population of Europe", speaking about the losses among the soldiers and commanders of the Red Army in the civil war, gives the following figures. The total number of those killed and died, in his opinion, is 425 thousand people. About 125 thousand people were killed at the front, about 300 thousand people died in the army and in the military districts. Urlanis B. Ts. Wars and the population of Europe. - M., 1960. p.183, 305. Moreover, the author writes that "the comparison and the absolute value of the figures give reason to assume that the killed and wounded are attributed to combat losses." Urlanis B.TS. Ibid, p. 181.

In the reference book "The National Economy of the USSR in Figures" (Moscow, 1925), completely different information about the losses of the Red Army in 1918-1922. In this book, according to the official data of the statistics department of the Main Directorate of the Red Army, the combat losses of the Red Army in the civil war are 631,758 Red Army soldiers, and sanitary (with evacuation) - 581,066, and in total - 1,212,824 people (p. 110).

The White movement was fairly small in number. By the end of the winter of 1919, that is, by the time of its maximum development, according to Soviet military reports, it did not exceed 537 thousand people. Of these, no more than 175 thousand people died. - Kakaurin N.E. How the revolution fought, vol. 2, M.-L., 1926, p. 137.

Thus, there were 10 times more reds than whites. But there were many more victims in the ranks of the Red Army, either 3 or 8 times.

But, if we compare the three-year losses of the two opposing armies with the losses of the population of Russia, then there is no escaping the question: so who fought with whom?
White with red?
Or both of them with the people?

“Cruelty is inherent in any war, but incredible ruthlessness reigned in the civil war in Russia. White officers and volunteers knew what would happen to them if they were captured by the Reds: more than once I saw terribly disfigured bodies with shoulder straps carved on their shoulders. Orlov, G. Drozdovets' Diary. // Star. - 2012. - No. 11.

The Reds were also brutally destroyed. "As soon as the party affiliation of the communists was established, they were hung on the first branch." Reden, N. Through the hell of the Russian revolution. Memoirs of a midshipman 1914-1919 - M., 2006.

The atrocities of Denikin, Annenko, Kalmyk, Kolchak are well known.

At the beginning of the Ice Campaign, Kornilov said: "I am giving you an order, very cruel: do not take prisoners! I take responsibility for this order before God and the Russian people!" One of the participants in the campaign recalled the cruelty of ordinary volunteers during the "Ice Campaign" when he wrote about the massacres of those captured: "All the Bolsheviks we captured with weapons in our hands were shot on the spot: alone, in dozens, hundreds. It was a war. "for extermination" ". Fedyuk V.P. White. Anti-Bolshevik movement in southern Russia 1917-1918

A witness, the writer William, told about the Denikinites in his memoirs. True, he is reluctant to spread about his own exploits, but he conveys in detail the stories of his accomplices in the struggle for a single and indivisible.
“They chased away the Reds - and how many of them were put, the passion of the Lord! And they began to establish their own rules. Liberation has begun. First, the sailors were tortured. Those with a fool were left, “our business, they say, is on the water, we will begin to live with the cadets” ... Well, everything is as it should, in an amicable way: they kicked them out for a pier, forced a ditch to dig for themselves, and then bring them to the edge and from revolvers one by one. So, believe me, how the crayfish moved in this ditch until they fell asleep. And then, at this place, the whole earth moved: therefore they did not finish off, so that others would be discouraged. "

The commander of the US occupation corps in Siberia, General Greves, in turn, testifies: “In Eastern Siberia, terrible murders were committed, but they were not committed by the Bolsheviks, as was usually thought. I will not be mistaken if I say that in Eastern Siberia for every person killed by the Bolsheviks, there were 100 people killed by anti-Bolshevik elements. "

“Perhaps sooner, more decisively put an end to ... the uprising, without stopping before the most severe, even cruel measures against not only the rebels, but also the population supporting them ... ... In case of incorrect and untimely information or treason, the hostages should be executed, and the houses belonging to them should be burned. " These are quotes from the order of the supreme ruler of Russia, Admiral A.V. Kolchak dated March 23, 1919.

And here are excerpts from the order of S. Rozanov, the specially authorized Kolchak, the governor of the Yenisei and part of the Irkutsk province of March 27, 1919: in the villages that do not betray the Reds, “shoot the tenth”; to burn the resisting villages, and “shoot the adult male population without exception,” take property and bread completely in favor of the treasury; hostages in case of resistance of fellow villagers "to shoot mercilessly."

The political leaders of the Czechoslovak corps B. Pavel and V. Girs in their official memorandum to the allies in November 1919 stated: “Admiral Kolchak surrounded himself with former tsarist officials, and since the peasants did not want to take up arms and sacrifice their lives for the return of these people to power , they were beaten, flogged with whips and killed in cold blood by the thousands, after which the world called them “Bolsheviks”.

“The most significant weakness of the Omsk government is that the overwhelming majority is in opposition to it. Roughly speaking, about 97% of Siberia's population today is hostile to Kolchak. " Testimony of Lieutenant Colonel Eichelberg. New time, 1988. No. 34. S. 35-37.

However, the fact that the Reds cruelly dealt with the recalcitrant workers and peasants is also true.

It is interesting that during the years of the civil war there were almost no Russians in the Red Army, although few people know this ...
"Wouldn't you, Vanek, be a soldier.
In the Red Army, there will be bayonets, tea,
The Bolsheviks will manage without you "...

In the defense of Petrograd from Yudenich, in addition to Latvian riflemen, more than 25 thousand Chinese participated, and there were at least 200 thousand Chinese internationalists in the Red Army units. In 1919, more than 20 Chinese units operated in the Red Army - near Arkhangelsk and Vladikavkaz, in Perm and near Voronezh, in the Urals and beyond the Urals ...
Probably there is no person who has not seen the film "The Elusive Avengers", but not many people know that the film is based on the book by P. Blyakhin "Red Devils", and very few people already remember that there is no gypsy Yashka in the book, there is a Chinese Yu-yu, and in the film, filmed in the 30s, instead of Yu was the negro Johnson.
The first organizer of the Chinese units in the Red Army, Yakir, recalled that the Chinese were distinguished by high discipline, unquestioning obedience to orders, fatalism and self-sacrifice. In the book “Memories of the Civil War,” he writes: “The Chinese took their salaries very seriously. They gave their lives easily, but pay on time and feed well. Yes, that's it. Their delegates come to me and say that 530 people were hired and, therefore, I have to pay for all of them. And how many are not, then nothing - the rest of the money that is due for them, they will share between everyone. I talked with them for a long time, convinced them that this was wrong, not in our opinion. Yet they got theirs. Another reason was given - they say that we need to send the families of those killed to China. We had a lot of good things with them in the long long-suffering journey through the whole of Ukraine, the whole Don, to the Voronezh province. "
What else?

There are about 90 thousand Latvians, plus 600 thousand Poles, 250 - Hungarians, 150 Germans, 30 thousand Czechs and Slovaks, 50 thousand from Yugoslavia, there were a Finnish division, Persian regiments. In the Korean Red Army - 80 thousand, and in different parts there were about 100 more, there were Uyghur, Estonian, Tatar, mountain units ...

The cadre command staff is also curious.
"Many of Lenin's most ferocious enemies agreed to fight side by side with the Bolsheviks they hated when it came to defending the Motherland." Kerensky A.F. My life is underground. Smena, 1990, No. 11, p. 264.
The famous book by S. Kavtaradze "Military Specialists in the Service of the Soviet Power". According to his calculations, 70% of the tsarist generals served in the Red Army, and 18% in all white armies. There is even a list by name - from general to captain - of officers of the General Staff who voluntarily joined the Red Army. Their motives were a mystery to me until I read the memoirs of N.M. Potapov, Quartermaster General of Infantry, who led the General Staff's counterintelligence in 1917. He was not an easy man.
I will briefly recount what I remember. Just make a reservation first - part of his memoirs was published in the 60s in the Military Historical Journal, and I read the other in the Leninka department of manuscripts.
So what's in the magazine.
In July 1917, Potapov met with M. Kedrov (they had been friends since childhood), N. Podvoisky and V. Bonch-Bruevich (the head of party intelligence, and his brother Mikhail later headed the Field Operational Headquarters of the Red Army for some time). These were the leaders of the Bolshevik Voenka, the future organizers of the Bolshevik coup. After long negotiations, they came to an agreement: 1. The General Staff will actively help the Bolsheviks in overthrowing the Provisional Government. 2. The people of the General Staff will be transferred to the structures for creating a new army to replace the decomposed one.
Both parties have fulfilled their obligations. After October, Potapov himself was appointed head of affairs of the War Ministry, since the people's commissars were on the perpetual journeys, in fact, he served as the head of the People's Commissariat, and from June 1918 he worked as an expert. By the way, he played an important role in the operations Trust and Syndicate-2. He was buried with honors in 1946.
Now about the manuscript. According to Potapov, the army was completely destroyed by the efforts of Kerensky and other democrats. Russia was losing the war. The influence on the government of the banking houses of Europe and the USA was too noticeable.
The Bolsheviks-pragmatists, in turn, needed the destruction of pseudo-democracy in the army, the establishment of iron discipline, in addition, they defended the unity of Russia. The career patriotic officers were well aware that Kolchak had promised the Americans to give Siberia away, and the British and French had secured similar promises from Denikin and Wrangel. Actually, on these terms, there were supplies of weapons from the West. Order # 1 was canceled.
Trotsky restored iron discipline and complete subordination of rank-and-file commanders in six months, resorting to the most severe measures, including executions. After the revolt of Stalin and Voroshilov, known as the military opposition, the Eighth Congress introduced one-man command in the army, forbidding the attempts of the commissars to interfere. Hostage tales were myths. The officers were well provided for, they were honored, awarded, their orders were unconditionally executed, one after another the armies of their enemies were thrown out of Russia. Such a position for them, as professionals, was quite satisfactory. So, in any case, Potapov wrote.

Pitirim Sorokin, a contemporary of events, testifies: "Since 1919, power has actually ceased to be the power of the working masses and has become just a tyranny, consisting of unprincipled intellectuals, declassed workers, criminals and all kinds of adventurers." Terror, he noted, "began to be carried out to a greater extent against the workers and peasants." Sorokin P.A. The current state of Russia. New world. 1992. No. 4. P. 198.

That is exactly how it is against the workers and peasants. Suffice it to recall the shootings in Tula and Astrakhan, Kronstadt and Antonovism, the suppression of hundreds of peasant revolts ...

How not to rebel when you are robbed?

“If in the cities we can say that the revolutionary Soviet power is strong enough to resist any attacks from the bourgeoisie, then this cannot be said about the countryside. We must seriously pose the question of stratification in the countryside. about the creation of two opposite hostile forces in the village ... Only if we can split the village into two irreconcilable hostile camps, if we can ignite the same civil war that went on not so long ago in the cities, if we manage to restore the village the poor against the rural bourgeoisie — only if we can say that we will do what we could do for the cities in relation to the countryside. ”Yakov Sverdlov Speech at a meeting of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of the IV convocation on May 20, 1918

June 29, 1918, speaking at the 3rd All-Russian Congress of the Party of Left Social Revolutionaries, delegate from the Ural region N.I. Melkov exposed the exploits of the food detachments in the Ufa province, where "the food business was" well organized "by the chairman of the food administration Tsyurupa, who was made the commissar of food for the whole of Russia, but the other side of the matter is clearer for us, the Left SRs, than for anyone else. or. We know how this bread was squeezed out of the villages, what atrocities this Red Army was doing in the villages: there were purely robber bands that began to plunder, it came to debauchery, etc. " Party of the Left Socialist Revolutionaries. Documents and materials. 1917-1925 In 3 volumes.Vol. 2.Part 1.M., 2010.S. 246-247.

For the Bolsheviks, suppression of the resistance of their opponents was the only way to retain power in a peasant country with the aim of turning it into the basis of the international socialist revolution. The Bolsheviks were convinced of the historical justification and justice of the use of merciless violence against their enemies and “exploiters” in general, as well as coercion against the wavering middle strata of the city and countryside, primarily the peasantry. Based on the experience of the Paris Commune, Lenin considered the main reason for its death to be the inability to suppress the resistance of the overthrown exploiters. It is worth considering his admission, repeated several times at the 10th Congress of the RCP (b) in 1921, that “the petty-bourgeois counter-revolution is undoubtedly more dangerous than Denikin, Yudenich and Kolchak put together”, and ... times exceeding all the Denikins, Kolchaks and Yudenichs put together. "

He wrote: "... The last and most numerous of the exploiting classes rebelled against us in our country." PSS, 5th ed., Vol. 37, p. 40.
“Everywhere the greedy, devoured, brutal kulaks united with the landowners and with the capitalists against the workers and against the poor in general ... Everywhere they entered into an alliance with foreign capitalists against the workers of their country ... There was no peace: a kulak could and could easily be reconciled with the landowner , tsar and priest, even if they quarreled, but never with the working class. And that's why we call the battle against the kulaks the last, decisive battle. " Lenin V.I. PSS, vol. 37, p. 39-40.

As early as July 1918, 96 peasant armed uprisings against Soviet power and its food policy took place.

On August 5, 1918, an uprising of the peasants of the Penza province broke out, dissatisfied with the food requisitions of the Soviet government. It covered the volosts of the Penza and neighboring Morshansk districts (a total of 8 volosts). See: Chronicle of the Penza regional organization of the CPSU. 1884-1937 Saratov, 1988, p. 58.

On August 9 and 10, V.I. Lenin received telegrams from the chairman of the Penza Provincial Committee of the RCP (b) E.B. Bosh and the chairman of the Council of Provincial Commissars V.V. Kuraev with a message about the uprising and in return telegrams gave instructions on organizing its suppression (see .: Lenin V.I.Biographical chronicle.Vol. 6.M., 1975, p. 41, 46, 51 and 55; Lenin V.I. , 148, 149 and 156).

Lenin sends a letter to Penza addressed to V.V. Kuraev, E.B. Bosch, A.E. Minkin.
11 August 1918
T-shcham Kuraev, Bosch, Minkin and other Penza communists
T-cabbage soup! The uprising of the five kulak volosts should lead to ruthless suppression.
This is required by the interest of the entire revolution, for now everywhere is the "last decisive battle" with the kulaks. A sample must be given.
1) Hang (certainly hang so that the people can see) at least 100 notorious kulaks, rich men, bloodsuckers.
2) Publish their names.
3) Take away all the bread from them.
4) Assign hostages.
Make it so that people can see, tremble, know, shout for hundreds of miles around the people: they will strangle and strangle the bloodsuckers of the kulaks.
Wire receipt and execution.
Your Lenin.
P.S. Find stronger people. Foundation 2, on. 1, d. 6898 - autograph. Lenin V.I. Unknown documents. 1891-1922 - M .: ROSSPEN, 1999. Doc. 137.

The Penza riot was suppressed on August 12, 1918. The local authorities managed to do this through agitation, with limited use of military force. Participants in the murder of five prodarmeytsy and three members of the village council with. Heaps of the Penza district and the organizers of the rebellion (13 people) were arrested and shot.

All the punishments the Bolsheviks rained down on the farmers who did not hand over grain and food: the peasants were arrested, beaten, shot. Naturally, villages and volosts rebelled, the peasants took up pitchforks and axes, dug up hidden weapons and cruelly dealt with the "commissars".

Already in 1918, more than 250 major uprisings took place in the Smolensk, Yaroslavl, Orel, Moscow and other provinces; more than 100 thousand peasants of the Simbirsk and Samara provinces revolted.

During the civil war, the Don and Kuban Cossacks, peasants of the Volga region, Ukraine, Belarus and Central Asia fought against the Bolsheviks.

In the summer of 1918, in Yaroslavl and the Yaroslavl province, thousands of urban workers and surrounding peasants rebelled against the Bolsheviks, in many volosts and villages the entire population, including women, old people, and children, took up arms.

The report of the Headquarters of the Eastern Red Front contains a description of the uprising in Sengileevsky and Belebeevsky districts of the Volga region in March 1919: "The peasants became brutal, with pitchforks, with stakes and guns alone and in droves climb on machine guns, despite the piles of corpses, their rage defies description." Kubanin M.I. Anti-Soviet peasant movement during the Civil War (War Communism). - On the agrarian front, 1926, No. 2, p. 41.

Of all the anti-Soviet demonstrations in the Nizhny Novgorod region, the most organized and large-scale was the uprising in the Vetluzhsky and Varnavinsky districts in August 1918. The reason for the uprising was dissatisfaction with the food dictatorship of the Bolsheviks and the predatory actions of food detachments. The insurgents numbered up to 10 thousand people. The open confrontation in the Urensky region lasted for about a month, but individual gangs continued to operate until 1924.

A witness to the peasant rebellion in the Shatsk district of the Tambov province in the fall of 1918 recalled: “I am a soldier, I was in many battles with the Germans, but I have not seen this. The machine gun mows down the rows, but they walk, see nothing, they crawl over the corpses, over the wounded, terrible eyes, the mothers of the children forward, shouting: Mother, Intercessor, save, have mercy, we'll all lie down for You. There was no longer any fear in them. " Steinberg I.Z. The moral face of the revolution. Berlin, 1923, p. 62.

Since March 1918, Zlatoust and its environs fought. At the same time, about two-thirds of the Kungur district was engulfed in the fire of the uprising.
By the summer of 1918, the "peasant" regions of the Urals were also blazing with fire.
All over the Ural region - from Verkhoturye and Novaya Lyalya to Verkhneuralsk and Zlatoust and from Bashkiria and Prikamye to Tyumen and Kurgan - detachments of peasants crushed the Bolsheviks. The number of insurgents was beyond counting. Only in the Okhansk-Osa region there were more than 40 thousand of them. 50 thousand rebels put the Reds to flight in the Bakal-Satka-Mesyagutovskaya volost. On July 20, the peasants took Kuzino and cut off the Trans-Siberian Railway, blocking Yekaterinburg from the west.

In general, by the end of the summer, huge territories were liberated from the Reds by the rebels. This is almost the entire Southern and Middle, as well as part of the Western and Northern Urals (where there were no whites yet).
The Urals also burned: the peasants of the Glazovsky and Nolinsky districts of the Vyatka province took up arms. In the spring of 1918, the flame of an anti-Soviet uprising engulfed the Lauzinsky, Duvinsky, Tastubinsky, Dyurtyulinsky, Kizilbash volosts of the Ufa province. In the area of ​​Krasnoufimsk, a battle took place between Yekaterinburg workers who came to requisition grain and local peasants who did not want to give up their grain. Workers against peasants! Neither one nor the other supported the Whites, but this did not prevent them from exterminating each other ... On July 13-15, near Nyazepetrovsk and on July 16 near Verkhniy Ufaley, the Red Ufim rebels defeated parts of the Red 3rd Army. Suvorov Dm. Unknown Civil War, M., 2008.

N. Poletika, historian: "The Ukrainian village waged a brutal struggle against the surplus appropriation and requisitions, ripping open the bellies of the rural authorities and agents of Zagotzern and Zagotskot, stuffing these bellies with grain, carving Red Army stars on the forehead and chest, hammering nails into the eyes, crucifying on crosses ".

The uprisings were suppressed in the most brutal and customary way. For six months, 50 million hectares of land were confiscated from the kulaks and distributed among the poor and middle peasants.
As a result, by the end of 1918 the amount of land used by the kulaks had decreased from 80 million hectares to 30 million hectares.
Thus, the economic and political positions of the kulaks were greatly undermined.
The socio-economic face of the village has changed: the proportion of the peasant poor, which in 1917 was 65%, by the end of 1918 had decreased to 35%; the middle peasants, instead of 20%, became 60%, and the kulaks, instead of 15%, became 5%.

But even after a year, the situation has not changed.
Delegates from Tyumen told Lenin at the party congress: "To carry out the surplus appropriation, they arranged such things: those peasants who did not want to give the appropriation, they were put in pits, filled with water and frozen ..."

F. Mironov, commander of the Second Cavalry Army (1919, from an address to Lenin and Trotsky): “The people are groaning ... I repeat, the people are ready to throw themselves into the arms of the landlord’s bondage, so long as the torment is not so sick, so obvious as it is now. .. "

In March 1919, at the VIII Congress of the RCP (b) G.E. Zinoviev briefly described the state of affairs in the countryside and the mood of the peasants: "If you now go to the countryside, you will see that they hate us with all their might."

A.V. Lunacharsky in May 1919 informed V.I. Lenin on the situation in the Kostroma province: “In most of the districts there were no serious unrest. There were only purely hungry demands, not even riots, but simply demands for bread, which is not ... But in the east of the Kostroma province there are forest and grain kulak districts - Vetluzhsky and Varnavinsky, in the latter there is a whole rich, prosperous, Old Believer land, the so-called Urensky ... A uniform war is being waged with this land. We want to pump out those 200 or 300 thousand poods from there by all means ... The peasants are resisting and have become bitter to the extreme. I saw terrible photographs of our comrades, from which Varnavin's fists tore off their skin, which they froze in the forest or burned alive ... ”.

As noted in the same 1919 in a report to the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, SNK and Central Committee of the RCP (b), the chairman of the Supreme Military Inspection N.I. Podvoisky:
"The workers and peasants who took the most direct part in the October Revolution, without understanding its historical significance, thought to use it to satisfy their immediate needs. With a maximalist attitude with an anarcho-syndicalist bias, the peasants followed us during the period of than not showing disagreements with its leaders. During the period of the creative period, they naturally had to disagree with our theory and practice. "

Indeed, the peasants parted with the Bolsheviks: instead of reverently giving them all the grain they had grown in their labors, they snatched machine guns and sawn-off shotguns taken from the war from secluded places.

From the minutes of the meetings of the Special Commission for the Supply of the Army and the Population of the Orenburg Province and the Kyrgyz Territory on providing assistance to the proletarian center on September 12, 1919.
We listened. Comrade Martynov's report on the catastrophic food situation in the Center.
Resolved. Having heard the report of Comrade Martynov and the content of the conversation on the direct wire with the authorized representative of the Council of People's Commissars, Comrade Blumberg, the Special Commission resolves:
1. To mobilize the members of the collegium, party and non-party workers of the provincial food committee to send them to the districts in order to strengthen the unloading of grain and its delivery to the stations.
2. To carry out a similar mobilization among the workers of the Special Commission, the food unit of the Kyrgyz Revolutionary Committee and use the workers of the political department of the 1st Army to send them to the regions.
3. Urgently instruct the chairmen of the district food committees to take the most exceptional measures to strengthen the loading [of grain], under the responsibility of the chairmen and members of the collegiums of the district food committees.
4. The head of the transport department of the provincial food committee, comrade Gorelkin, should be ordered to show maximum energy for organizing transport.
5. To send the following persons to the regions: Comrade Shchipkova - to the region of the Orsk railway. d. (Saraktash, Orsk), t. Styvrina - to the district food committees of Isaevo-Dedovsky, Mikhailovsky and Pokrovsky, t. Andreeva - to Iletskiy and Ak-Bulaksky, t. Golynicheva - to the Krasnokholmsky District Food Committee, t. Chukhrita went to Aktyubinsk, giving him the broadest powers.
6. Send all available bread immediately to the centers.
7. Take all measures to remove from Iletsk all the stocks of bread and millet available there, for which to send the required number of wagons to Iletsk.
8. Apply to the Revolutionary Military Council with a request to take possible measures to provide the Provincial Prodcom with transport in this urgent work, for which, if necessary, cancel the underwater outfit of the Revolutionary Military Council for some areas and issue a mandatory decree that the Revolutionary Military Council guarantees timely payment to the carters who brought bread.
9.To offer the oskoprodivs 8 and 49 to temporarily serve the needs of the army with the help of their districts, so that the rest of the districts can be used to supply the centers ...
Genuine with proper signatures
Archive of the Kazakh SSR, f. 14.op. 2, d. 1. l 4. Certified copy.

Troitsko-Pechora uprising, anti-Bolshevik mutiny in the upper Pechora during the civil war. The reason for this was the export of grain reserves from Troitsko-Pechorsk to Vychegda by the Reds. The initiator of the uprising was the chairman of the volost cell of the RCP (b), commandant of Troitsko-Pechorsk I.F.Melnikov. The conspirators included the commander of the Red Army company M.K. Pystin, priest V. Popov, deputy. chairman of the executive committee M.P. Pystin, forester N.S. Skorokhodov and others.
The uprising began on February 4, 1919. The rebels killed some of the Red Army soldiers, the rest went over to their side. During the uprising, the head of the Soviet garrison in Troitsko-Pechorsk N.N. Suvorov, the red commander A.M. Cheremnykh. District military commissar M.M. Frolov shot himself. The Judicial Collegium of the rebels (chairman P.A. Yudin) executed about 150 communists and activists of the Soviet regime - refugees from the Cherdyn district.

Then anti-Bolshevik revolts broke out in the volost villages of Pokcha, Savinobor and Podcher'e. After the Kolchak army entered the upper reaches of the Pechora, these volosts fell under the jurisdiction of the Siberian Provisional Government, and the participants in the uprising against Soviet power in Troitsko-Pechorsk entered the Separate Siberian Pechora Regiment, which showed itself in offensive operations in the Urals as one of the most combat-ready units of the Russian army.

Soviet historian M.I. Kubanin, reporting that 25-30% of the total population participated in the uprising against the Bolsheviks in the Tambov province, summed up: "Undoubtedly, 25-30% of the village's population means that the entire adult male population went to Antonov's army." Kubanin M.I. Anti-Soviet peasant movement during the civil war (war communism) .- On the agrarian front, 1926, No. 2, p.42.
M.I. Kubanin also writes about a number of other major uprisings during the years of war communism: about the Izhevsk People's Army, which had 70,000 people, which managed to hold out for more than three months, about the Don Uprising, in which 30,000 armed Cossacks and peasants participated, and with the rear, which had a force of one hundred thousand man and broke through the red front.

In the summer and autumn of 1919, in a peasant uprising against the Bolsheviks in the Yaroslavl province, according to M.I. Lebedev, chairman of the Yaroslavl provincial Cheka, was attended by 25-30 thousand people. Regular units of the 6th Army of the Northern Front and detachments of the Cheka, as well as detachments of workers in Yaroslavl (8,500 people), ruthlessly cracked down on the rebels, were thrown against the "white-greens". In August 1919 alone, they destroyed 1845 and wounded 832 insurgents, executed 485 insurgents on the verdicts of the revolutionary military tribunals, and over 400 people went to prison. Center for Documentation on the Contemporary History of the Yaroslavl Region (CDNI YAO). F. 4773. Op. 6.D. 44.L. 62-63.

The scope of the insurrectionary movement in the Don and Kuban reached special strength by the fall of 1921, when the Kuban insurgent army under the leadership of A.M. Przhevalsky made a desperate attempt to seize Krasnodar.

In 1920-1921. on the territory of Western Siberia, liberated from Kolchak's troops, a bloody 100-thousandth peasant revolt against the Bolsheviks was blazing.
“In every village, in every village,” wrote P. Turhansky, “the peasants began to beat up the communists: they killed their wives, children, relatives; they chopped off with axes, chopped off arms and legs, and opened their bellies. They dealt with the food workers especially cruelly ”. Turhansky P. Peasant uprising in Western Siberia in 1921. Memories. - Siberian Archives, Prague, 1929, No. 2.

The war for bread was not for life, but for death.
Here is an excerpt from the Report of the management department of the Novonikolaevsky district executive committee of the Soviets on the Kolyvan uprising to the management department of the Siberian Revolutionary Committee:
“In the rebellious localities, the lumps have been almost completely destroyed. The accidental survivors who managed to escape. Even those excluded from the cell were exterminated. After the suppression of the uprising, the defeated cells were rebuilt on their own, increased their activity, a large influx into the cells of the poor is noticeable in the villages after the suppression of the uprising. The cells insist on arming them or on the creation of special-purpose detachments from them at the district party committees. There were no cases of cowardice or the extradition of members of the cells by individual members of the cells.
Police in Kolyvan were taken by surprise, 4 police officers and an assistant to the district police chief were killed. The remaining militiamen (a small percentage fled) handed over their weapons one by one to the rebels. About 10 militiamen from the Kolyvan militia took part in the uprising (passively). Of these, after our occupation of Kolyvan, three were shot by order of the special department of the county check.
The reason for the unsatisfactory nature of the militia is explained by its composition of local Kolyvan petty bourgeoisie (there are about 80-100 workers in the city).
The communist executive committees were killed, the kulaks took an active part in the uprising, often becoming the head of the insurgent administrations ”.
http://basiliobasilid.livejournal.com/17945.html

The Siberian revolt was suppressed as ruthlessly as all the others.

“The experience of the civil war and peaceful socialist construction has convincingly proved that the kulaks are the enemies of Soviet power. The complete collectivization of agriculture was a method of eliminating the kulaks as a class. " (Essays on the Voronezh organization of the CPSU. M., 1979, p. 276).

The Statistical Office of the Red Army determines the combat losses of the Red Army in 1919 at 131,396 people. In 1919, there was a war on 4 internal fronts against the White armies and on the Western Front against Poland and the Baltic states.
In 1921, none of the fronts already existed, and the same administration calculates the losses of the "workers 'and peasants'" Red Army for that year at 171,185 people. Units of the VChK of the Red Army were not included and their losses are not included here. Possibly not included are the losses of the ChON, VOKhR and other communist detachments, as well as the militia.
In the same year, peasant uprisings against the Bolsheviks flared in the Don and Ukraine, in Chuvashia and in the Stavropol region.

Soviet historian L.M. Spirin summarizes: "We can say with confidence that there was not only a single province, but also not a single district, where there were no protests and uprisings of the population against the communist regime."

When the civil war was still in full swing, on the initiative of F.E. Dzerzhinsky in Soviet Russia everywhere (on the basis of the decree of the Central Committee of the RCP (b) of April 17, 1919), units and troops of special, special purpose are created. These are the military-party detachments under factory party cells, district committees, city committees, regional committees, and provincial committees of the party, organized to help the bodies of Soviet power in the fight against counterrevolution, to carry out guard duty at especially important facilities, etc. They were formed from communists and Komsomol members.

The first CHONs arose in Petrograd and Moscow, then in the central provinces of the RSFSR (by September 1919, they were created in 33 provinces). The ChONs of the frontline zone of the Southern, Western and Southwestern Fronts took part in front-line operations, although their main task was to fight the internal counter-revolution. The personnel of the ChON was divided into personnel and militia (variable).

On March 24, 1921, the Central Committee of the party, on the basis of the decision of the X Congress of the RCP (b), adopted a resolution on the inclusion of the ChON in the militia units of the Red Army. In September 1921, the command and headquarters of the ChON of the country were established (commander A.K. Aleksandrov, chief of staff V.A.Kangelari), for political leadership - the Council of ChON under the Central Committee of the RCP (b) (Secretary of the Central Committee V.V. Cheka I.S.Unshlikht, commissar of the staff of the Red Army and commander of the ChON), in the provinces and districts - the command and headquarters of the ChON, the ChON Councils at the provincial and party committees.

They were a fairly serious police force. In December 1921, the ChON had a staff of 39 673 people. and alternating - 323,372 people. The ChON included infantry, cavalry, artillery and armored parts. More than 360 thousand armed fighters!

With whom did they fight if the civil war officially ended in 1920? After all, special-purpose units were disbanded by the decision of the Central Committee of the RCP (b) only in 1924-1925.
Until the very end of 1922, martial law remained in 36 provinces, regions and autonomous republics of the country, that is, almost the entire country was in martial law.

CHON. Regulations, guidelines and circulars. - M .: SHTACHONres., 1921; Naida S.F. Parts for special purposes (1917-1925). Party leadership in the creation and activities of the ChON // Military History Journal, 1969. №4. S.106-112; Telnov N.S. From the history of the creation and combat activities of communist special purpose units during the civil war. // Scientific notes of the Kolomna Pedagogical Institute. - Kolomna, 1961. Volume 6.P.73-99; Gavrilova N.G. The activities of the Communist Party in the leadership of special-purpose units during the civil war and the restoration of the national economy (based on materials from the Tula, Ryazan, Ivanovo-Voznesensk provinces). Diss. Cand. ist. sciences. - Ryazan, 1983; Krotov V.L. The activities of the Communist Party of Ukraine on the creation and combat use of special purpose units (CHON) in the fight against counter-revolution (1919-1924). Dis. Cand. ist. sciences. - Kharkov, 1969; Murashko P.E. The Communist Party of Belarus - organizer and leader of special communist formations (1918-1924) Diss. Cand. ist. Sciences - Minsk, 1973; Dementyev I.B. ChON of the Perm province in the fight against the enemies of Soviet power. Diss. Cand. ist. sciences. - Perm, 1972; Abramenko I.A. Creation of communist special forces in Western Siberia (1920). // Scientific notes of Tomsk University, 1962. №43. S.83-97; Vdovenko G.D. Communist detachments - Special Forces of Eastern Siberia (1920-1921) .- Diss. Cand. ist. Sciences. - Tomsk, 1970; Fomin V.N. Special-purpose units in the Far East in 1918-1925 - Bryansk, 1994; Dmitriev P. Special-purpose units .- Soviet review. No. 2.1980. S.44-45. Krotov V.L. Chonovtsy. - M .: Politizdat, 1974.

The time has come to finally look at the results of the civil war in order to realize that out of more than 11 million deaths, more than 10 million are civilians.
We need to admit that it was not just a civil war, but a war against the people, above all, the peasantry of Russia, which was the main and most dangerous force in resisting the dictatorship of a destructive power.

Like any war, it was fought in the interests of profit and plunder.

D. Mendeleev, the creator of the periodic table of elements, the most famous Russian scientist, was engaged not only in chemistry, but also in demography.
Hardly anyone will deny him a thorough approach to science. In his work "To the Knowledge of Russia" Mendeleev predicted in 1905 (based on the data of the all-Russian population census) that by 2000 the population of Russia will be 594 million people.

It was in 1905 that the Bolshevik party actually began a struggle for power. The payback for their so-called socialism was bitter.
On the land that has been called Russia for centuries, by the end of the 20th century, judging by Mendeleev's calculations, almost 300 million people were missing (before the collapse of the USSR, about 270 million lived in it, and not about 600 million, as the scientist predicted).

B. Isakov, head of the statistics department at the Plekhanov Moscow Institute of National Economy, states: “Roughly speaking, we are“ halved ”. Because of the "experiments" of the 20th century, the country lost every second inhabitant ... Direct forms of genocide claimed from 80 to 100 million lives. "

Novosibirsk. September 2013

Reviews of “Russia in 1917-1925. Arithmetic of losses "(Sergey Shramko)

A very interesting and digitally rich article. Thank you, Sergey!

Vladimir Eisner 02.10.2013 14:33.

I completely agree with the article, at least based on the example of my relatives.
My great-grandmother died not old in 1918, when her food detachments raked out all the grain, and she ate out of hunger somewhere in a field of rye. As a result, she suffered a "volvulus" and she died in terrible agony.
Further, my grandmother's sister's husband died from persecution already in 1920, when two daughters were babies.
Another sister's grandmother's husband died of typhus in 1921, and two daughters were also babies.
In my dad's family, from 1918 to 1925, three brothers died of hunger when they were very young.
My mother's two brothers died of hunger, and she herself, born in 1918, barely survived.
The food detachments wanted to shoot my grandmother when she was pregnant with my mother and shouted to them: "Oh, you robbers!"
But grandfather stood up and was arrested, beaten and released barefoot 20 kilometers away.
Both my mother's and father's parents had to leave with their families from warm houses in the city to remote villages in unsuitable houses. Due to despair, the connection with the rest of the relatives was lost, and we do not know the whole terrible picture from 1917 to 1925. Sincerely. Valentina Gazova 09/19/2013 09:06.

Reviews

Thank you Sergey for the great and intelligible work. Now, when the Khmer Rouge again start waving flags, erecting terrible boulders to the tyrant here and there, erecting their utopian prayers, powdering the brains of the youth, blotting out immature souls with heresy, WE must stand up with the whole world to defend our state in order to prevent the Middle Ages! Ignorance! - Here is a terrible force, especially in the countryside, in the countryside. I see it in my native Siberian places. Those who knew the real horror, and passed it - they are no longer alive. Only the children of the war remained. In my village, where 30 households have survived, my aunt was left alone - a child of war. It turns out that only one knows that horror of continuous ruin, destruction of high-quality human capital, any prospects. And the remaining youth are completely ignorant! She has one place for that HISTORY! She needs to survive, it will be preserved! He gets drunk, ready even tomorrow to become under the banner of the next proletarians; on a new divide, shred, exile and set to the wall! I lived in Siberia, from the stories of old people I know how a red bloody tornado swept across the land, which did not know serfdom. Grandmother recalling the time of the peasant's peasantry (dispossession), collectivization - she always started crying, praying and whispering: "Oh, Lord, you are a granddaughter, you tied it up, you saw it with your eyes, you lived with it" Now the fields are all abandoned, the farms are destroyed, and this all a consequence of those terrible years when the Stalinists and Leninists forged a new person, burning out in him the feelings of the owner, the owner! At the end of the day, we ended up with completely dead villages. "Take Vaska land! After all, your grandfather went to lead for it!" - I say to my countryman, who recently turned fifty. And he sits on a bench, toothless already, greases his cigarette, spits on the grass, in galoshes on his bare feet, and smokes with a smoky smile "-" Well ... A seed was thrown to this terrible fruit in the year 17. This mighty tree called HOLY RUSSIA collapsed, tearing out roots and roots, to one of the fertile land. Thank you so much for your work! Patience to YOU ​​and creative ideas. another scrapping, revolutionary bacchanalia ... As they say, do not be dashing!