The tragic fate of the merchant Popenov's family: the Red Terror and "local excesses"

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

The Red Terror has become a bloody page in our history. The photograph of the family of the merchant Popenov, kept in the museum of the city of Rybinsk, could serve as an illustration of a traditional Russian family, if not for one tragic circumstance: almost all the people depicted on it were shot in the fall of 1918.

On September 5, 1918, the resolution of the Council of People's Commissars of the RSFSR "On the Red Terror" was published. It said that. "Responsible comrades" were supposed to determine the measure of guilt of each suspect, and at the end of the month. Dzerzhinsky, the initiator and leader of the terror, defined its concept more broadly - as

Today, this period of Russian history is causing heated debate among both historians and ordinary people, whose families still keep the memory of the innocently killed, dispossessed, exiled to the camps. The horror of the situation was added by the fact that, along with the detachments of the red commissars, numerous bandits were engaged in their own terror in those years, and ordinary Red Army men could, on their own initiative, join the cause of clearing the state from the "white plague." True, they chose victims for their "raids" according to a different principle - richer, because all the property of the executed after a quick execution was confiscated.

I must say that the "red terror" began much earlier than it was officially proclaimed. At times hasty decisions and decisions were made "on the ground". So, in that very Rybinsk, Yaroslavl province, at the end of the summer of 1918, hundreds of people were sentenced to death. The fire in the furnace of repression was added by a telegram about the attempt on Lenin's life:

From the report of the executive committee of the Rybinsk Sovdep on August 30, 1918 (RF GAYO fund R-2 op. 5, file 1, sheet 17):

The "Red Terror" in Rybinsk began a day earlier than the official decree was published. On the night of September 4-5, 1918, an unprecedented massacre of civilians took place in the town. The lists, in addition to the so-called "bourgeois", included the intelligentsia, clergy, and "others. counterrevolutionaries ". Mass graves were dug in advance for the number of 50 to 100 people - documents about the details of these bloody days, together with lists of people who were shot, have now become public knowledge. Also known is the protocol of the special commission, which arrived a little later to investigate (dated September 11, 1918, classified as "Secret"). From it you can learn that the executions in Rybinsk were carried out. Apparently, the family of the merchant Popenov became a victim of just such - drunk and unofficial "persons". Urban legend says that the father, mother and all children after the execution were buried in the garden near their house. The estate beyond the Volga River later became a medical facility (it has survived to this day).

Controversy flared up around the photo of a happy family, which, together with a terrible story, flew around the Internet. Bloggers who decided to check these facts did not find Popenov's surname in the lists of those executed that month, but in response to one of the publications, a letter came from Elizaveta Neranova, the great-granddaughter of a merchant living in St. Petersburg. She revealed some of the details of the shocking murder 100 years ago:

This letter forces us to reconsider the “urban legend” - judging by the woman's words, part of the family did not die on that fateful day:

However, the revealed details in no way diminish the tragedy of the situation. The fact that four children escaped a terrible fate can be considered just a fluke. And the fact that instead of the "culprit" himself, who was not even at home, his family suffered, and all the more seems terrifying. As for the specific executors of the "sentence", Elizaveta Neranova does not report anything, but writes: Probably, an elderly woman and her children were killed by one of the unofficial detachments operating in those days and under the guise of the "Red Terror" mission that robbed wealthy estates.

In total, according to the verdicts of revolutionary tribunals and extrajudicial sessions of the Cheka in 1917-1922, from 50 to 140 thousand people were shot in Russia (data from various sources differ). The total number of victims (killed, exiled and dispossessed) is estimated at up to two million. In addition to peasants, merchants, industrialists and White Guard officers, many famous writers, artists, musicians, religious leaders and scientists suffered from this "action". Historians believe that these years of bloody massacres laid the foundation for subsequent Stalinist repressions.

(Vladimir Putin, from an interview with the Trud newspaper, 2007).

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