Russia grandly celebrated the 100th anniversary of Lenin's revolution. Rallies and demonstrations were mostly held by the left idea supporters. Many guests all around the globe, who arrived in our country on the occasion of the anniversary, were among the participants. The rally in the center of Moscow on November, 7 was the most numerous. Revolution! Revolution! 100 years ago, the Lenin revolution led us to a search, as it was put in the USSR, to a social experiment.
The experiment was bold, hard and with a difficult beginning.
Speaking of that revolution, we often reduce our idea of the events that happened 100 years ago to Petrograd. In Moscow, meanwhile, there was a different situation. For the sake of historical justice, we must remember not only the revolutionaries, but also those who opposed them. Alexei Denisov has the details.
100 years ago Civil War came to Moscow. Fierce street fighting between the White and the Red Armies lasted a whole week, from October 27 to November 2. During this time about 1,000 people were killed in the city. A considerable part of the dead were children and young men aged 14 to 20 years. They were junkers and cadets of Moscow military schools, as well as students and high-school pupils.
Writer Maxim Gorky, who had addressed the Russian youth with the appeal "Oh, let the storm burst!", — stunned, would say in those days: "The Moscow bloodshed essentially was an awful, bloody massacre of infants".
The only fault of these "innocents" was that they refused to betray the oath and the country that they once had vowed to protect.
The burial service of the cadets took place in the temple of the Great Ascension near the Nikitsky Gate. Metropolitan Evlogiy recalled the day: "The whole church was full of coffins with young, beautiful, newly blooming lives, cadets and students, like cut flowers".
In a funeral address to the relatives of the deceased, Metropolitan Evlogiy spoke about the cruel irony of fate. According to him, "the Russian youth who strove for political freedom fought for it so fiercely and sacrificially that they were the first to fall victim to the realized dream."
The center of resistance to the October coup in Moscow was the Alexander Military School, located on Znamenka Street. Future officers brought up in the spirit of loyalty to the oath and respect for law, saw the Bolshevik armed uprising as an attempt to seize power for the benefit of one political party.
On October 27, 1917, the cadets and officers gathered at the school and decided to create volunteer detachments of the White Guard to oppose the Red Army who had seized state institutions. Addressing the Muscovites, they urged to join them those "who wanted to save Moscow and Russia from anarchy, revolution from death, honor and dignity of Russians from mockery."
According to historians, about 30,000 officers of the Russian army were in Moscow at that time. Only 700 of them supported the cadets' move. The rest, like most of the two-million population of the city, took a wait-and-see attitude. This predetermined the outcome of the struggle. From October 28, fighting was underway in all the central districts of the city.
In total, about 7,000 cadets, students, teachers of military schools and officers of different military units stood up to the Bolsheviks in Moscow.
The Red armed forces, consisting mainly of deserters and propagandized soldiers of reserve units were estimated at 25,000 people. On October 29, according to Lenin's personal order, about 12,000 well-armed soldiers, sailors, and workers arrived to help the Moscow Bolsheviks. They were tasked to capture streets and buildings in the central part of the city near the Kremlin. For example, the detachment storming the hotel Metropol was commanded by the future Soviet military leader Mikhail Frunze.
On October 30, 1917, the Military Revolutionary Committee ordered the shelling of the Kremlin from heavy guns. It lasted two days and three nights. Militarily, the shelling of the Kremlin was a complete nonsense. It didn't affect the cadets hiding behind its walls. Instead, it inflicted enormous damage to architectural monuments.
The last strike was delivered at 6 am on November 3, when the cadets had already left the Kremlin hill upon the order by the command. The shelling badly damaged the ancient cathedrals of the Kremlin, monasteries, palaces, walls and towers of the fortress. Indignant with that senseless barbarism, People's Commissar for Education Lunacharsky resigned.
Bishop to Kamchatka and Petropavlovsk Nestor, who visited the Kremlin after the shelling, bitterly stated: "To the horror of our Motherland, the Russian weapons were drawn not to the enemy, but to their own Russian brothers, to shoot their native cities and holy places."
After the fighting, the Military Revolutionary Committee ordered to bury the dead Red Army soldiers on Red Square without church burial service, to the sound of revolutionary songs and marches.
Despite this, many relatives secretly put icons in the coffins of their dearest and nearest.
The cadets, students and white officers were buried in the bed of honor of the World War I heroes near the Church of All Saints. Now it's near the Sokol metro station. The following inscription was on the wreaths that the Muscovites laid on their graves: "To the victims of folk madness."
In the Soviet era, the bed of honor was destroyed. The official reason was "the need to create places for working people to have a rest and walk". Now a memorial cross and several symbolic monuments are the only reminders of it.
Alexei Denisov, Stanislav Petrov, Viktor Barmin specially for Vesti — News of the Week.
