Politician, publicist. Born in Kiev in the family of a professor of history at Kiev University. Graduated from the 2nd Kiev gymnasium and the law faculty of Kiev University (1900). Since his student years he was an anti-Semite, but he was against Jewish pogroms.
From 1907 he devoted himself entirely to political activity. He was a deputy of the II - IV State Duma from the Volyn province. In the Duma, he soon became one of the leaders of the right - the monarchist group of nationalist progressives and one of the best orators. He welcomed the dissolution of the Second Duma, called it "the Duma of the people's anger and ignorance."
In the III Duma, he supported P.A. Stolypin and his reforms, advocated harsh measures against revolutionaries, defended the idea of introducing the death penalty.
In 1914 he volunteered for the front and was wounded. The unpreparedness of the Russian army for war, the retreat of the army in 1915 shocked him. He returned to the Duma as a resolute opponent of the government.
In August 1915, the Progressive Bloc was elected to the State Duma, which set itself the task of creating a government accountable to the Duma. V.V. Shulgin was elected to the leadership of the Progressive Bloc. From the rostrum of the State Duma, he called for "to fight the authorities until they leave." On February 27, 1917, a revolutionary crowd burst into the Tauride Palace, where the Duma sat.
Later V.V. Shulgin will convey the sensations of that moment: "Soldiers, workers, students, intellectuals, just people ... They flooded the confused Tauride Palace. ... But no matter how many of them there were, they all had the same face: disgusting - animal - stupid or vile - devilish - vicious ... Machine guns - that's what I wanted. "
On February 27, 1917, the Council of Elders of the Duma V.V. Shulgin was elected to the Provisional Committee of the State Duma, which took over the functions of the government. The Provisional Committee decided that Emperor Nicholas II should immediately abdicate in favor of his son Alexei under the regency of his brother, Grand Duke Mikhail Alexandrovich.
On March 2, the Provisional Committee sent V.V. Shulgin and A.I. Guchkov. But Nicholas II signed the Act of abdication in favor of the brother of the Grand Duke Mikhail Alexandrovich.
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03 March V.V. Shulgin took part in negotiations with the Grand Duke Mikhail Alexandrovich, as a result of which he refused to accept the throne until the decision of the Constituent Assembly. April 26, 1917 V.V. Shulgin admitted: "I will not say that the entire Duma wanted a revolution; all this would be untrue .... But, even without wanting it, we created a revolution."
V.V. Shulgin strongly supported the Provisional Government, but seeing his inability to establish order in the country, in early October 1917 he moved to Kiev. There he headed the Russian National Union.
After the October Revolution V.V. Shulgin created an underground organization "Azbuka" in Kiev with the aim of fighting Bolshevism. In November-December 1917 he went to the Don in Novocherkassk, participated in the creation of the White Volunteer Army. Seeing the disintegration of the white movement, he wrote: "The white work began almost with the saints, and it was almost finished by the robbers."
From the end of 1918 he edited the newspaper "Russia", then "Great Russia", praising monarchist and nationalist principles and the purity of the "white idea". After the end of the civil war, he emigrated.
In 1925-1926. illegally arrived in Russia, visited Kiev, Moscow, Leningrad. He described his visit to the USSR in the book "Three Capitals", summed up his impressions with the words: "When I went there, I did not have a homeland. Now I have it." Since the 30s. lived in Yugoslavia.
In 1937 he retired from political activity. When in 1944 Soviet troops entered the territory of Yugoslavia, V.V. Shulgin was arrested and taken to Moscow. For "hostile to communism and anti-Soviet activities" he was sentenced to 25 years in prison. He served his term in the Vladimir prison, worked on memories. After the death of I.V. Stalin was released during a wide amnesty for political prisoners in 1956 and settled in Vladimir.
In the 1960s. called on the emigration to abandon the hostile attitude towards the USSR. In 1965 he starred in the documentary "Before the Court of History": V.V. Shulgin, sitting in the Catherine Hall of the Tauride Palace, where the State Duma sat, answered the historian's questions.
He was a guest of the XXII Congress of the CPSU (October 1961), at which a new Party Program was adopted - the program of building communism. He wrote memoirs: "Days" (1925), "1920th year" (1921), "Three capitals" (1927), "The Adventures of Prince Voronetsky" (1934).
SHULGIN, VASILY VITALIEVICH(1878-1976), Russian politician. Born January 1 (13), 1878 in Kiev in the family of V.Ya. Shulgin, professor of history at Kiev University and founder of the right-wing nationalist newspaper "Kievlyanin", who died in the year of his birth. Godson of the Minister of Finance N.H. Bunge. He was brought up by his stepfather, DI Pihno, a professor of political economy at Kiev University, who took over the editing of "Kievlyanin". Studied at the Second Kiev Gymnasium and at the Law Faculty of Kiev University; during his student years, his legal-nationalistic and anti-Semitic convictions were formed. After graduating from the university in 1900, he was elected a zemstvo vowel; became the leading journalist of "Kievlyanin". During the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905, he was drafted into the army with the rank of warrant officer in the reserve of field engineering troops and served in the 14th engineer battalion; did not participate in hostilities.
In 1907-1917 - deputy of the 2nd, 3rd and 4th State Duma from the Volyn province, where he had land ownership (three hundred acres of land in the village of Kurgany); member of the monarchist faction of nationalists; became widely known as one of the leaders of the right-wing camp. He sharply criticized the First Russian Revolution of 1905-1907 and actively supported the policy of PA Stolypin. In 1908 he opposed the abolition of the death penalty. In 1911 he headed the editorial board of "Kievlyanin". Despite his anti-Semitism, he condemned the Jewish pogroms. During the trial of M. Beilis in September 1913, he accused the prosecutor's office of conducting the case on a prejudicial basis; the issue of "Kievlyanin" with its critical article was confiscated, and in 1914 he himself was sentenced to three months' imprisonment. In the same year he published the first part of the historical novel (In the land of freedoms).
With the outbreak of the First World War, he volunteered for the front; fought near Przemysl as part of the 166th Rivne Infantry Regiment. After being wounded, he was seconded to the order of the South-Western regional zemstvo organization and became the head of the forward dressing and feeding detachment. At the beginning of 1915, he founded a faction of "progressive Russian nationalists" in the Duma. In August 1915 he joined the leadership of the Progressive Bloc, which united nationalists, Octobrists, Cadets, progressives and centrists; member of the Special Defense Conference. He openly denounced the government for the inept conduct of the war and the collapse of the rear; opposed the arrest and conviction of the Bolshevik deputies.
During the February Revolution on February 27 (March 12) 1917 he was elected a member of the Provisional Committee of the State Duma. He made every effort to stop the development of the revolution. Participated in the formation of the first Provisional Government, proposing MV Rodzianko as its head. On March 2 (15), together with AI Guchkov, he went to Pskov to see Nicholas II, inviting him, on behalf of the Provisional Committee, to relinquish power in favor of his son Alexei; the emperor, however, signed an act of abdication in favor of his brother Michael. On March 3 (16), upon returning to Petrograd, he participated in negotiations with Mikhail, which ended in the Grand Duke's renunciation of the Russian throne.
He accused the Provisional Government of weakness and indecision. He took part in the Meeting of Public Figures in Moscow on August 8-10 (21-23), 1917, which condemned the demoralizing activity of the Soviets in the rear and at the front and called for a decisive struggle against them; elected a member of the Permanent Council of Public Figures. On August 14 (27), he spoke at the State Conference in Moscow against the abolition of the death penalty, against the elected committees in the army and the autonomy of Ukraine. He considered possible cooperation between Prime Minister A.F. Kerensky and Commander-in-Chief L.G. Kornilov in restoring order in Russia. During the Kornilov speech, by order of the local Committee for the Protection of the Revolution, on August 30 (September 12), 1917, he was arrested in Kiev, and his newspaper was banned. After leaving prison, he founded the Russian National Union in Kiev in early October 1917; refused to participate in the work of the Pre-Parliament. He was nominated by the Crimean monarchists as a candidate for the Constituent Assembly.
The October coup was met with hostility. In November 1917 he created in Kiev a secret monarchist organization "Azbuka" to fight the Bolsheviks. At the same time, he resumed the publication of "Kievlyanin", criticizing the separatist policy of the Central Rada (the supreme body of power in Ukraine, created by local nationalists). In November-December he visited Novocherkassk, where he negotiated with the leaders of the White movement M.V. Alekseev and L.G. Kornilov. In January 1918, after the capture of Kiev by the Bolsheviks, he was arrested and escaped execution only thanks to the intercession of a prominent figure of the RSDLP (b) G.L. Pyatakov. At the end of January 1918, while remaining a firm supporter of the alliance of Russia with the Entente, he strongly condemned the Brest-Litovsk agreement of the Central Rada with Germany. When German troops entered Kiev in early March 1918, he stopped publishing his newspaper in protest. He was in constant context with the command of the Volunteer Army and with the leadership of the anti-Bolshevik National Center, organized in Moscow in May 1918. He was recruiting officers to send them to the Volunteer Army. In August 1918 he moved to Yekaterinodar to the General A.D. Denikin; together with General A.M. Dragomirov developed Regulations on the Special Meeting under the Supreme Leader of the Volunteer Army, legally formalizing the management system in the territories occupied by whites. He was actually the main ideologist of the White movement in the south of Russia; published in Yekaterinodar the monarchist newspaper "Russia" (then "Great Russia"). He founded the South Russian National Center, which set as its task the restoration of the constitutional monarchy; he nominated Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich as a candidate for the Russian throne. From November 1918 he settled in Odessa. In January 1919 he headed the Commission on National Affairs at a Special Conference. He called on A.I.Denikin to immediately implement the agrarian reform. In August 1919 he moved to Kiev, occupied by the whites; resumed the publication of "Kievlyanin", where he published lists of those executed by the Cheka and at the same time condemned the Denikinites for violence against civilians and Jewish pogroms, which he considered disastrous for the White cause.
After the defeat of the troops of A.I.Denikin in the fall of 1919 he returned to Odessa. When the detachments of G.I. Kotovsky occupied the city in February 1920, he left as part of the detachment of Colonel Stoessel along with his wife and two sons to the Romanian border, but the Romanian military did not allow them to enter Bessarabia. For some time he hid in Odessa, and then managed to get over to the Crimea to General P.N. Wrangel.
After the entry of the Red Army into the Crimea in November 1920, he fled with his youngest son Dmitry to Constantinople. Trying to find his son Benjamin who had disappeared in the Crimea, in September 1921 he secretly arrived in Gurzuf, but his search ended in failure. In 1921-1922 he was a member of the Russian Council, created by P.N. Wrangel as the Russian government in exile. Settled in Yugoslavia in the city of Sremskie Karlovitsy; wrote two books of memories - 1920 and Days... In 1925-1926, in search of his son, he again secretly visited Soviet Russia; visited Kiev, Moscow and Leningrad; described my journey in an essay Three capitals, in which he expressed hope for the internal degeneration of the Bolshevik regime and the restoration of a strong Russian statehood. Upon his return from Russia, he continued his active journalistic and literary and artistic activities. In 1930 he published an anti-Semitic brochure What we don't like about them, in which he blamed the Jews for the Bolshevik revolution, in 1934 - the second part of the historical novel The Adventures of Prince Voronetsky (In the land of bondage), and in 1939 - work Ukrainians and we directed against Ukrainian nationalists. In 1937 he refused to participate in the political life of the Russian emigration.
Feeling sympathy for fascism (primarily in its Italian version) and endorsing the Anschluss of Austria in 1938, however, with the outbreak of World War II, he switched to anti-German positions, seeing in Hitlerism a threat to the national interests of Russia. After the capture of Yugoslavia by the Germans in April 1941, he refused any contacts with the occupiers.
In October 1944, when Soviet troops entered Yugoslavia, he was arrested by SMERSH officers. In January 1945 he was sent to the USSR; for "anti-Soviet activity" he was sentenced to a long prison term. He served time in the Vladimir prison. After his release in 1956, he stayed to live in Vladimir, where he wrote a book Years about his ten-year work in the Duma (1907-1917). In the early 1960s, he addressed two open letters to the Russian emigration, urging them to abandon their hostile attitude towards the USSR. He died in Vladimir on February 15, 1976.
Compositions: Recent days... Kharkov, 1910; In the land of freedoms... Kiev, 1914; 1920 ... Sofia, 1921; Days... Belgrade, 1925; Three capitals... Berlin, 1927; What we dislike about them: About anti-Semitism in Russia... Paris, 1930; The Adventures of Prince Voronetsky... Belgrade, 1934; Ukrainians and we... Belgrade, 1939; Years... M., 1979.
Ivan Krivushin
Source - Wikipedia
Date of birth: January 1 (13), 1878
Place of birth: Kiev, Russian Empire
Died: February 15, 1976 (98 years old)
Place of death: Vladimir, USSR
Citizenship: a citizen of the Russian Empire, then stateless
Education: Lawyer. Kiev University of St. Vladimir
Religion: Orthodox
Party: All-Russian National Union
Key ideas: monarchism nationalism anti-Semitism Russia is one, great and indivisible
Occupation: State Duma deputy, publicist
Vasily Vitalievich Shulgin (January 1, 1878 [K 1], Kiev - February 15, 1976, Vladimir) - Russian political and public figure, publicist. From the hereditary nobles of the Volyn province. Deputy of the second, third and fourth State Duma, who accepted the abdication from the hands of Nicholas II. One of the organizers and ideologists of the White movement. Russian nationalist and monarchist.
Youth
Vasily Shulgin was born on Vasilyev evening on January 1 (13), 1878 in Kiev in the family of the historian Vitaly Yakovlevich Shulgin (1822-1878). His father died when the boy was not even a year old, and Vasily was raised by his stepfather, economist Dmitry Ivanovich Pikhno, editor of the newspaper "Kievlyanin" (replaced his father Vasily Shulgin), later - a member of the State Council. Shulgin developed warm and friendly relations with his stepfather [K 2]. As Shulgin himself later argued, the formation of his political views and worldview took place under the influence of his stepfather, and until his death, Shulgin "looked through his eyes at all political events in the country." Shulgin's godfather was a professor at the University of St. Vladimir, later the Minister of Finance of the Russian Empire N. Kh. Bunge. In 1895, Shulgin graduated from the Second Kiev Gymnasium with rather mediocre grades: in his matriculation certificate, he had "troikas" in six out of eleven subjects, in particular, in the Russian language, history, and Latin. In the same year he entered the Kiev Imperial University of St. Vladimir to study law at the Faculty of Law. After graduating from university in 1900, he entered the mechanical department, but after studying for only one year, he left it. A negative attitude towards revolutionary ideas was formed in him at the university, when he constantly became an eyewitness to riots organized by revolutionary-minded students. At the same time, his political views were formed. Shulgin himself in his mature years recalled this time: “I became an anti-Semite in my last year of university. And on the same day, and for the same reasons, I became “rightist”, “conservative”, “nationalist”, “white”, in a word, what I am now ... ”. Shulgin was a very erudite person, knew several foreign languages, played the guitar, piano and violin. At forty he became a vegetarian. Shulgin went through the usual one-year compulsory military service for a conscript with a completed secondary education (3rd sapper brigade) and in 1902 he was transferred to the reserve in the standard rank of warrant officer of the reserve of field engineering troops. After that he left for the Volyn province, where he got a family and was engaged in agriculture (first in the village of Agatovka, Burinskaya volost of the Ostrozh district, and from 1905 he settled on his estate Kurgany, where he lived until 1907), writing the novel "The Adventures of Prince Janos Voronetsky" [K 3] and zemstvo affairs - he was appointed "trustee for fire and insurance affairs." He also became an honorary magistrate and zemstvo vowel of the Ostrog district. This life continued until 1905, when in September he was drafted into the Russo-Japanese War, which ended before Shulgin reached the front; however, he continued to serve from September to December 1905 as a junior officer in the 14th Combat Engineer Battalion in Kiev. After the publication of the Manifesto on October 17, 1905, riots broke out in Kiev, and Shulgin, together with his soldiers, took part in suppressing the Jewish pogroms. The stepfather accepted Shulgin as a journalist for his newspaper, where, under the influence of the revolutionary events of 1905, Shulgin began to publish his articles (from September 1913, Shulgin became the editor of this newspaper). Shulgin's talent as a publicist was noted by both contemporaries and researchers of his heritage. Shulgin was very prolific - in the pre-emigrant period, his articles appeared every two to three days, or even daily. At the same time, Shulgin joined the Union of the Russian People (NRC), and then the Russian People's Union named after Mikhail Archangel, as he considered its leader V.M. Purishkevich more energetic than the leader of the NRC A.I.Dubrovin.
In his first elections - to the Second Duma - Shulgin showed himself to be a skillful agitator. He was elected as a landowner from the Volyn province (where he had 300 acres of land), first in the II, and later in the III and IV Dumas, where he was one of the leaders of the "right" faction, and then the moderate party of Russian nationalists - the All-Russian National Union and solidarity with the VNS organization - the Kiev club of Russian nationalists. Over time, Shulgin moved from the right flank (II Duma) to more and more moderate positions, gradually drawing closer to the center in the person of the Octobrists (III Duma), and then the Cadets (IV Duma). The historian DI Babkov believed that such a change in Shulgin's position was primarily due to the unconditional desire to bring Russia to victory in the war, therefore, remaining right-wing and monarchist, he was ready to go to an alliance with those forces that proclaimed the slogan “war to victory. end ". According to Babkov, Shulgin believed that neither the right, nor the tsarist government would be able to bring the country to victory. Shulgin's attitude to work in the Duma also changed. Shulgin recalled that as a child he "... hated Parliament." Shulgin had a similar attitude to the Second Duma, whose deputy he was elected spontaneously and against his own will: “when one says something, then the other says something, and then everyone shouts something together, even if shaking their fists , and shouting to disperse to drink beer, what kind of "struggle" is it really? I was getting bored and disgusted - to the point of nausea. " But already during the work of the Third Duma, he "got involved" in parliamentary work. When he was a deputy of the IV Duma, he wrote in a letter to his sister L. V. Mogilevskaya in 1915: “Do not think that we are not working. The State Duma is doing everything it can; support it with all your might - there is life in it ”, and in April 1917, when as a result of the revolution Russia was left without a representative body altogether, Shulgin wrote:“ to think of Russia without national representation ... not a single fanatic will dare ”. Shulgin was an excellent speaker. Speaking in the Duma, Shulgin spoke quietly and politely, always remaining calm and ironically parrying the attacks of his opponents, for which he received the nickname "spectacle snake." The Soviet publicist D. Zaslavsky described the attitude of his Duma opponents towards Shulgin in the following words: "They hated him more than Purishkevich, more than Krupensky, Zamyslovsky and other Duma Black Hundreds and brawlers." Shulgin himself later recalled his speeches in the Duma: I was once in a battle. Fearfully? No ... It's scary to speak in the State Duma ... Why? I don’t know ... Maybe because the whole of Russia listens ... - Shulgin V.V.Days Shulgin wrote poetry and during the Duma period successfully competed in political poetry with V.M. Purishkevich, a master of political parody and epigrams. The poem by V. V. Shulgin “The hero fell. On a bloody feast "became the poetic epigraph of the" Books of Russian Sorrow "published by Purishkevich. Meeting room of the State Duma. Here, as Shulgin recalled, he liked to come in the evening and think alone. In the II and III Dumas, Shulgin supported the government of P. A. Stolypin both in reforms and in the course of suppressing the revolutionary movement, including the introduction of military courts. Nicholas II received him several times.
With the beginning First world war Shulgin volunteered for the Southwestern Front as an ensign of the 166th Rivne Infantry Regiment. In the spring of 1915, almost immediately after arriving in the active army, he was wounded in an attack near Przemysl. The wound was such that there was no longer a question of further service in the army. Subsequently, he was in charge of the front-line feeding and dressing station, organized at the expense of zemstvo organizations (Sanitary detachment of the South-Western zemstvo organization). At the time of the Duma sessions, as a Duma deputy, he had the opportunity to leave the detachment for the capital for their meetings. He was shocked by the terrible organization and supply of the army. He was a member of the Special Defense Conference. In 1915, he unexpectedly opposed the arrest and conviction under a criminal article, despite the parliamentary immunity, of the Social Democratic deputies of the Duma, calling it a "major state mistake." On August 13 (26), 1915, he left the Duma faction of nationalists and, together with VA Bobrinsky, formed the "Progressive Group of Nationalists", becoming the deputy chairman of the faction, however, due to frequent travels of Bobrinsky, he actually headed the group. Together with many Duma deputies (from the extreme right to Octobrists and Cadets), he participated in the creation of the Progressive Bloc, which he saw as an alliance of the "conservative and liberal part of society", and became a member of its leadership, drawing closer to his former political opponents. Shulgin's speech became famous on November 3 (16), 1916, which became a kind of continuation of the speech made two days earlier by the leader of the cadets P.N. Milyukov. In it, Shulgin expressed doubt that the government is capable of bringing Russia to victory, and therefore called on "to fight this power until it leaves." In his speech at the last meeting of the Duma on February 15 (28), 1917, Shulgin called the tsar an opponent of everything "that the country needs like air."
Russian revolutions of 1917
Shulgin as a member of the State Duma Committee
Events in Petrograd on February 26-28
Shulgin greeted the February Revolution without enthusiasm. He wrote: From the very first moment ... disgust flooded my soul, and since then it has not left me for the entire duration of the "great" Russian revolution. An endless stream of human water supply threw more and more new faces into the Duma ... But no matter how many of them there were, they all had the same face: disgustingly animal-stupid or disgustingly devilishly evil ... God, how disgusting it was! ... So disgusting that, gritting my teeth, I felt in myself one yearning, powerless and therefore even more vicious fury ... Machine guns! Machine guns - that's what I wanted. For I felt that only the language of machine guns was accessible to the street crowd and that only he, lead, could drive back into his den the terrible beast that had escaped to freedom ... Alas - this beast was ... His Majesty the Russian people ... - Shulgin V. V. Days.
These "machine guns" in the future will become in some way winged words. An echo of rejection of the Petrograd streets of the revolutionary days could be seen in its later description in the film "Before the Judgment of History" (1965). The insurgents of Petrograd, according to the testimony of Shulgin the newsreel, appear as "a continuous disorderly crowd, a gray-red soldier and a blackish mass of workers." The historian Oleg Budnitsky, however, believed that Shulgin viewed what was happening in those days in Petrograd as a "lesser evil" in comparison with the unpopular regime, incapable of waging a war, and attributed such a categorically negative description of the revolutionary crowd to the assessments formed by Shulgin in the course of subsequent events ... On February 27 (March 12), 1917, Shulgin was elected to the Provisional Committee of the State Duma (VKGD). On February 28 (March 13), 1917, in a car under a red flag, Shulgin went to "take the Bastille" - to the Peter and Paul Fortress in order to persuade its officers to go over to the side of the revolution. In the course of negotiations with the commandant of the fortress, General V.N. Nikitin, he managed to persuade him not to take hostile actions against the new government and to submit to the VKGD. By his order, 19 Pavlovian soldiers arrested the day before were released. Shulgin spoke in front of the garrison of the fortress, telling about the events taking place in Petrograd and urging the soldiers to observe discipline. The crowd shouted: "Hurray for Comrade Shulgin!" The historian A. B. Nikolaev noted that it was after Shulgin's speech that riots began in the fortress.
Abdication of Nicholas II
Main article: Abdication of Nicholas II
On March 2 (15), 1917, Shulgin, together with A.I. The emergency train consisted of a steam locomotive and one carriage, in which seven passengers were traveling - Guchkov, Shulgin and five security soldiers with red bows on their greatcoats. Shulgin was present at the signing of the manifesto by Nicholas II of the abdication of the throne, because, like many representatives of the upper strata of society, he considered a constitutional monarchy headed by Alexei Nikolaevich (under the regency of the uncle, brother of the Tsar, Grand Duke Mikhail Alexandrovich) as a way out of the situation. The appearance of Shulgin and Guchkov, who appeared to the tsar in jackets, had not been washed or shaved for four days, while Vasily Vitalievich noted that he himself was, "with the face of a convict released from just burned prisons," provoked the wrath of the retinue, from - why a feud arose between Shulgin and the extreme monarchists, which lasted for many years. When Guchkov and Shulgin got out of the carriage of Nicholas II, someone from the royal retinue approached Shulgin and said: “That's what, Shulgin, what will be there someday, who knows. But we will not forget this "jacket" ... ". Countess Brasova wrote that Shulgin "deliberately did not shave ... and ... put on the dirtiest jacket ... when he went to see the Tsar in order to emphasize his mockery of him." The next day, March 3 (16), 1917, Shulgin was present when Mikhail Alexandrovich refused the throne: like most of those present, he persuaded him not to accept the supreme power (only Milyukov and Guchkov insisted that Mikhail should ascend the throne), noting that in Petrograd there was no force on which Michael could rely, he drew up and edited his act of abdication. According to DI Babkov, in the first days of the revolution, Shulgin headed the Petrograd Telegraph Agency for one day, which he took advantage of by sending his article to three hundred addresses with an assessment of the situation in Russia, which was published by many provincial newspapers. Other historians, however, reported that they could not find confirmation of this fact.
In Petrograd Refusing to enter the Provisional Government, Shulgin nevertheless remained in Petrograd throughout the spring and early summer of 1917, trying in every possible way to support the Provisional Government, which he wanted to see strong, and under no circumstances did he recognize the second center of power, which had arisen on its own, - the Petrograd Soviet of Workers. and soldiers' deputies, since his activities were aimed at undermining discipline in the army and ending the war. Gradually he became disillusioned with the revolution, in which he took personal part - at a meeting of the State Duma of all four convocations, held on April 27 (May 9) 1917, he said: “We cannot renounce this revolution, we contacted it, we are with it we are soldered and we bear moral responsibility for it. " He increasingly came to the conviction that the revolution was going the wrong way, that the real "gains of the revolution" - the notorious "freedoms" - led to the collapse of the army and dual power and was beneficial only to the Bolsheviks and Germany. Therefore, he was not afraid of the prospect of losing these freedoms - Shulgin wrote during this period: “Let's forget about political freedom for now. Now the very existence of Russia is in danger. " Shulgin also took part in the "shock work" that was gaining popularity at the beginning of the summer of 1917 - on June 23 (July 6), 1917, he and several other former deputies of the State Duma submitted an application to the Supreme Commander in which a plan for recruiting, equipping and training volunteers was presented: We, the undersigned, have decided to volunteer for the active army, we believe that this step of ours ... can be used to attract a certain number of volunteers besides us. ... we petition to allow us the following: 1) Open an enrollment in the volunteer squad ... 2) Start immediately to train the enrolled volunteers. "
Disappointed with the Provisional Government due to the inability to end the diarchy even after the July crisis and connivance with Ukrainian separatism, Shulgin left Petrograd for Kiev on July 6 (19), 1917, where preparations for the elections to the City Duma began, and took up the formation of the Non-Party bloc of Russian voters, which led ... The bloc went to the elections with the slogans of maintaining close ties between Little and Great Russia, preserving private property and continuing the war with the Central Powers. The elections took place on July 23 (August 5), 1917, and List No. 3 [K 4] managed to gain 14% of the vote and take third place in the City Duma. Shulgin also organized a protest action [K 5] "against the forcible Ukrainization of South Russia", which was joined by about 15 thousand people from Kiev, some higher educational institutions, public organizations and even military units. On August 30 (September 12), 1917, Shulgin was arrested as a "Kornilovite" [K 6] by order of the Committee for the Protection of the Revolution in the city of Kiev, but already on September 2 (15), 1917, the committee was disbanded, and Shulgin was released. The newspaper "Kievlyanin" was closed during the same period. At the elections to the Constituent Assembly, his candidacy was nominated by the monarchical union of the South Coast of Crimea. Under the chairmanship of Shulgin, on October 17 (30), 1917, a congress of Russian voters of the Kiev province was held in Kiev, which adopted an order in which it was said that one of the main tasks of the Constituent Assembly should be the creation of solid state power. Shulgin sharply condemned AF Kerensky's proclamation of the "Russian Republic" on September 1 (14), 1917, believing that the question of the future state structure can and should be decided only by the Constituent Assembly. When it was announced that the Pre-Parliament was convened, the Council of Public Figures elected Shulgin as its representative, but he refused such an "honor."
Shulgin arrived in Moscow, to take part in the Meeting of Public Figures and in the State Conference, becoming a member of the Bureau for the Organization of Public Forces. On August 14 (27), 1917, he delivered a vivid speech against the elected committees in the army, the abolition of the death penalty ("a democracy that does not understand that being governed by elected collectives during a terrible war means behaving towards certain death is doomed") and autonomy Ukraine, demanding for the Provisional Government a "strong and unlimited" power, in fact - a military dictatorship, which would be necessary for the government to be able to conclude an "honest peace in agreement with the allies" and, "ensuring the safety of individuals and property", bring the country to elections to the Constituent Assembly. At the same time, he called for attention to the state of culture, he was worried about the rapid degradation of Russian society. Shulgin wrote that in revolutionary times, hatred of the past makes the new leaders vilify everything in the past, including their own history and culture, so Russian culture, according to Shulgin, was in serious danger.
The coming of the Bolsheviks to power
In November 1917, Shulgin arrived in Novocherkassk and, under No. 29, enrolled as a serviceman in the “Alekseevskaya organization”. Shulgin intended to start publishing the newspaper "Kievlyanin", closed by the authorities of the UPR, on the territory of the Don, but the military chieftains asked to postpone this, since due to the hesitation of the Cossacks, the straightforwardness of the political course of the "Kievlyanin" could only harm. General MV Alekseev said to Shulgin: "I ask you and order you to return to Kiev and keep the" Kievlyanin "until the last opportunity ... and - send us officers." Shulgin left for Kiev. Elections of deputies to the All-Russian Constituent Assembly were to be held in Little Russia on November 26-28 (December 9-11). The non-party bloc of Russian voters headed by Shulgin went to the elections with the same slogans, adding the demand for "an end to socialist experiments." This time the struggle was not easy and unequal - during the attempt of the Bolsheviks to seize power in Kiev, first the Central Rada, and then the Soviet of Workers 'and Soldiers' Deputies requisitioned the printing house of "Kievlyanin". Shulgin's bloc (List No. 8) was left without an opportunity to conduct an election campaign. The publication of the newspaper could be resumed only on November 18 (December 1), 1917. But even under these conditions, the Shulgin bloc in Kiev was able to get the second result - 36,268 people voted for it (20.5% of the vote, while for socialists of all shades - 25.6%, for the Bolsheviks - 16.8%). However, throughout the Kiev electoral district, the bloc won only 48,758 votes (socialists - over a million, Bolsheviks - 90,000). Shulgin's bloc did not enter the Constituent Assembly. The seizure of power in Ukraine by the Central Rada Shulgin called the "Ukrainian occupation ..." of the region, "the threshold of the Austrian occupation." At the same time, elections were held for the Ukrainian Constituent Assembly, which was never convened. Shulgin's bloc went to the polls to declare, in addition to the above-mentioned slogans, that "the Russian people ... will remain loyal to Russia to the end." Voter interest was lower than in the all-Russian elections. Shulgin's bloc, which nominated its candidates in all Little Russian provinces and the city of Kiev, managed to achieve a major victory - in the Kiev elections, the bloc was ahead of both the Ukrainians themselves and the Bolsheviks, and Shulgin became the only representative from the city of Kiev elected to the Ukrainian Constituent Assembly. After the occupation of Kiev by the Soviet troops of M.A.Muravyov in January 1918, Shulgin was arrested, but before the Bolsheviks left Kiev, he was released. Subsequently, during interrogation in Lubyanka, he explained his release as follows: “I got the impression that Pyatakov had something to do with my release” [K 7], but the researchers believed that the merit in the release belonged to the city duma. When German troops entered Kiev in February, Shulgin, addressing them, wrote in the issue of "Kievlyanin" dated February 25 (March 10) 1918 in an editorial, after which he closed his newspaper in protest: There are provisions in which it is impossible not perish. There is no situation from which it would be impossible to get out with honor. ... Since we did not call the Germans, we do not want to enjoy the benefits of relative calm and some political freedom that the Germans have brought us. We have no right to this ... We are your enemies. We may be your prisoners of war, but we will not be your friends as long as the war is going on. The article was noticed by all political circles and, according to Shulgin, produced "the effect of an exploding bomb." Immediately after its publication, a French military agent Emile Enno, who was in Kiev, including with a secret mission from French intelligence, came to Shulgin's home, according to him, and on behalf of France and the allies thanked Shulgin for his clear allied position. A little later, the same Emile Enno was appointed the military representative of France in Odessa, where during the winter of 1918-1919 he worked together with Shulgin to organize the French intervention in the South of Russia and the creation of southern Russian government structures in the territories liberated from the Bolsheviks. At the same time, to promote the idea of an inextricable link between Great and Little Russia and the fight against the ideas of Ukrainian separatism, Shulgin began publishing a monthly magazine "Little Russia". The first issue was prepared in January, but came out only after the expulsion of the Bolsheviks and the restoration of the power of the Central Rada in Kiev. In the programmatic article, Shulgin, in particular, wrote: "[Ukrainians] ... declared themselves a 'sovereign power' and with this windbag phrase deprived our people of a huge land reserve in the East, which was at his disposal ...". Presumably, a total of three issues of the magazine were published, all before Shulgin's departure to the Don. The second issue was dedicated to the Soviet-Ukrainian war and the seizure of Kiev by the Bolsheviks. The third issue continued the theme of “Ukrainian independence”.
Russian Civil War When the hope for a quick overthrow of the Bolshevik power in Central Russia was lost, Shulgin joined the White movement in southern Russia: in Kiev, Odessa, Yekaterinodar, where he took an active part in the activities of the Armed Forces of Yekaterinburg as a political consultant and propagandist. He was at the origins of the creation of the secret organization "Azbuka", engaged in collecting information and analyzing it on the state of affairs in Russia, both in the "Soviet" and "white", for a report to the leadership of the Armed Forces of Yugoslavia.
Ekaterinodar
Since August 1918, Shulgin, being with the Volunteer Army, began to seek the creation of a special body under the Commander-in-Chief of the Volunteer Army, whose competence would include the tasks of civil administration. In the autumn, together with General A. M. Dragomirov, he developed the "Regulations for a Special Meeting under the Supreme Leader of the Volunteer Army," regulating his work. The name of the new institution was inspired by memories of the Special Meeting during the First World War, in which Shulgin took part. Shulgin became a member of the Special Meeting as a "minister without a portfolio" and at first took part in its meetings. However, after representatives of the Kuban government began to be involved in the work of the meeting, Shulgin had to withdraw from the work of the meeting, since his figure was unacceptable to the Kuban because of Shulgin's sharply negative attitude towards the Kuban and Ukrainian separatism. The official Ukrainian representative in the Kuban Baron F. Borzhinsky called Shulgin Ukrainian. “A vicious vorog ... Mother of Ukraine”, and in Kiev the head of the Ukrainian State, Hetman P. P. Skoropadsky, in private conversations called Shulgin his “personal enemy”. During the summer and autumn, Shulgin edited the newspaper "Russia" in Yekaterinodar (then "Great Russia", since the Kuban regional council, dissatisfied with the "anti-self" course of the newspaper "Russia", closed it on December 2 (15), 1918 - a total of 88 issues were published ), on the pages of which he promoted three basic principles: 1) loyalty to the allies; 2) restoration of "Russia united, great and indivisible"; 3) the fight against "mass insanity called socialism." The newspaper was originally the official organ of the Volunteer Army, but soon passed into the category of "private", as it too openly preached the idea of monarchism, which ran counter to the "unauthorized" course of the leadership of the Dobrarmia. The newspaper "Great Russia" was published until the fall of the White Crimea. Although it was highly appreciated by P.N. Wrangel, it remained a private newspaper. Shulgin's publishing plans during the Civil War were more extensive: he planned to organize the publication of newspapers of a single ideological direction in all large cities occupied by whites - so, in particular, the newspaper "Russia" was published in Odessa in January 1919, but due to attempts Since the French authorities opposed the Volunteer Army and flirted with the UNR emissaries, to influence the editorial policy, Shulgin decided to demonstratively close the newspaper, in the manner of closing the Kievlyanin because of the German occupation of Ukraine. The newspaper "Russia" began to appear in Kursk after its occupation by volunteers in October 1919 and came out for about a month, until Kursk was again occupied by the Reds. The relationship between the Commander-in-Chief of the Volunteer Army A. I. Denikin and Shulgin was not easy. Shulgin believed that Denikin's firm position on issues of "non-determination" in conditions when all power was in his hands was a big disadvantage. Shulgin explained this position by the personal qualities of the Commander-in-Chief, first of all, by the absence of a real "taste for power." Shulgin will treat Baron Wrangel in a completely different way - "Apart from Wrangel, I have not seen a person about whom one could even dream that he would overthrow the Bolsheviks and lead Russia."
Odessa period of winter 1918-1919 See also: Odessa evacuation (1919) Was elected a member of the "Russian delegation" (representative of the Volunteer Army) at the Yassy meeting, but could not take part in it, because on the way from Yekaterinodar to Yassy he fell ill. In the winter of 1918-1919, returning from Yassy to Odessa, he was a political adviser to the “Odessa dictator” A. N. Grishin-Almazov. Since January 1919, Shulgin headed the "Commission on National Affairs" at the Special Conference, although he did not actively show himself in this field. At Shulgin's insistence, Odessa schools introduced “local history” lessons instead of “Ukrainian studies” (to promote “healthy local patriotism” instead of “foreign betrayal”) and optional lessons of “Little Russian vernacular” instead of the obligatory lessons of “Ukrainian language” introduced by the Ukrainian authorities. As Shulgin recalled, the gymnasium students skipped optional lessons, preferring to “play ball”. So, in the Second Odessa gymnasium, the lessons of "Little Russian vernacular" were attended by only two gymnasium students - the sons of Shulgin himself.
Kiev in the fall of 1919 See also: Kievlyanin (newspaper) Already at the time of the occupation of Kiev by the troops of the ARSUR in August 1919, Shulgin arrived in the city and resumed the publication of the newspaper "Kievlyanin". While in Kiev, he was actively engaged in the reconstruction of the party structures of the South-Western Territory, standing on a pro-Russian and monarchist position. Without holding any official posts in the administration of the Armed Forces of South Russia, Shulgin nevertheless became one of the most influential figures. Under his leadership, the formation of the "South Russian National Party" took place, building its program on the basis of the slogans of the South Russian National Center. The "Russian National Bloc" was created by uniting with friendly political forces. However, these works, due to the short duration of the power of the Armed Forces in the region, were never completed. The historian D.I.Babkov believes that calling Shulgin the ideologist of the South Russian white movement is fundamentally wrong, since Shulgin is not had nothing to do, and Shulgin's personal ideas (monarchism) even ran counter to the ideas of the Good Army. Babkov characterized Shulgin's position in his Odessa and Kiev periods as the position of the main propagandist of the ideas of the Volunteer Army in the region. With the beginning of the autumn retreat of the Volunteer Army to the south, Shulgin remained in Kiev until the last day to "fulfill his duty to the end ... [although] ... doom lurked in all corners." On the morning of December 3 (16), 1919, when the Red Army was already entering Kiev, Shulgin with ten employees of the "Kievlyanin" and members of the "Alphabet" left the city. The volunteer army was demoralized, no one thought about resisting the advancing Soviet units. Later Shulgin, recalling the retreat of his detachment in the ranks of other volunteers from Kiev to Odessa, wrote not without irony: "Our eyes saw a lot, our feet felt a lot, but we did not hear or see one thing: the enemy."
Odessa and Crimea (1920) In the 1920s, the books of the inspirer of "white thought" were still published in the USSR. In December 1919, Shulgin again found himself in Odessa, where he was organizing a volunteer formation to defend the city from the Bolsheviks. After an unsuccessful attempt to escape with his wife and two sons from the city abandoned by the White Army to Romania, he suffered typhus and in March 1920 remained in an illegal position in Odessa, occupied by the Bolsheviks, where he headed the local branch of Azbuka. However, the Odessa Cheka managed to get on the trail of Shulgin. Their organization was approached by a "Wrangel courier" who, as it turned out later, was a provocateur. Together with him, “Azbuka” courier F.A. Shulgin had to urgently disappear from the city. Together with his sons, he was able to escape on a rowing boat from red Odessa to the Tendra occupied by the white fleet, from where he reached the Crimea on July 27 (August 9) 1920. In Crimea, Shulgin, moving away from public affairs, devoted himself to journalism and attempts to rescue his wife (who remained in Odessa) and nephew from the hands of the Bolsheviks. As he wrote later about this period: "... the whole point of Wrangel's struggle in the Crimea was precisely to wash away the shame of the collapse [under Denikin], and precisely in the fact that the heroic epilogue corresponded to the immortal prologue." Wrangel's policy, despite the softening of the latter's position on the Ukrainian issue [K 8], Shulgin considered a successful experience and wrote (already in exile) that he wanted "... all of Russia could live the way Crimea lived in 1920". From that time on, Shulgin became an unconditional and unchanging supporter of the "Wrangel experience", whom he considered the continuer of Stolypin's work. Shulgin tried to organize the exchange of his nephew for one, not called by sources, "a prominent Bolshevik" who was in captivity of the whites. There was no response from the Chekists to this proposal. Then he made an attempt again to illegally (by sea) return to Odessa, intending to offer himself to the Chekists in exchange for the freedom of his nephew (by this time had already been shot). An autumn storm made it impossible to land on the coast in the Odessa region, and Shulgin had to land in the Akkerman region, which belonged to Romania after the capture of Bessarabia. Having lost his brothers and two sons in the civil war, leaving his wife in Bolshevik Odessa, Shulgin, after a two-month imprisonment in Romania (he and his companions were checked whether they were Bolshevik agents), left for Constantinople. By this time, the Whites had already left the Crimea.
In emigration Shulgin
There is something fantastic about him:
it contains an Artist, a patriot, a hero and a lyricist,
A hymn to tsarism and a panegyric to the will,
And, careful, he jokes with fire ...
He is at the helm - we will sleep peacefully.
He is one of the weights on the scales of Russia,
In which the nobility.
In the books, he dubbed the Indisputable for a new day.
His calling is a difficult hunt.
From Don Juan and from Don Quixote
There is something in it.
We persecute unjustly
He is those compatriots
Who, failing to understand the topic,
He sees hatred for other peoples.
Igor Severyanin Cycle "Medallions". Belgrade. 1934 g.
Arriving in Constantinople (where he spent time from November 1920 to July 1921), Shulgin first of all visited the Gallipoli camp, where he unsuccessfully tried to find his son Benjamin, who disappeared during the defense of the Crimea. In the summer of 1921, Shulgin secretly visited the coast of the Crimea for the same purpose. To do this, he and a group of his associates, each of whom set the goal of visiting Soviet Russia for personal reasons, had to purchase a motor-sailing schooner in Varna, on which they made a trip to the Crimea. A group of lieutenant and journalist Vl. Lazarevsky and Count Kapnist, whom Shulgin entrusted with the search for his son. At the appointed time, the schooner approached the shore to pick up the disembarked, but none of them was found, and the schooner was fired upon from the shore. The venture ended in failure. Shulgin had to return to Bulgaria. From Bulgaria Shulgin moved to Czechoslovakia (lived until the fall of 1922), then to Berlin (where he lived from the fall of 1922 to August 1923), to France (Paris and the south of France - September 1923 - September 1924) and settled in the Kingdom Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. Since the formation of the ROVS, Shulgin has become an active participant in it. In 1921-1922 he was a prominent member of the Russian Council, created by P.N. Wrangel as the Russian government in exile. In exile, Shulgin no longer became either a publisher or an editor, remaining only a journalist. His first journalistic work, White Thoughts, written in exile, appeared during a visit to the Gallipoli camp and was published in December 1920 in the manuscript magazine "Explore the Mountain in the Bare Field", which was published in the camp. This article was published by P. B. Struve in the first edition of "Russian Thought" resumed abroad. In the future, Shulgin published journalism in émigré newspapers and magazines of various directions, and not necessarily those who sympathized with his views. At this time, Shulgin's stable source of income was fees for his journalistic and literary work. For example, according to the records of Shulgin himself, for the period from September 1, 1921 to September 1, 1923 Shulgin earned $ 535 by his "literary work", while his total income was $ 3055 (the rest of the income was the work of the mill on his estate in Volyn - as a result of the Soviet-Polish war, the estate turned out to be on the territory of Poland). However, in the first years of emigration, Shulgin had little left of his fees - a significant part of his income went to pay debts made by him and his relatives in Constantinople. In addition to politics, Shulgin was engaged in the preservation and development of Russian culture in the Diaspora, he was worried about the possible loss of the Russian emigration of its national identity, the possibility of national “dissolution” in the countries that had received emigrants. In 1924, in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, a cultural and educational society "Russian Matica [K 9]" was formed, the branches of which were supposed to be formed "wherever Russians live." Shulgin became a full member of the branch in the city of Novy Sad. He took part in the preparation and publication of the literary and journalistic collection published by this department, "Blagovest". In addition, Shulgin was a member of the "Union of Writers and Journalists" of Yugoslavia.
Softening positions on Bolshevism Despite the fact that Shulgin continued to declare himself a nationalist and monarchist (while the historian Repnikov pointed out that Shulgin was not a chauvinist), his attitude towards the Bolshevik regime began to change. Considering that Bolshevism gradually evolved and that the "white thought" would triumph over the "red shell", Shulgin switched to compromising positions close to the "Smenovekh" ones. Shulgin wrote about the Bolsheviks: ... our ideas jumped over the front ... they (the Bolsheviks) restored the Russian army ... It may seem crazy, but it is so ... The Bolsheviks actually raised the banner of United Russia ... in fact, the International turned out to be an instrument ... of expanding the territory ... for the authorities sitting in Moscow ... it is impossible not to see that the Russian language, for the glory of the International, again occupied a sixth of the land ... the Bolsheviks: 1) restore the military might of Russia; 2) restore the borders of the Russian state ... 3) prepare the coming of the all-Russian autocracy ... - Shulgin V. V. Years. Days - 1920 .-- S. 795-797. In Bolshevism and monarchism, Shulgin generally saw many similarities - rejection of parliamentarism, strong dictatorial power - "... from here there is only one leap to the Tsar", Shulgin wrote about the Bolsheviks back in December 1917. Shulgin gave credit to the Bolsheviks that they actually restored the "normal" organization of society - they established inequality and the principle of one-man rule, placing a new elite over the Russian people - the Bolshevik Party, headed by the sole ruler - the leader. Shulgin had no intention of destroying everything that was created by the Bolsheviks, he hoped to “achieve his goal by simply 'biting the top'” - to remove the ruling stratum from power and replace it with a new one. The historian M. S. Agursky in his work "Ideology of National Bolshevism" came to the conclusion that Shulgin was the first to draw attention to the fact that the Bolsheviks, and only on an unconscious level, took national positions, using the ideas of the "Internationale" as an instrument of Russian nationality policy.
Interest in fascism Shulgin looked closely at Italian fascism with interest and sympathy. Shulgin saw in him a suitable mechanism for managing modern society. Shulgin was especially impressed by such elements of fascism as discipline and nationalism. In June 1923, in a letter to PB Struve, Shulgin wrote: “I would add“ discipline ”to your slogan 'fatherland and property'. By discipline, you can, if you wish, mean both the form of government ... and the form of government. As for the latter, I am increasingly beginning to lean towards Italianism ... ". In the eyes of Shulgin, there were no significant differences between fascism and communism: "Stolypinism, Mussolinism and Leninism ... are systems 'minorist', that is, based on the rule of the minority over the majority." According to the historian Babkov, Shulgin for some period of time became the ideologist of Russian fascism. In 1927 Shulgin took part in the work of the Eurasian Union and the "School of Fascism" under the Union of Monarchists and already confidently asserted: "I am a Russian fascist." The leitmotif of the propaganda of fascism by Shulgin was the following: in order to defeat the "Reds", the "Whites" must learn a lot from them and adopt their tactics. As an example of creating a movement capable of defeating the Bolsheviks, he pointed to the organization of the Italian fascists. Shulgin began publishing articles in the press, popularizing the ideas of fascism and proposing the creation of Russian militarized groups, like the Soviet communists and Italian fascists. Shulgin's propaganda of fascism caused a contradictory reaction in the emigre environment. Some of the emigrants accused Shulgin (“black fanatic”) of trying to restore the monarchy in Russia, for which he was allegedly ready to take the path of “red fanatics” - the communists - and create militarized detachments in Russia that suppress democracy. But there were also supporters of his ideas (for example, N. V. Ustryalov): the preaching of "Russian fascism" was a success. But already at that time Shulgin saw the danger lurking within fascism itself that the fascists of different countries would seek to strengthen their own nation at the expense of other nations. In this regard, he wrote: “Fascists of all countries ... are unable to rise above the narrowly understood interests of their state. ... fascism ... has in itself something that threatens a terrible danger to this entire movement. In other words, fascism is prone to self-destruction in mutual struggle. " While developing a program for the Russian fascist party in 1925 [K 10], he suggested: “Do not assert after the Germans ... that“ the homeland is above all ”. Homeland is higher than all other human concepts, but God is higher than homeland. And when you want to "in the name of your homeland" attack the neighboring nation for no reason, remember that before God it is a sin, and in the name of God step back from your intention. ... Love your homeland "as yourself", but do not make it a god, ... do not become an idolater. " Later, the theme of fascism was continued in Shulgin's books Three Capitals and What We Don't Like About Them, but the consequences of Operation Trust discredited not only Shulgin, but also his ideas, including the idea of “Russian fascism”. After the appearance in European politics of such a phenomenon as German National Socialism, believing that there was "a great difference ..." between it and Italian fascism, Shulgin became an opponent of both National Socialism and, in general, all extreme forms of nationalism.
Operation Trust and the Three Capitals book
On the instructions of the ROVS in the winter of 1925-1926, Shulgin secretly visited the Soviet Union with a false passport to establish contacts with the underground anti-Soviet organization "Trust" and in an attempt to find his missing son. Shulgin later said: I ... turned in Paris to a clairvoyant lady ... she, looking into the ball, began to say that my Lyalya was in one of the madhouses in the south of Russia. Why did I not think then to ask her in detail what this city looked like, starting from the station and ending with the street where this yellow house was! Then I would find Lyalya. After all, my secret trip to Russia in 1925 was largely fueled by the hope that I would find my son. I visited Kiev, Moscow and St. Petersburg, and then described it in the book "Three Capitals". By the way, in Kiev, in make-up, I watched a play based on the novel by Mikhail Kozakov “The Fall of the Empire”, where an actor played, made up for me ... And recently, with the help of Khrushchev, I got the opportunity to travel around Ukraine. And imagine, in Poltava, in an insane asylum, I found traces of my Lyalya ... He died there ... So many years later I received confirmation of the old prophecy ... - Mikhailov ON One day with Shulgin
Shulgin was on the territory of the USSR from December 23, 1925 to February 6, 1926. During this time, he visited Kiev, Moscow and Leningrad. In Vinnitsa, where he wanted to visit in search of his son, he was not allowed. People allegedly traveled there from the Trust, but Shulgin's son was not found (by that time he had already died). Shulgin returned under the great impression of what he had seen in Russia - he expected the overthrow of Bolshevism from day to day. The Trust organization made a good impression on him. Shulgin believed that he had finally returned the opportunity to do a real business - he was ready to give his estate in Poland on the border with Soviet Russia to Trust in order to organize there a transshipment base for the organization's agents - imaginary "smugglers", and for he even tried to organize a soap factory on the estate. Before leaving the USSR, at a meeting with the management of Trust, Shulgin received a recommendation to describe his impressions of the NEP in a book. This is how the book Three Capitals was born. Shulgin described in it what he saw and heard during the trip - but he saw and heard not so much, since "for reasons of conspiracy" his circle of contacts and visits to various places was limited. He received information about the mood of the Soviet people and life in the USSR either from the "trustees" or from the Soviet press. Therefore, even in spite of the anti-Soviet and anti-Leninist attacks in the book, Shulgin showed in the book as a whole a completely positive picture of the new Russia during the heyday of the NEP. To exclude the possibility of the "failure" of the anti-Soviet underground, it was decided to send the manuscript of the book to the USSR for "proofreading", after which it was published in the West. This was done, the manuscript visited Moscow and returned without any special changes (only fragments describing the technical organization of the border crossing were removed, even very harsh remarks about Lenin were not touched). Shulgin did not know that the GPU was the "censor" of his book and that the book he wrote was supposed, according to the Chekists' plan, to propagate the idea of expecting the degeneration of Soviet Russia and, as a result, to reduce the activity of the White emigration. The book stated that “Russia is not dead, that it is not only alive, but also full of juices,” and if the NEP develops in the “proper direction,” it will destroy Bolshevism. The author also argued that foreign Russian forces wishing to overthrow the Soviet regime must certainly coordinate their actions with the internal forces of Russia pursuing the same goals. Many years later, Shulgin commented on the situation in the following way: “In addition to the author's signature, that is, 'V. Shulgin ", under this book you can read an invisible but indelible remark:" I authorize printing. F. Dzerzhinsky "". The book was published in January 1927 and caused confusion in the ranks of the Russian emigration. Shulgin was inspired by the "trustees" that, in addition to publishing the book, it would be desirable for him to speak at the Congress of Russian emigrants, which was being prepared for April 1927, with a report on what he saw in Soviet Russia, in order to "force his" congress "to follow the desired path." Shulgin may have been preparing to speak at the congress, but he never spoke at it. But a few days before the start of the work of the congress, I met with one of its organizers, who opened the congress with his report - P.B. Struve. It is possible that the conversation that took place influenced Struve's speech at the opening of the congress. As a result of the trip and the publication of the book, the authority of both Shulgin and "Trust" in emigre circles was quite high at that moment - both A.P. Kutepov and Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich clearly favored the latter. But then an event occurred that crossed out the plans of the Chekists. In April 1927, one of the leaders of the Trust, EO Opperput-Staunitz, fled from the USSR and immediately testified about this Chekist provocation. Thanks to the revelatory campaign launched in May 1927 according to his testimony by VL Burtsevs, it became clear to emigre circles that the entire organization "Trust" was in fact a provocation of the Soviet special services; that Shulgin's arrival, all his travels across the USSR and meetings were under the control of the OGPU, and everyone with whom he met were members of the special services. The situation for Shulgin was aggravated by the fact that, although he learned about the Chekist provocation from A.P. Kutepov before reports about it appeared in the emigrant press, the latter forbade Shulgin to take any preemptive public steps, apparently still hoping keep it secret or because of "interests that seemed more important." Shulgin was forced to obey and do nothing to save his reputation until the moment when the public became aware of the provocation. Trust in Shulgin and his ideas among the emigrants was undermined. Shulgin was morally shocked by this: earlier he was accused of being "a man who traveled to Pskov," now he has become a man whom the GPU "took to Moscow." Shulgin considered that under the circumstances he had no moral right to continue his journalistic activities and that he should "go into the shadows." This was the beginning of the end of Shulgin's active political activities. Until the end of his life, Shulgin did not believe that all those with whom he had the opportunity to communicate as members of the "Trust" were agents of the GPU. Reflecting on the reasons why the GPU allowed him to safely leave the Soviet Union and why the manuscript of his book almost did not undergo proofreading by Dzerzhinsky, Shulgin said in an interview in the 1970s: “Because this text was beneficial from the point of view of Dzerzhinsky ...” The three capitals “were an excuse for the Leninist NEP condemned by many communists. ... So, Shulgin, generally hostile to the Soviets, claims that Russia is being reborn, and moreover thanks to the NEP, the last act of the late Lenin. It was important to instill this in Europe. " Shulgin also recalled that the French edition of the book “Three Capitals” was published under the title “Revival of Russia”.
Moving to Yugoslavia. Departure from active political activity Shulgin in exile. 1934 At the beginning of 1930 Shulgin finally moved to Yugoslavia, where he lived alternately in Dubrovnik and Belgrade, in 1938 he settled in Sremski Karlovtsy, where many veterans of the Russian army found refuge. He moved away from active political life, “wanted to live as a private person,” as he himself wrote. He sympathized with the NTSNP (National Labor Union of a New Generation) and became its full-time lecturer on general political issues, was engaged in explanatory work on the activities of P.A.Stolypin, whose ideas he remained until the end of his life, gave lectures and participated in discussions. He took part in the newspaper "Voice of Russia" published in 1936-1938 by I. L. Solonevich, where a series of his articles was published. In exile, Shulgin maintained contacts with other leaders of the White movement until 1937, when he finally ceased his political activities.
The Second World War The researcher of Shulgin's biography A.V. Repnikov noted that Shulgin's life of this period is a "blank spot" in his biography and researchers have only the memories of Shulgin himself and his testimony during interrogations after his arrest. From the declassified investigation file of Shulgin, it became known about a certain work - "Orion's Belt", written around 1936, in which Shulgin substantiated the need for an alliance of Russia liberated from the Bolsheviks with Hitler's Germany and Japan - star states that form a "belt" in the constellation Orion, and Germany was supposed to liberate Russia, fulfilling its historical movement to the east - "Drang nach Osten". In payment for liberation from Bolshevism, Russia would transfer to Germany some of its border territories for German colonization, but would preserve its state independence and Ukraine. According to Shulgin, he wrote this work for transfer to someone from the leadership of Nazi Germany, and acquainted AI Guchkov, IL Solonevich and IA Ilyin with its content; The latter work was criticized for the fact that in it Shulgin promised too little to the Germans, who, therefore, would not go to negotiations. During this period, Shulgin was not alone in his hopes for Germany - a fascist party came to power in it by many representatives of the Russian diaspora (D.S.Merezhkovsky, Z.N. Gippius, I.A.Ilyin, father John Shakhovsky, P. N. Krasnov) was explained as a response to the ideas of the Comintern and was associated with a possible foreign intervention, which would put an end to the Bolshevik rule in Russia, and it was believed that Hitler would not be an enemy of the Russian people, and his goals in the fight against the communist regime coincided with those of White movement. In 1938, Shulgin approved the Anschluss of Austria.
With the outbreak of World War II, Shulgin saw National Socialism as a threat to Russia's national interests. After the capture of Yugoslavia in April 1941, Shulgin, in his own words, refused any contacts with the German administration, considering the Germans enemies, but not calling for a fight or an alliance with Nazi Germany. Shulgin recalled that "... with not a single German during the entire war I was unable to say a single word." In the summer of 1944, his son Dmitry, who worked in Poland on the construction of highways, sent Shulgin documents allowing him to travel to one of the neutral countries, but Shulgin did not use them - at the end of the statement he had to write: "Heil Hitler!" could do it "on principle."
In Soviet Union
In custody In 1944, Soviet troops occupied Yugoslavia. In December 1944, Shulgin was detained, taken out through Hungary to Moscow, where on January 31, 1945, his arrest was formalized as "an active member of the White Guard organization Russian Common Military Union" 58-4, 58-6 part 1, 58-8 and 58-11 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR by decree of a special meeting at the Ministry of State Security of July 12, 1947 to 25 years in prison for "anti-Soviet activity." When asked before the sentencing, whether he pleads guilty, Shulgin replied: “On every page there is my signature, which means I kind of confirm my deeds. But whether it is a fault, or it should be called another word - leave it to my conscience to judge. "
The verdict shocked Shulgin with its cruelty. He recalled: “This I did not expect. The maximum I was counting on was three years. " The historian A. V. Repnikov explained the passing of just such a sentence by the following circumstance: By the Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR of May 26, 1947 "On the abolition of the death penalty", the abolition of the death penalty was proclaimed in peacetime. The same decree established that for crimes punishable by the current laws with the death penalty, a punishment was introduced in the form of imprisonment in a forced labor camp for a period of 25 years. Thus, as Repnikov believed, the elderly Shulgin should have been sentenced to death, and he was saved only by the fact that at the time of his sentencing, the death penalty was abolished in the USSR. Shulgin was even more fortunate if we recall that already on January 12, 1950, the death penalty in the USSR was restored for "traitors to the Motherland, spies, demolition saboteurs." Shulgin served his term in the Vladimir Central, among his cellmates were Mordechai Dubin, philosopher Daniil Andreev, Prince PD Dolgorukov, MA Tairov, Wehrmacht generals and Japanese prisoners of war. On the night of March 5, 1953, Shulgin had a dream: "A magnificent horse fell, fell on its hind legs, resting its forepaws on the ground, which it covered with blood." At first, he connected the dream with the approaching anniversary of the death of Alexander II, but soon learned about the death of I.V. Stalin. After twelve years in prison, Shulgin was released in 1956 under an amnesty. During the entire term of his imprisonment, Shulgin worked hard on his memoirs. The museum, which opened in the Vladimir Central after the collapse of the USSR, has a stand dedicated to Shulgin. Among the exhibits there is an inventory of one of the parcels that Shulgin received from his former cellmate, a German prisoner of war [K 11]: the usual contents of the parcels were food, the parcel to Shulgin consisted of two kilograms of writing paper. Unfortunately, most of these recordings were destroyed by the prison administration. There are only fragments left about meetings with wonderful compatriots. The political part of the memoirs later served as the basis for the book "Years".
After being released. In Gorokhovets and Vladimir. The book "Lenin's Experience" After his release, Shulgin was sent under escort to the town of Gorokhovets in the Vladimir region and there was placed in an invalid home, but there were no conditions for family living (Shulgin was allowed to live with his wife, who was allowed to come from exile in Hungary, where she was, having been expelled from Yugoslavia, as a "Soviet spy"), he was very quickly transferred to an invalid home in Vladimir, where conditions were better. Shulgin was allowed to return to literary work, and in a nursing home in 1958 he wrote his first book after his release, Lenin's Experience (published only in 1997), in which he tried to comprehend the results of social, political and economic construction that began in Russia after 1917. The significance of this book is that, not assuming that his contemporaries could read it, Shulgin tried to describe Soviet history through the eyes of a 19th century man who saw and remembered “Tsarist Russia” in which he played a significant political role. Unlike the emigrants, who knew about Soviet life only by hearsay, Shulgin watched the development of Soviet society from the inside. According to the point of view of Shulgin of this period, the beginning of the civil war in Russia was laid by the "obscene" Brest-Litovsk Peace, which many citizens of Russia could not then regard as anything other than treacherous surrender and national humiliation. However, comprehending the events of those days over the past years, Shulgin came to the conclusion that Lenin's position was not so unrealistic and irrational - by concluding peace, as Shulgin wrote, the Bolsheviks saved millions of Russian lives from destruction on the front of the First World War. As a Russian nationalist, Shulgin could not help but rejoice at the growing influence of the Soviet Union in the world: "The Reds ... in their own way glorified the Russian name ... as never before." In socialism itself, he saw the further development of the features inherent in Russian society - communal organization, love for authoritarian power; even he gave an explanation to atheism that it is just a modification of the Orthodox faith. At the same time, he did not idealize Soviet life; some of his gloomy reflections turned out to be prophetic. He was worried about the strength of the criminal environment he had to meet in custody. He believed that under certain circumstances (weakening of power), this "formidable" force, "hostile to all creation", will be able to come to the surface and "life will be seized by bandits." He also considered the national problem unresolved: "The position of the Soviet power will be difficult if, at the moment of some weakening of the center, any nationalities that have entered the union ... of the USSR, will be caught up in a tornado of belated separatism." A serious problem, in his opinion, was the low standard of living in the USSR, especially in comparison with the standard of living in the developed countries of Europe - he noticed that such traits as fatigue and irritability had turned into the national traits of the Soviet people. In the conclusion of the book, Shulgin wrote: My opinion, formed over forty years of observation and reflection, boils down to the fact that for the fate of all mankind it is not only important, but simply necessary that the communist experience, which has gone so far, be unhindered to the end. What I am writing now is a feeble senile attempt, before completely, completely stepping aside, to express, as I understand it, the pitfalls that threaten the ship Russia, on which I once sailed. - Shulgin V.V. Lenin's Experience. The historian DI Babkov believed that Shulgin came to understand and justify the "Lenin experience", but, as before, from the standpoint of the nationalist and conservative - "Lenin's experience" must be "brought to an end" only so that the Russian people finally "got sick" and got rid of the "recurrence of the communist disease" forever. Historians A.V. Repnikov and I.N. Grebyonkin believed that Shulgin could not be accused of wanting to curry favor or confirm his loyalty to the Soviet regime in order to improve his own situation. By writing the book "The Experience of Lenin" Shulgin tried to analyze the changes that had taken place in Russia and force the authorities to heed his warnings.
Life in Vladimir. Book "Letters to Russian Emigrants"
Shulgin's first book after a long silence in his homeland House No. 1 on Kooperativnaya Street (since 1967, Feigina Street), where the Shulgins lived in apartment No. 1 on the first floor from 1960 until their death. In 1960, the Shulgin was allocated a one-room apartment in Vladimir, where they lived under the constant supervision of the KGB. He was allowed to write books and articles, receive guests, travel around the USSR, and even occasionally visit Moscow. A real pilgrimage began to Shulgin: many unknown and famous visitors came, wishing to communicate with a person who witnessed turning events in the history of Russia - writer M.K. Kasvinov, author of the book "Twenty-Three Steps Down", dedicated to the history of the reign of Nicholas II. director S. N. Kolosov, filming a television movie about "Operation Trust", writer L. V. Nikulin, author of a fictional chronicle about the same operation, writers D. A. Zhukov and A. I. Solzhenitsyn, who asked Shulgin about the events of the February Revolution, collecting materials for the novel "Red Wheel", artist I. Glazunov, musician M. L. Rostropovich. In 1961, the book "Letters to Russian Emigrants", written by Shulgin, was published in one hundred thousandth circulation. The book stated: what the Soviet communists are doing in the second half of the 20th century is not only useful, but absolutely necessary for the Russian people and salutary for all mankind. The book mentioned the standard ideological set of that time: about the leading role of the CPSU, about NS Khrushchev, whose personality "gradually captured" Shulgin. Subsequently, Shulgin, with annoyance, spoke about this book as follows: “I was deceived” (to write the book, Shulgin was specially taken across the USSR, showing the “achievements” of the communist government, which in fact were “Potemkin villages”), but from the main idea of the book - that a new war, if it begins, it will become the end of the existence of the Russian people - he did not renounce until his death.
Guest at the XXII Congress of the CPSU. Shooting of the film "Before the Court of History"
In 1961, Shulgin was among the guests at the XXII Congress of the CPSU. In 1965, Shulgin acted as the protagonist of the Soviet documentary "Before the Court of History" (directed by Friedrich Ermler, work on the film lasted from 1962 to 1965), in which he shared his memories with the "Soviet historian" (it was not possible to find a real historian , and the role was assigned to the actor and intelligence officer Sergei Svistunov). Shulgin did not make any concessions, the purpose of the film - to show that the leaders of the white emigration themselves admitted that their struggle had been lost and the cause of the "builders of communism" had won - was not achieved, and the film was shown in Moscow and Leningrad cinemas for only three days: despite the interest of the audience, the film was discontinued. All these - trips around the country, published books, an invitation to a party congress and a film release - were signs of Khrushchev's "thaw." But as soon as Nikita Khrushchev was removed and new leaders came to power in the USSR, the ideological policy changed, censorship was tightened. Involvement of Shulgin in public life was recognized as erroneous at a meeting of the secretariat of the Central Committee of the CPSU.
last years of life
Shulgin never accepted Soviet citizenship. Living abroad, he also did not accept foreign citizenship, remaining a subject of the Russian Empire, jokingly called himself stateless. On July 27, 1968, Shulgin's wife died. After seeing his wife on her last journey, Shulgin settled next to a cemetery in the village of Vyatkino near Vladimir and lived there for 40 days, next to a fresh grave. The lonely old man was looked after by the neighbors in the house. Shulgin has always been a romantic-minded person, showing an increased interest in the mysterious phenomena of the human psyche. All his life he led an "anthology of mysterious cases" - those that happened to him or to his relatives and friends. He was personally acquainted with many prominent occultists (G. I. Gurdjieff, A. V. Sakko, S. V. Tuholka, etc.), until the end of his days he was fond of spiritualism. Towards the end of his life, his mysticism intensified. Then he made the habit of writing down the content of dreams that he dreamed the day before in ordinary student notebooks every morning. In recent years, he saw poorly and wrote almost at random, in very large handwriting. Several suitcases piled up in notebooks with the notes of his dreams.
Death
Back in 1951, while in prison, Shulgin rewrote Igor Severyanin's poem, once dedicated to himself, "in the form of restoring the truth":
He was a wasteland.
The thing is
What he read as a child
Jules Verne,
Walter Scott,
And a great hunt for dear old times
Awkwardly intertwined with the mirage of the future.
But still he was in vain persecuted
Of the Ukrainian brothers, those
Who did not understand the topic
He was straightforward.
Believing that he would soon die, he bequeathed the last line to be carved on the back of his gravestone, and for its obverse he composed the following epitaph:
The last leaves are filled with bliss of tears.
But do not be sad, pen, they will return to you again.
When the thunder strikes and the slabs rise
I will sing immortal love again!
Vasily Vitalievich Shulgin died in Vladimir on February 15, 1976, on the Feast of the Presentation of the Lord, at the ninety-ninth year of his life from an attack of angina pectoris. They served him in the cemetery church next to the Vladimir prison, in which he spent 12 years. He was buried at the Baigushi cemetery in Vladimir. There were 10-12 people at the funeral, among them were A. K. Golitsyn, I. S. Glazunov. KGB officers watched the funeral from a Gazik. They buried him next to his wife. Both graves have survived. A strict black cross was erected above them, installed on a small pedestal, on which the names and dates of life are engraved. According to the memoirs of contemporaries, Shulgin retained a clear mind and good memory until the last days of his life and remained a Russian patriot.
Political views
Shulgin's name is firmly merged with the name of the "Black Hundred" and "anti-Semite". And although Shulgin himself did not hide his nationalist and anti-Semitic views, his attitude to the "Jewish", "Ukrainian" and "Russian" issues was very contradictory and changed greatly in different periods of his life. But Shulgin remained unchanged and moved throughout his life, according to the historian Babkov, love for Russia and, above all, for his "small homeland" - Little Russia. In the "Russian question" Shulgin acted as a "statesman" - he could not imagine a strong Russia without a powerful state, while the very form of power in Russia (monarchism, republic or something else) was a secondary issue for Shulgin. However, he believed that for Russian conditions the monarchy was the best form of government that would ensure strong power. The essence of Shulgin's monarchism was the combination of the state-national idea with the idea of legality, implemented through the Duma (representative body) - “Stolypin monarchism”. PA Stolypin remained for Shulgin a model of a politician, even an idol, until the end of his days. Shulgin's monarchism underwent an evolution from absolute monarchy (at the beginning of his political career) to a constitutional monarchy by the beginning of the First World War. During the Civil War, Shulgin firmly believed that the best way to rule in Russia could only be a constitutional monarchy. Shulgin could not articulate exactly what a "Russian nation" and a "real Russian" are. For him, the main criterion of "Russianness" was love for Russia. According to Shulgin, the Russian people faced a certain messianic task on a global scale - to transfer the achievements of European culture to the East, to “domesticate” the wild Asian expanses. Until the end of his life, Shulgin remained a monarchist and remembered his role in the abdication of Nicholas II. He wrote: “My life will be connected with the king and queen until my last days. And this connection does not diminish over time ... ”, which, however, did not prevent some of the right, for example, N. Ye. Markov the second, to consider him a traitor of the monarchist idea. Shulgin did not part with the newspaper "Kievlyanin" even in the days of the abdication of Nicholas II. For Shulgin, the "Ukrainian question" was the most important among all other national problems, and in this matter he saw himself as the successor to the cause of his father and stepfather. Considering that the cornerstone of national self-determination for the people living in southern Russia will be the question of self-designation, Shulgin basically did not use the word "Ukraine", calling this region "Little Russia", and its population "Little Russians", and if he used the word Ukrainians and derivatives from him, then usually put them in quotation marks. Shulgin also treated the issue of the Ukrainian language: his "Galician dialect", which Shulgin interpreted as "a real Ukrainian language", Shulgin considered alien to the population of South Russia. He called the "local dialect" Little Russian, considering it one of the dialects of the "Great Russian dialect". The outcome of the struggle between the "Ukrainian" and "Little Russian" trends, according to Shulgin, rested on the self-identification of the population living in Ukraine. From this, according to Shulgin, the future of the entire Russian state depended. To win this struggle, it was necessary to explain to the Little Russian people that “they, the people living from the Carpathians to the Caucasus, are the most Russian of all Russians [K 12]”. Shulgin has repeatedly spoken in the spirit that there is no separate Ukrainian nation, and Little Russia is a natural and integral part of Russia, the separation of which from Great Russia will also be a step back culturally. Since Shulgin did not see ethnic and racial differences between the Great Russians and the Little Russians, for him the “Ukrainian question” was a purely political issue. For Shulgin, the Little Russians were one of the branches of the Russian people, and the Ukrainians were perceived by him not as a people, but as a political sect seeking to split its unity, and the main feeling of this sect was “hatred for the rest of the Russian people ... [and this hatred forced] ... them to be friends of all enemies of Russia and forge Mazepa plans. ”Shulgin also considered himself a Little Russian. Although Shulgin described himself as an anti-Semite, his attitude to the "Jewish question" was perhaps the most controversial point in Shulgin's worldview. Shulgin distinguished three types of anti-Semitism: 1) biological, or racial, 2) political, or, as he said, cultural, 3) religious, or mystical. Shulgin was never an anti-Semite of the first type, he adhered to the second, "political anti-Semitism", believing that "Jewish dominance" could be dangerous for the indigenous peoples of the empire, since they could lose their national and cultural identity. Shulgin explained this by the fact that the Jewish nation was formed three thousand years ago, and the Russian - only a thousand, therefore it is "weaker". The "Jewish question" always remained for Shulgin exclusively a political question, and he reproached himself for criticizing "Jewry" in his publications, he did not always foresee his reader that he meant only "political Jewry" and not all Jews as a nation. Shulgin described the evolution of his attitude towards Jews in the following way: In the Russo-Japanese War, Jewry staked on defeat and revolution. And I was an anti-Semite. During the World War, Russian Jewry, which actually ran the press, took a patriotic track and threw out the slogan "war to a victorious end." By this, it denied the revolution. And I became a Philosemite. And this is because in 1915, just like in 1905, I wanted Russia to win and the revolution to be defeated. Here are my pre-revolutionary "zigzags" on the Jewish question: when the Jews were against Russia, I was against them. When, in my opinion, they began to work for "Russia", I went to reconcile with them. At the same time, Shulgin always opposed Jewish pogroms. But with the outbreak of the Civil War, seeing a large percentage of Jews among both ordinary Bolsheviks and the leaders of Soviet Russia, Shulgin began to accuse not individual Jewish representatives of the destruction of the Russian state, but the entire nation (citing an analogy with the German nation - although not all Germans are to blame for unleashing World War, according to the terms of the Versailles Peace, the entire German nation was responsible for this). According to Shulgin, the Jews are to blame, first of all, for the fact that they did not fight back the revolutionaries who had left their ranks and did not stop them. His articles in Kievlyanin in 1919, and especially the infamous article "Torture by Fear", were perceived as encouraging and justifying pogrom sentiments. Anticipating the logic that became common only in the second half of the 20th century, Shulgin, perhaps for the first time in the history of Russian political journalism, proposed the principle of ethnic guilt, ethnic responsibility and ethnic repentance in his brochure What We Don't Like About Them. Shulgin demanded from the Jews "a voluntary refusal ... to participate in the political life of Russia." However, towards the end of his life, according to the testimony of Yu. O. Dombrovsky, Shulgin radically changed his views on Jews. The reasons for this were his imprisonment in the Gulag, the catastrophe of European Jewry and friendship with a certain orthodox Lithuanian Jew. When Shulgin was asked at that time whether he was an anti-Semite, instead of answering, he recommended reading his articles about the "Beilis case."
Criticism of Shulgin's personality and his views
As a right-wing deputy, Vasily Shulgin was the object of numerous political cartoons.V.I. Lenin assessed the activities of Shulgin the politician, proceeding from his idea of the antagonism of the interests of the revolutionary proletariat and the landlord-noble bourgeoisie, whose exclusive interests, according to the leader of the proletariat, were represented in the Duma by Vasily Vitalievich, defending the principles of private ownership of land. The compulsory alienation of land, according to Shulgin, meant "the grave of culture and civilization." The correspondence dispute between Shulgin and Lenin in May 1917 was played out in 1965 in F. Ermler's film "Before the Court of History", where Shulgin, defending his position as a patriot and supporter of the continuation of hostilities against Germany in a dispute with the Bolsheviks, who insisted on ending the unpopular war, argued : “We prefer to be beggars, but beggars in our country. If you can save us this country and save it, undress us, we will not cry about it. " To which VI Lenin (through the mouth of the Soviet historian S. Svistunov) objected: “Do not intimidate, Mr. Shulgin! Even when we are in power, we will not “undress” you, but we will provide you with good clothes and good food, on the condition of work that is quite strong and familiar to you! Intimidation is good against the Chernovs and Tsereteli, you will not “intimidate” us! ”: 34 Another Lenin quote was not included in the film:“ Imagine a Bolshevik who approaches citizen Shulgin and is going to undress him. He could, with great success, blame Minister Skobelev for this. We never went that far ”: 94, however, the subsequent events of the Civil War confirmed that there was nothing unusual in Shulgin's assumption. The further interest of the chairman of the Council of People's Commissars to Shulgin is evidenced by the fact that in his library there were two books by Vasily Vitalievich - "Something fantastic" and "1920". SP Melgunov, who did not belong to Shulgin's admirers, criticized his memoirs and their author, referring the former to "semi-fictional works that could not serve as a canvas for a historical narrative." In "The March Days of 1917" Melgunov wrote about Shulgin's book "Days" that in it "fiction cannot always be separated from reality," and hinted that Shulgin was involved in a conspiracy against Nicholas II. However, the historian D.I.Babkov noted that such accusations were never proven by anyone, and the descriptions of events given by Shulgin and criticized by Melgunov as unreliable coincide with the memoirs of other persons, which Melgunov probably did not know about at the time of writing. of the specified book. In the USSR, Shulgin, like other "Black Hundreds", was labeled a "Great Russian chauvinist", in particular, in 1922, Stalin referred to Shulgin as "obscurantist of Russian chauvinism." Information about Shulgin, published in Soviet reference sources, was often biased. Already in the post-Soviet era, Shulgin's personality and his role in historical events, primarily in connection with two episodes - the Beilis case and the abdication of Nicholas II, were often criticized, both from liberal and conservative positions. Thus, the researcher V. S. Kobylin, who evaluates Shulgin's activities from a right-monarchical standpoint, wrote about him: “decent people don’t shake hands with Shulgin”. The dissident VN Osipov, who visited Shulgin in Vladimir, was amazed at his lack of remorse for a number of antimonarchist actions committed before the revolution, and left the "92-year-old witness to the fateful days of Russia with a feeling of inexpressible bitterness." On the other hand, the liberal writer V.P. Erashov, in the annotation to his "thought-novel" "Paradoxes of V.V. Shulgin," published in 2004, gave him such impartial assessments: "An ardent monarchist, he took act of abdication. A convinced anti-Semite - he defended Jews from pogroms and persecution. Terry Russophile - he hated and despised his people. The ideologist of the "White Movement" - debunked him. The enemy of the Bolsheviks did not raise weapons against them. The enemy of the Soviet regime served it, being broken by it, ”and Shulgin's memories were described as“ fiction ”,“ fantasy ”,“ lie ”or even“ delirium ”. At the same time, the author did not provide evidence for his statements, and his book about Shulgin contained many factual inaccuracies. However, similar assessments of Shulgin's actions were given back in the 1920s by the Soviet publicist I.M. Vasilevsky. In 1993, Mikhail Buyanov's book "The Beilis Case" was published, several pages of which are dedicated to Shulgin. Buyanov believed that he “... was one of the most disgusting Russian public and political figures. He was a large landowner, a Black Hundred man, one of the most conservative figures in the state, a chauvinist, anti-Semitic, theorist of pogroms. " Shulgin's views and personality evoked unanimous criticism in post-Soviet Ukraine. Some Ukrainian historians called Shulgin nothing more than a “Ukrainian-Ukrainophobe”, “Ukrainophobe”, “Ukrainophobe-monarchist, one of the leaders of militant Russian nationalism,” an enemy of Ukrainian statehood, and the like. Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko called Vasily Shulgin a chauvinist, and Ukrainian publicist Ivan Dziuba called “a classic of Ukrainophobia and anti-Semitism”.
A family
From a letter from V. V. Shulgin dated January 6 (19), 1919 to V. A. Stepanov ... Since we parted with you, I also lost my son. Consolation for me is that he died the death of an honest, pure boy, whose word does not differ from deed. There were 25 youths of them on the Svyatoshinskoe highway. Their boss left for the city and did not return, instructing them to defend the highway. On the morning of December 1/14, Kiev was handed over. The neighboring parts began to move away. A comrade from a neighboring squad approached Vasilko and said: "We are leaving, you are leaving too." He replied: “We cannot leave, we have not received an order. Come to my mother ... ”These were the last words from him. They stayed ... The peasants saw how, dragging a machine gun into a tree, they twisted it to the last round. Then they fired back from rifles. Nobody left. Each and every one died following orders. Sometime, perhaps, Russia will remember these poor children who died while adults betrayed. His mother dug up his body from a common pit-grave. The face was calm and beautiful, the bullet hit right in the heart, and death must have been quick. Almost the day before, after three weeks in positions, he came home for one day. They wanted to keep him for one more day. He replied: "There can be no deserters in such a family." And who took his body out of the pile of others, who, risking their lives (they were almost shot), dug it out of the common pit? Four Volyn peasants from our village, who knew him from childhood, and in fact loved the "landowner". Here is fate. ...
Mother Maria Konstantinovna Shulgina-Popova (? -1883) died of consumption in France before she was 40 years old. The body was transported to Kiev and buried at the Baikovo cemetery next to the first husband and other relatives. Pavel's sister Vitalievna Mechlevskaya (née Shulgina, 1865-?) Emigrated after the revolution, lived in Belgrade.
The first wife Ekaterina Grigorievna Gradovskaya (1869-?) - publicist, wrote for "Kievlyanin", took an active part in the publication of the newspaper, was its manager. After the divorce from Shulgin, which occurred in 1923, her fate was tragic - she committed suicide. Sons Vasilid (Vasilyok) (senior), Veniamin (Lyalya) and Dmitry (junior): 19-year-old Vasilid volunteered for the "Order squad", which consisted mainly of student youth, and died, like all 25 young men from this squad, in a battle with supporters of the Directory on December 1 (14), 1918 during the defense of Kiev, when they forgot to inform them that the hetman had surrendered and they could leave the position (this episode formed the basis of the battle scene at the "Polytechnic arrow" in the novel by M.A. Bulgakov's "White Guard").
Veniamin in 1920 - cadet of the Fleet, served in the machine-gun command of the 3rd Markov regiment and went missing (he was wounded and captured by the Reds) during the Crimean evacuation. Shulgin made two attempts to find traces of his son, secretly visiting the USSR, but both times to no avail. According to some reports, Benjamin died in an insane asylum either in Poltava or in Vinnitsa in the early 1920s. The youngest son Dmitry in 1920, at the age of 15, entered the Naval Cadet Corps recreated in the Crimea, among which he left for Bizerte on board the Russian squadron. In the late 1960s, Dmitry, who lived in the United States after the war and was a member of the Washington branch of the North American department of the NTS, found his father. They entered into correspondence. Shulgin wanted to see his son and asked the Soviet authorities to visit him. After long ordeals, the answer came: "Inappropriate", after which the KGB generally interrupted the correspondence between the son and the father. Dmitry called himself Demyan, lived in the city of Bessemer (Alabama); he never accepted American citizenship, saying: "But someone has to remain Russian!"
During the Civil War, Shulgin met his second love, tragic. "Darusya" (Daria Vasilievna Danilevskaya, real name - Lyubov Antonovna Popova) died of a fleeting, eleven days old, Spanish woman on November 11 (24), 1918, in Yassy, when she accompanied Shulgin to the Yass meeting as a secretary. On the way, both of them fell ill. Shulgin recovered, Darusia died. Shulgin was very upset about the loss and even thought about suicide - “... but something held me back. Perhaps the thought that after death a suicide will not get to the place where the soul of a woman who died as a saint was. " Never dictating about her, he said: "You need to write a book about her or not write anything." The last wife of Shulgin, Maria Dmitrievna Sidelnikova, daughter of General D. M. Sidelnikov, was half the age of Vasily Vitalievich. Pioneer. He met her at the end of the existence of the White Crimea, when she, a radio operator, was arrested by counterintelligence through a misunderstanding. She was threatened with execution. Shulgin saved her and forgot about this incident. She found him in Constantinople. They got married in 1924. V.V.Shulgin had relatives with opposite political views. So, his cousin Yakov Nikolaevich Shulgin sympathized with social democracy, because of which the family of V. V. Shulgin did not communicate with him, and supported the Ukrainian movement. At the end of his life, he gave all his modest fortune to the publication of literature in the Ukrainian language. All three of his sons actively participated in the Ukrainian movement, and the eldest, Alexander, became the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the UPR. Yakov Nikolaevich's own sister Vera Nikolaevna Shulgina married a Ukrainian teacher and public figure VP Naumenko, and after that, like her brother, she took “Ukrainian positions”.
After death
According to the conclusion of the General Prosecutor's Office of the Russian Federation of November 12, 2001, Shulgin was fully rehabilitated. In 2008, on the house on Feigin Street in Vladimir, where he spent the last years of his life, a memorial plaque was installed with the text: “In this house from 1960 to 1976. there lived an outstanding public and political figure Vasily Vitalievich Shulgin. "
In literature and art
In the 1965 novel "The Dead Swell" by the writer L. V. Nikulin, Shulgin is shown as one of the participants in the KGB operation "Trust". In 1967, the novel was filmed by Sergei Kolosov under the title "Operation Trust"; the role of Shulgin was played by Rodion Alexandrov. In the film directed by F. M. Ermler "Before the Court of History", released in 1965 and dedicated to the events of the February Revolution, Shulgin played himself. Possessing the skills of an outstanding Duma orator, Shulgin, by means of acting, tried to convey to the descendants the emotionality of Duma speeches, the speech manner and appearance of Emperor Nicholas II and others, his own perception of historical events, which he had to witness.
Major works
V.V.Shulgin is the author of numerous journalistic and analytical newspaper articles, a number of novels, and also memoirs. A bibliography of Shulgin's main works, obviously incomplete, in alphabetical order of titles: Admiral Makarov: Prologue. - Kiev: Type. t-va I.N.Kushnerev and K °, 1908 .-- 64 p. Anshluss and we! - Belgrade: Edition of N.Z. Rybinsky, 1938 .-- 16 p. Baylisiada // Memory: historical collection. - Paris, 1981. - V. 4. - S. 7-54. White thoughts (On New Year's Eve) // Russian Thought. - 1921, Book. I-II. - S. 37-43. The Return of Odysseus: The Second Open Letter to Russian Emigrants // Izvestia: newspaper. - 1961, 7 Sept. - P. 4. Elective zemstvo in the Southwest Territory. - Kiev: Type. t-va I.N.Kushnerev and K °, 1909 .-- 64 p. Years. Days. 1920 / Preface V. Vladimirov, S. Piontkovsky. - M .: News, 1990 .-- 832 p. - (Voices of History). - ISBN 5-7020-0073-0 Years. Memoirs of a member of the State Duma. - M .: APN, 1979. "Let the descendants know": Unpublished preface to the book "Years" // Domostroy. - 1993, 12 Jan. - S. 8-9. Denikin and Wrangel // Preface. H. H. Fox. Moscow builder. - 1990, February 20-27. - No. 7. - S. 13-14. Days: Notes. - Belgrade: Publishing house of M. A. Suvorin, 1925 .-- 310 p. Recent days: [Stories]. - Kharkov: Type. “Myrn. labor ", 1910. - 2 + 269 p. Unpublished journalism (1960s) // Three capitals. - M., 1991 .-- S. 377-397. New about the "Trust" // Preface. G. Struve. New magazine. - 1976. - No. 125. One of many. - Kiev: Type. t-va IN Kushnerev and Co., 1913. - S. 10. Lenin's experience // Preface. M. A. Ayvazyan; after V.V. Kozhinova. Our contemporary: the magazine. - 1997. - № 11. Open letter to Petliura // Kuban: magazine. - 1991. - No. 9. - S. 47-48. Writer: Dedicated to V. G. Korolenko. - SPb .: Otech. type, 1907 .-- 16 p. Letters to Russian emigrants. - M .: Sotsekgiz, 1961 .-- 95 p. Pogrom. - Kiev: Type. t-va I.N.Kushnerev and K °, 1908 .-- 96 p. Last Eyewitness: Memoirs. Essays. Dreams. - M .: OLMA-PRESS, 2002 .-- 588 p. - (Eras and destinies). - ISBN 5-94850-028-4 The Adventures of Prince Voronetsky: [Roman]. - [Kiev]: Type. t-va I.N. Kushnerev and K °, 1914 .-- 335 p. Against the violent ukrainization of southern Russia // Kievlyanin: newspaper. - 1917, July 18. Reflections. Two old notebooks // Unknown Russia. XX century: Archives, letters, memoirs. Book. 1. - M., 1992 .-- S. 306-348. Story about G.I. Gurzhiev // Preface. H. H. Fox. Moscow builder. - 1990, 20-27 nov. - P. 12. Sapper revolt. - Kharkov: Type. zhurn. “Myrn. labor ", 1908. - 44 p. Witness: Letters to Russian emigrants // In the world of books: magazine. - 1989. - No. 4. - S. 78-85. Stolypin and the Jews // Stolypin's Truth: collection, 1st issue / Prepared. to ed. Saratov Cultural Center. P. A. Stolypin; comp. G. Sidorovnin. - Saratov: Compatriot, 1999. - ISBN 5-88830-008-X Three capitals. Memories. - Berlin, 1925 .-- 462 p. 1920: essays. - Sofia: Russian-Bulgarian Book Publishing House, 1921 .-- 278 p. 1917-1919 // Persons: Biographical Almanac / Preface. and publ. R. G. Krasyukova; comment. B.I.Kolonitsky. - M .; SPb., 1994. - T. 5. - S. 121-328. Ukraine // Kievlyanin: newspaper. - 1912, January 4. Ukrainian studies // Kievlyanin: newspaper. - 1917, June 15. Ukrainian people. - Rostov-on-Don, 1919 .-- 24 p. Ukrainians and we // Free speech of Carpathian Rus. - 1986. - No. 9-10. French intervention in the south of Russia in 1918-1919 (Fragmentary memories) // Publ. and foreword. H. H. Fox. Domostroy. - 1992, 4 Feb. - P. 12. The fourth capital (From the newspaper "Renaissance") // Word: newspaper. - Riga, 1927. - No. 526. "What we don't like about them ...": On anti-Semitism in Russia. - Paris: Russia Minor, 1929 .-- 330 p. “I am obliged to do this” (Open letter to Russian emigrants) // Izvestia: newspaper. - 1960. - V. 298. in English V. V. Shulgin. The years: Memoirs of a member of the Russian duma, 1906-1917 / Transl. by Tanya Davis; Introd. by Jonathan E. Sanders. - New York: Hippocrene books, 1984. - P. XVII + 302. - ISBN 0-88254-855-7 [edit] Not published during his lifetime 1921 // Preface. E. A. Osminina. Continent: magazine. - 2002. - No. 114 .; continued - 2003, No. 117, end - 2003, No. 118. Essays by V. V. Shulgin, first published in 2002-2003.
Links:
1. Shulgin Dmitry Vasilievich
2. Shulgin Veniamin Vasilievich
3. Mechlevskaya Pavel Vitalievna (ur. Shulgin, 1865-?)
4. Danilevskaya Daria Vasilievna (real name - Lyubov Antonovna Popova)
5. Sidelnikova Maria Dmitrievna
6. Shulgina-Popova Maria Konstantinovna (? -1883)
7. Shulgin Vasily (Vasilid) Vasilievich
8.
Russian politician, publicist Vasily Vitalyevich Shulgin was born on January 13 (January 1, old style) 1878 in Kiev in the family of the historian Vitaly Shulgin. His father died in the year his son was born, the boy was raised by his stepfather, economist Dmitry Pikhno, editor of the monarchist newspaper "Kievlyanin" (replaced Vitaly Shulgin in this position), later - a member of the State Council.
In 1900, Vasily Shulgin graduated from the law faculty of Kiev University, for another year he studied at the Kiev Polytechnic Institute.
Was elected zemstvo vowel, honorary magistrate, became the leading journalist of "Kievlyanin".
Deputy of the II, III and IV State Duma from the Volyn province. First elected in 1907. Initially, he was a member of the right-wing faction. Participated in the activities of monarchist organizations: was a full member of the Russian Assembly (1911-1913) and was a member of its council; took part in the activities of the Main Chamber of the Russian People's Union. Michael the Archangel, was a member of the commission for the compilation of the "Book of Russian sorrow" and "Chronicle of the pogroms of the troubled years 1905-1907".
After the outbreak of World War I, Shulgin volunteered for the front. In the rank of warrant officer of the 166th Rivne Infantry Regiment of the Southwestern Front, he took part in battles. He was wounded, after being wounded he headed the Zemstvo forward bandaging and feeding detachment.
In August 1915, Shulgin left the Nationalist faction in the State Duma and formed the Progressive Nationalist Group. At the same time, he became a member of the leadership of the Progressive Bloc, which he saw as an alliance of the "conservative and liberal part of society," drawing closer to former political opponents.
In March (February old style) 1917, Shulgin was elected to the Provisional Committee of the State Duma. On March 15 (March 2, old style), he, together with Alexander Guchkov, was sent to Pskov for negotiations with the emperor and was present at the signing of the manifesto of abdication in favor of Grand Duke Mikhail Alexandrovich, which he later wrote in detail about in his book "Days". The next day - March 16 (March 3 according to the old style), he was present at the refusal of Mikhail Alexandrovich from the throne and participated in the drafting and editing of the act of abdication.
According to the conclusion of the General Prosecutor's Office of the Russian Federation of November 12, 2001, he was rehabilitated.
In 2008, a memorial plaque was erected in Vladimir at house number 1 on Feigin Street, where Shulgin lived from 1960 to 1976.
The material was prepared on the basis of information from open sources
The amazing fate of Vasily Shulgin, a nobleman, nationalist, deputy of the Tsar's State Duma, was filled with historical paradoxes. Who was this man, a monarchist who accepted the resignation of Nicholas II, one of the founders of the White movement, who at the end of his life came to terms with the Soviet regime?
Most of Vasily Shulgin's life was associated with Ukraine. Here, in Kiev, on January 1, 1878, he was born, here he studied at the gymnasium. His father, a renowned historian and teacher, died when his son was not yet a year old. Soon the mother married the famous scientist-economist, editor of the newspaper "Kievlyanin" Dmitry Pikhno (Vasily's father, Vitaly Shulgin, was also the editor of this newspaper).
A nobleman with an impeccable past
The traditions of hereditary nobles, large landowners laid in Vasily, in addition to ardent love for Russia, a passion for free thought, independent behavior and a certain inconsistency dictated by excessive emotionality to the detriment of logic and sobriety of thinking. All this led to the fact that already at the university, Vasily, despite the craze for imaginary revolutionism, not only rejected these ideals, but also became an ardent monarchist, nationalist and even anti-Semite.
Shulgin studied law at Kiev University. His stepfather got him a job in his newspaper, where Vasily quickly declared himself as a talented publicist and writer. True, when the authorities "hyped" the Beilis case, giving it an anti-Semitic connotation, Shulgin criticized him, for which he had to serve a three-month prison sentence. So already in his youth, Vasily Vitalievich proved that the political coloring of what was happening was not so important to him as the truth and family honor.
After graduating from university, he served in the army for a short time, and in 1902, after being transferred to the reserve, he moved to the Volyn province, got a family and took up agriculture. In 1905, during the Russo-Japanese War, he served as a junior officer in a combat engineer battalion, then again engaged in agricultural activities, combining it with journalism.
But in 1907 his life changed dramatically - Vasily Shulgin was elected a member of the II State Duma from the Volyn province. The provincial landowner left for Petersburg, where the main events of his stormy life took place.
My thought, my thought ...
From his very first speeches in the Duma, Shulgin showed himself to be a skillful politician and an excellent orator. He was elected to the II, III and IV State Dumas, where he was one of the leaders of the "right". Shulgin always spoke softly and politely, always remained calm, for which he was called the "spectacled snake." “I was in a fight once. Fearfully? - he recalled. - No ... It's scary to speak in the State Duma ... Why?
I don't know ... maybe because the whole of Russia is listening. "
In the II and III Dumas, he actively supported the government of Pyotr Stolypin, both in reforms and in the course for the suppression of uprisings and strikes. Several times he was received by Nicholas II, who at that time did not evoke anything but enthusiastic respect.
But everything changed with the outbreak of the First World War, when Vasily volunteered for the front. For the first time in his life, a Duma deputy and a wealthy landowner saw the underside of reality: blood, chaos, the disintegration of the army, its complete inability to fight.
Already on November 3, 1916, in his speech, he expressed doubts that the government was capable of bringing Russia to victory, and called on "to fight this power until it leaves." In the next speech, he agreed to the point that he called the tsar the enemy of everything "that, like air, the country needs."
The passionate and consistent rejection of the personality of Nicholas II was one of the reasons that on March 2, 1917, Shulgin, along with Alexander Guchkov, the leader of the Octobrists, was sent to Pskov to negotiate with Nicholas II on abdication. They coped with this historic mission excellently. An emergency train with 7 passengers - Shulgin, Guchkov and 5 security soldiers - arrived at the Dno station, where Nicholas II signed a manifesto abdicating the throne. Among the many details in the memory of Shulgin, one, seemingly quite unimportant, was imprinted. When it was all over and Guchkov and Shulgin, tired, in their crumpled jackets as they arrived, left the carriage of the former tsar, someone from Nikolai's retinue approached Shulgin. Saying goodbye, he quietly said: “That's what, Shulgin, what will be there someday, who knows. But we will not forget this "jacket" ... "
And in fact, this episode became almost defining the entire long and, of course, tragic fate of Shulgin.
After all
After Nikolai's abdication, Shulgin did not enter the Provisional Government, although he actively supported it. In April, he made a prophetic speech, in which there were the following words: "We cannot renounce this revolution, we got in touch with it, we became united and bear moral responsibility for it."
True, he increasingly came to the conviction that the revolution was going the wrong way. Seeing the inability of the Provisional Government to restore order in the country, in early July 1917 he moved to Kiev, where he headed the Russian National Union.
After the October Revolution, Vasily Shulgin was ready to fight the Bolsheviks, so in November 1917 he went to Novocherkassk. Together with Denikin and Wrangel, he created an army that was supposed to return what he had actively destroyed throughout his previous life. The former monarchist became one of the founders of the White Volunteer Army. But even here he was in for deep disappointment: the idea of the White movement was gradually waning, the participants, mired in ideological disputes, lost to the Reds in all respects. Seeing the disintegration of the White movement, Vasily Vitalievich wrote: "The white work began almost with the saints, and it was almost finished by the robbers."
During the collapse of the empire, Shulgin lost everything: his savings, two children, his wife, and soon his homeland - in 1920, after the final defeat of Wrangel, he went into exile.
There he actively worked, wrote articles, memoirs, continuing to fight the Soviet regime with his pen. In 1925-1926 he was offered to secretly visit the USSR on a false passport to establish contacts with the underground anti-Soviet organization "Trust". Shulgin went, hoping to find his missing son, and at the same time to see with his own eyes what was happening in his former homeland. When he returned, he wrote a book in which he predicted the imminent revival of Russia. And then a scandal broke out: it turned out that the operation "Trust" was a provocation of the Soviet special services and took place under the control of the OGPU. Confidence in Shulgin among the emigrants was undermined, he moved to Yugoslavia and finally stopped political activity.
But politics caught up with him here: in December 1944, he was detained and taken through Hungary to Moscow. As it turned out, the "father of nations" had not forgotten anything: on July 12, 1947, Shulgin was sentenced to 25 years in prison for "anti-Soviet activities."
He never left the USSR again, despite the fact that after Stalin's death he was released and even given an apartment in Vladimir. However, Vasily Vitalievich was not very eager to go abroad. He was already too old, and with age his attitude towards socialism softened somewhat.
In socialism itself, he saw the further development of the features inherent in Russian society - communal organization, love for authoritarian power. A serious problem, in his opinion, was the very low standard of living in the USSR.
Shulgin was a guest at the 22nd Congress of the CPSU and heard how the Program of Building Communism was being adopted, when Khrushchev uttered the historic phrase: "The current generation of Soviet people will live under communism!"
Surprisingly, back in the 1960s, Shulgin wrote in one of his books: “The position of Soviet power will be difficult if, at the moment of some weakening of the center, all nationalities that entered the union of the Russian Empire, and then inherited by the USSR, are taken up a whirlwind of belated nationalism ... Colonizers, get out! Get out of the Crimea! Get out! Get out of the Caucasus! Get out! ! Tartary! Siberia! Get out, colonialists, from all fourteen republics. We will leave you only the fifteenth republic, the Russian one, and then within the limits of Muscovy, from which you have captured half the world by raids! "
But then no one paid attention to these words - it seemed that this was nothing more than the delirium of an elderly monarchist.
So Vasily Shulgin, who died on February 15, 1976, left unheard by either Tsarist Russia or the Soviet Union ...