Solovyov and Larionov Page 6
13th Infantry Division
800 bayonets
34th Infantry Division
1,200 bayonets
1st Caucasus Rifle Regiment
100 bayonets
Slavic Regiment
100 bayonets
Chechen Regiment
200 sabers
Don River Cavalry Brigade
1,000 sabers
Headquarters Convoy Corps
100 sabers
The troops enumerated had twenty-four light and eight
horse-drawn weapons at their disposal. In the course of
organizing the defense, General Larionov also succeeded in procuring six tanks (three heavy and three light) as well as eight armored trains. Despite all the armored trains turning out to be defective, they became a big source of moral
support for the son of the railroad department’s director.
For anyone with even the slightest knowledge of military
matters, the above enumeration leaves no doubt: the White
Army had decided, at the highest level of command, to relin-quish Crimea. Only 3,500 fighters were sent to protect the front, which stretched for 400 versts. The general was aware that it was impossible to defend Crimea in Northern Taurida.
And so he did not even begin to do so.
Without a doubt, General Larionov was inspired by a
brilliant idea from Spartan king Leonidas, who decided to
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fend off the Persians in a narrow gorge. As we know,
Leonidas’s military contingent was extremely limited (a
tenth of what General Larionov had at his disposal, not to mention the complete absence of armored trains), but that
did not prevent him from fighting in the worthiest manner.
This battle was analyzed in depth during tactical lessons at the Second Cadet Corps, where the future general studied
back in the day. King Leonidas’s feat made an indelible
impression on cadet Larionov.
As life would have it, the general took part in battles that unfolded on emphatically open terrain. These were flood
plains, boundless rye fields, or steppes that were parched until they cracked. During World War One, Larionov
happened to fight in the mountains for a time, but those
mountains turned out to be the Carpathians, which by 1914
had become thoroughly weathered and were not at all suit-
able with respect to defense. General Larionov mentally
thanked fate that it was not the Persians opposing him in
these tactically unsuitable circumstances. Only in January 1920 did he sense that his hour had come. Like the renowned Spartan, the Russian general was visited by the abrupt realization that the only chance for a successful defense was to narrow the front. He decided against defending Northern
Taurida and moved his troops toward Perekop.
The Perekop Isthmus was probably the most joyless place
in Russia’s south. It was difficult to breathe there in the summer heat because of fumes from the dead waters of
the Sivash, lagoons often referred to as the Putrid Sea. A wind would come up from time to time, rolling dried-out
seaweed along salt-splotched soil but bringing no feeling of freshness. The wind became an utter disaster in the winter.
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It drove stinging drifting snow over an uninhabited icy
expanse where there were not even any shrubs to stop it.
The wind carried away all hope of warming up. It crept
behind the lapels of army overcoats and froze fingers to
gun barrels, extinguished campfires made from cart debris
and strewed Perekop’s lunar landscape with ash. It is not
surprising that territory of this sort made a most unfavorable impression on General Larionov. And so he decided not to
defend it.
After familiarizing himself with the history of the defense of Northern Crimea, the military commander noticed that
a common mistake of defenders each time was their abso-
lute determination to stand firm on the Perekop rampart.
Meanwhile, in light of the climatic conditions already
described, simply being on the Perekop Isthmus sapped a
huge amount of strength, resources, and morale because
there is nothing more ruinous for an army than sitting in
trenches in the bitter cold. The road to Crimea was opened after defenders were thrown from the Perekop ramparts.
The resourceful general acted differently so as not to repeat his predecessors’ mistakes. He decided to grant his adversary this expanse drifted with snow and deprived of any form
of habitation. They did not wait for the Reds on the Perekop Peninsula; only a small outpost was left there and its role boiled down to informing the main forces of an attack. They waited for the Reds at the exit from the isthmus.
The Red Army lived up to the general’s expectations.
Their cavalry, reinforced by the infantry, was drawn onto
the isthmus immediately after the White Army’s troops
abandoned it. The Red Army soldiers began feeling anxious
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and not encountering an enemy with which to do serious
battle. Advancing so late at night seemed dangerous to them.
They thought they were choosing the lesser evil by deciding to spend the night on the frozen steppe.
Many researchers consider that as early as January 1920
the commander of Red troops in the Crimean zone was
Dmitry Zhloba (1887–1938), the son of a peasant and a
graduate of the Moscow Aviation School (1917). There is
an opposing opinion, too, according to which, by January
1920, Dmitry Zhloba was still continuing his training
because of his failure to complete his flight hours under the school’s program.
Everyone familiar with this aviator’s story, of course, also knows of the vexed relations that developed between him
and the other students at the aviation school. On the whole, they were far younger than Zhloba and indulged themselves
in mocking the peculiarities of his appearance (the nearly complete absence of a forehead plus the presence of two
extra upper teeth) and kept him away from the flying
machines however they could. Bullied by his younger
comrades, the aviation school pupil only had the opportunity to fly at night, thus restricting his qualification. Night flights were not scored as flying time for Zhloba. As a result, it was recommended he fly the required number of hours
again—now in the daytime—something he undertook with
varying success until 1920. In the end, he was appointed
commander of the First Cavalry Corps and ceased his
dangerous experiments in aerial expanses.
Zhloba the cavalryman turned out to be more fortunate
than Zhloba the aviator. He was able to exert his influence over the personnel of his corps, particularly the horses. The 580VV_txt.indd 50
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animals unquestioningly obeyed the peasant’s son’s booming voice, which was intolerable at close range, and rushed to attack at his first shout. As he charged to attack the enemy with his unsheathed saber, Dmitry Zhloba imagined that it
was his former fellow pupils from the Moscow Aviation
School before him. The frenzy h
e displayed in battle did not just make an impression on the adversary; after a certain
point in time, it even began causing apprehension within
the corps subordinate to him.
Nobody objected when Zhloba announced they would
spend the night on Perekop. Even if another, more accept-
able plan had existed, it is unlikely that anyone would have dared contradict the commander. There was no such plan,
though, and there could not have been. Everything that
happened with Zhloba’s troops after that hour was helping
to realize General Larionov’s strategy. The Red forces spent the night under a chilly Perekop sky. And then another night.
Their overwhelming numerical superiority went untapped.
Without the opportunity to fully deploy their battle formations, they could not resolve to attack the Whites first. The longed-for battle seemed to have evaded Dmitry Zhloba.
After spending a third night on Perekop, half the corps’
personnel were sick and the aviation school alumnus realized he risked losing his troops without a battle. He decided to act. At dawn on the fourth day, the Reds moved toward the
exit from the Perekop Isthmus and came under brutal fire
to their flank, from the Yushun side. Their attack ended with a messy escape and the capture of prisoners. It should be
noted that prisoners were the primary source of replenish-
ment troops for the White Army. Those taken prisoner were
placed on active duty again and began moving in the exact
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opposite direction. They fought with just the same inflexibility as before captivity. Such was this war.
Dmitry Zhloba left in order to return. After gathering
his forces, he once again attempted to burst into Crimea
but—just like the first time—did not succeed in moving
further than Perekop. The White general had built lines of defense that seemed insurmountable. Larionov, however,
knew that they, too, were vulnerable. According to the
Russian battle captain, General Winter had rendered an
invaluable natural service by freezing the Red attack but
was now threatening to switch to the enemy side. The
winter of 1920 was so harsh that something unexpected
happened. The Sivash, which is as briny as a barrel of salted cucumbers, began to freeze. On the days when Dmitry
Zhloba was stubbornly hitting at the isthmus’s stopped-up
exit, General Larionov was sending men to the Sivash to
monitor the formation of ice.
Initially, thin glass-like layers covered the gulf ’s water in the mornings. The general grew anxious when it stopped
thawing under the daytime sun. Only a few days later, the
ice was so solid it could hold a lightly armed infantryman.
The general began sending loaded carts to the Sivash to test the firmness of the ice at night, so as not to give away the object of his apprehensions. The general’s Thermopylae
plan would crumble in an instant if the ice were to freeze a little more firmly, because the infantry and cavalry and all the Reds’ available heavy weaponry could cross over the
Sivash’s ice. In fact, it appeared to have been frozen for several days but Dmitry Zhloba, distracted by yet another
storm of the Perekop Isthmus, was paying no attention
whatsoever.
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The panic that began mounting in Crimea after the Reds’
occupation of the isthmus gradually subsided. Institutions unpacked the paperwork they had hastily tossed into
plywood crates. Everything was prepared for evacuation in
those days. Thousands of refugees from central Russia, who had broken free of the Bolsheviks and were deathly afraid
of landing back there, were planning to evacuate with the
army. ‘Deathly’ is what they said, and they were not far
from the truth. Only a very few of those who were not able to join the evacuation to Constantinople survived.
It is interesting that the establishment of Soviet power
in Crimea was the topic that Prof. Nikolsky assigned to
Solovyov in his fourth year of study. Solovyov did not know then that he would study the general’s fate, but from then on, the topics he cultivated grew ever closer to what would become the main focus of his research in the future.
Solovyov approached his work with all possible meticulous-
ness and found several unpublished reminiscences in the
archives, which would serve as the basis for a paper at the end of his fourth year.
It concerned primarily Sevastopol, which turned out to
be a harbinger of the Communist spring. Solovyov described how notices were hung up in the city, inviting all formers to gather at the city’s circus for job placement. Despite his efforts, the researcher was unsuccessful in clarifying why the circus had been chosen. Whether that would become a
portent of prevailing absurdity, whether the gathering place hinted at ancient tearing to shreds by wild animals, or
whether the circus was simply the only hall the Bolsheviks knew . . . none of the formers sensed a ploy. These were noncombatant formers; those who had been in combat were 580VV_txt.indd 53
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already in Constantinople. Former accountants, secretaries, and governesses all arrived obediently at the square in front of the circus. When the square was filled, troops encircled it and strung up barbed wire. So many people had come
that they could not even sit down. Several thousand formers stood in the square for two days. On the third day they were taken outside the city and shot.
And that was only the beginning. After collecting data
for all Crimea’s cities, Solovyov reached the conclusion that around 120,000 people were put to death on the peninsula
during the first months of Soviet power. This exceeded the data cited in Ratsimor’s Encyclopedia of the Civil War by 15,000. The data on the elderly, women, children, and injured who were killed by firing squad diverged seriously and
needed to be increased.
The paper was written very capably, using abundant
factual material attested to by 102 footnotes. Prof. Nikolsky saw the paper’s narrative style—which seemed excessively
emotional to him—as a minus. He requested that Solovyov
remove rhetorical questions as well as passages that expressed the researcher’s attitude toward the Reds’ actions. From the professor’s point of view, the figures were the most eloquent part of the paper. In the final reckoning, they needed no
detailed commentary.
In his fifth year of study, Solovyov wrote his diploma
thesis on ‘The Role of Latvian Riflemen in the October
Coup and Latvia’s Loss of Independence in 1939’. In his
account, the two events reflected in the title turned out to have both a cause-and-effect relationship as well as, even more so, a moral and ethical relationship. According to
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riflemen were supporting a regime that also subsequently
devoured Latvia, its independence, and the riflemen them-
selves. This time, his paper was not accompanied by
rhetorical questions. There was minimal commentary.
Despite the young historian’s paradoxical thinking (or
perhaps, actuall
y, thanks to it), Prof. Nikolsky published the paper in the journal Past and Present in 1996. Several months later, a brief but forceful review of Solovyov’s
article, signed by ‘The Council of Veterans’, appeared in Der Kampf, a popular Riga publication. Its authors saw no connection between the specified events and, for their part, discussed the possibility of an alternative course of history in 1939. They saw Latvia’s hypothetical future in the rosiest of hues.
Prof. Nikolsky considered it essential to stand up for his student under the circumstances and so published his own
‘Response to the Riga Veterans’ in Past and Present. He began with a theoretical introduction that validated the importance of the moral factor in history. In the scholar’s opinion, moral inferiority deprived states of the energy they needed for a trouble-free existence. The professor showed how this
ravaged them from within, transforming them into empty
shells flattened by the very first wind. Within this context, he examined the fall of the great empires of the ancient
world and the modern age.
True to his theory regarding the absence of all-encompassing scholarly truths, the professor also indicated that it is only possible to speak of tendencies, not of rules. By way of
exception, he offered the example of the English and
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and did not suffer in the least as a result. In the Petersburg professor’s opinion, distance, and the fact that both Anglo-Saxon states were surrounded by water, turned out to be
the decisive factors in the matter’s happy outcome. The
geographical factor also allowed those states to bide their time entering World War Two, until the circumstances had
been clarified to some extent. Water played a deciding role in these cases; Nikolsky met Solovyov halfway here.
In making his conclusions, however, the professor
admitted that his view of things might be excessively gloomy and Latvia’s big future really had been taken away from it.
From Prof. Nikolsky’s point of view, his skepticism could
be explained by the fact that historians deal primarily with the deceased and so are, for the most part, pessimists. The Russian professor concluded his essay unexpectedly, saying history is the science of the dead and there is little room there for the living.