As a child, I must have been an anti-Semite. And all because of him. Here he is.
He always annoyed me. I simply adored Paustovsky's magnificent cycle of stories about a thief cat, a rubber boat, etc. And only he spoiled everything.
For a long time I could not understand - why did Paustovsky hang out with this Fraerman? Some kind of caricature Jew, and his name is stupid - Reuben. No, of course, I knew that he was the author of the book "Wild Dog Dingo, or The Tale of First Love", but this only aggravated the situation. No, I haven't read the book, and I don't intend to. What self-respecting boy would read a book with such a snotty title if Captain Blood's Odyssey hadn't been read for the fifth time?
And Paustovsky ... Paustovsky was cool. A really cool writer, for some reason I understood this as a child.
And when I grew up and learned about three nominations for the Nobel Prize, international fame and Marlene Dietrich, who publicly knelt before her favorite writer, I began to respect him even more.
And how much I respected him when, having grown wiser, I re-read his books ... Paustovsky not only saw a lot and understood a lot in this world - he was wise. And this is a very rare quality. Even among writers.
Especially among writers.
Around the same time, I realized why he hung out with Fraerman.
And after a recent story about the demons of the Civil War, I decided to tell you.
***
I was always surprised - why poignant films were made about the Great Patriotic War, in which people cried, and the Civil War was some kind of entertainment attraction. For the most part, all sorts of light-entertaining "easterns" like "The White Sun of the Desert" or "The Elusive Avengers" were filmed about her.
And only much later did I realize that this was what is called “substitution” in psychology. Behind this entertainment they hid us from the truth about what the Civil War really was.
Believe me, there are times when the truth is not a fact that you need to know.
In history, as in mathematics, there are axioms. One of them says: in Russia there is nothing worse than the Troubles.
There were no wars, no epidemics, and there were no nearby. Any person immersed in documents will recoil in horror and repeat after the shocked classic who decided to study Pugach's confusion: "God forbid to see a Russian rebellion ...".
The civil war was not just terrible - it was something beyond.
I never get tired of repeating - it was hell that invaded the earth, a breakthrough of Inferno, an invasion of demons that captured the bodies and souls of recently peaceful inhabitants.
Most of all, it was like a mental epidemic - the country went berserk and fell into a riot. For a couple of years there was no power at all, the country was owned by small and large groups of crazed armed people who rushed aimlessly, devouring each other and flooding the soil with blood.
The demons spared no one, they infected the Reds, the Whites, the poor, the rich, criminals, civilians, Russians, and foreigners. Even Czechs, who in ordinary life are peaceful hobbits. They were already being transported by echelons home, but they also became infected, and blood flowed from Penza to Omsk.
I will tell only about one episode of that war, later called by diplomats the “Nikolaev Incident”. I will not retell it in detail, I will only give the main outline of events.
There was such, as they would say today, a field commander of a “red” orientation named Yakov Tryapitsyn. Uncommon, I must say, was a man. Former warrant officer, who became an officer from the rank and file in the First World War, while still a soldier he received two St. George's crosses. An anarchist, on Civil fought against those same White Czechs in Samara, then went to Siberia and reached the Far East.
Once he quarreled with the command, and, dissatisfied with the decision to suspend hostilities until the arrival of the Red Army, he left with people loyal to him, of whom there were only 19. Despite this, he announced that he was going to restore Soviet power on the Amur and went on a campaign - already with 35 people.
In the course of the raid, the detachment grew, they began to occupy the villages. Then the head of the garrison of Nikolaevsk-on-Amur, the actual capital of those places, the white colonel Medvedev sent a detachment led by Colonel Vitz to meet Tryapitsyn. The Whites decided to eliminate the Reds before they gained strength.
Having met with the punishers, Tryapitsyn, declaring that he wanted to avoid bloodshed, personally appeared at the location of the Whites for negotiations. The strength of this man's charisma was so great that soon after that a riot broke out in Vitz's detachment, the colonel with the few remaining loyal fighters went to De-Kastri Bay, and most of the recent white soldiers joined Tryapitsyn's detachment.
Since there were almost no armed forces left in Nikolaevsk - only about 300 fighters, the whites in Nikolaevsk invited the Japanese to defend the city. Those, of course, were only in favor, and soon a Japanese garrison was stationed in the city - 350 people under the command of Major Ishikawa. In addition, approximately 450 Japanese civilians lived in the city. As in all Far Eastern cities, there were many Chinese and Koreans, in addition, a detachment of Chinese gunboats wintered in Nikolaevsk, which did not have time to go to the Chinese coast of the Amur before freezing, led by Commodore Chen Shin.
Until spring and the ice drift, they were all locked up in the city, from which there was nowhere to leave.
The entry of Japanese troops into Nikolaevsk-on-Amur in 1918. Separately, Major Ishikawa was taken out in a horse carriage.
However, soon, having made an unprecedented winter transition, the 2-strong “partisan army” of Tryapitsyn approaches the city, in the columns of which Reuben Fraerman, an infected geek, a recent student of the Kharkov Technological Institute, was sent for industrial practice to the railway in the Far East . Here he was caught by the Civil War, in which he took the side of the Reds and was now one of Tryapitsyn's agitators.
The city was under siege.
And a long and inhumanly terrible bloody dance of the demons of the Civil War began.
It all started small - with two people, the red parliamentarians Orlov-Ovcharenko and Shchetnikov, who were killed by the whites.
Then the Reds propagandized the garrison of the Chnyrrakh fortress, which controlled the approaches to Nikolaevsk-on-Amur, and occupied the fortress, having received artillery.
Under the threat of shelling the city, the Japanese declare their neutrality.
The Reds enter the city and occupy it with virtually no resistance, capturing, among other things, the entire archive of white counterintelligence.
The mutilated corpses of Ovcharenko and Shchetnikov are exhibited in coffins in the building of the garrison assembly of the Chnyrrakh fortress. The partisans demand revenge, and according to the lists of counterintelligence, arrests and executions of whites begin.
The Japanese keep neutrality and actively communicate with the new owners of the city. Soon the condition of their being in their quarter is forgotten, fraternization begins, and armed Japanese soldiers, wearing red and black (anarchist) bows, wander around the city, and their commander is even allowed to keep in touch by radio with the Japanese headquarters in Khabarovsk.
But the idyll of fraternization quickly ended. On the night of March 11 to March 12, the Japanese shelled Tryapitsyin's headquarters building with machine guns and incendiary rockets, hoping to immediately decapitate the Red troops. The building was wooden, it starts a fire. The chief of staff, T. I. Naumov-Medved, died, the secretary of the headquarters, Pokrovsky-Chernykh, cut off from the exit by the flames, shot himself, Tryapitsyn himself, with his legs shot through, was taken out on a bloody sheet and, under Japanese fire, was transferred to a nearby stone building, where they organized defense.
Shooting and fires are going on all over the city, as it quickly became clear that not only the soldiers of the Japanese garrison, but also all Japanese men capable of holding weapons, took part in the armed uprising.
Fights go to the death, the prisoners are finished off by both.
Tryapitsyn's personal bodyguard, a former Sakhalin convict named Lapta, with a detachment makes his way to the prison and cuts out all the prisoners.
In order not to attract the attention of the Japanese by shooting, everyone is “finished off” with edged weapons. Since blood intoxicates no worse than vodka, the distraught people killed not only the arrested whites, but also their own partisans who were sitting in the guardhouse.
The fighting in the city goes on for several days, the outcome of the battle is decided by the commander of the partisan detachment of red miners Budrin, who came with his detachment from the nearest large settlement - the village of Kirby, which is 300 km away. from Nikolaevsk.
In the end, the Japanese were massacred completely, including the consul, his wife and daughter, and the geishas from the local brothels. Only 12 Japanese women who were married to the Chinese escaped - they, along with the city Chinese, took refuge on gunboats.
Tryapitsyn's mistress Nina Lebedeva, a Maximalist Social Revolutionary exiled to the Far East as a schoolgirl, at the age of 15, was appointed the new chief of staff of the partisan formation for participating in the assassination attempt on the Penza governor.
Wounded Y. Tryapitsyn with his common-law wife N. Lebedeva.
After the defeat of the Japanese, the Nikolaev Commune is declared in the city, money is canceled and a real hunt for the bourgeois begins.
Once launched, this flywheel is almost impossible to stop.
I will spare you the bloody details of what is happening in Nikolaevsk further, I will only say that as a result of the so-called. "Nikolaev incident" was the death of several thousand people.
This is all together, different: reds, whites, Russians, Japanese, intellectuals, Honghuzi, telegraph operators, convicts and various other thousands of people.
And the complete destruction of the city - after the evacuation of the population and the departure of the Tryapitsyn detachment, nothing remained of the old Nikolaevsk.
Nothing.
As it was later calculated, out of 1165 residential buildings of various types, 21 buildings (stone and semi-stone) were blown up, 1109 wooden ones were burned, thus 1130 residential buildings were destroyed in a circle, which is almost 97% of the entire housing stock of Nikolaevsk.
Before leaving, Tryapitsyn, distraught with blood, sent a radiogram:
Comrades! We are talking to you for the last time. We leave the city and the fortress, blow up the radio station and go into the taiga. The entire population of the city and the region was evacuated. Villages along the entire coast of the sea and in the lower reaches of the Amur were burned. The city and the fortress were destroyed to the ground, large buildings were blown up. Everything that could not be evacuated and that could be used by the Japanese was destroyed and burned by us. In the place of the city and the fortress, only smoking ruins remained, and our enemy, having come here, will find only heaps of ashes. We are leaving…
You ask - what about Fraerman? There is no evidence of his participation in atrocities, rather the opposite.
A mad playwright named Life decided that it was at this moment that the first love should happen to the former Kharkov student. Of course, unhappy.
Here is what Sergey Ptitsyn wrote in the memoirs of partisans:
“Rumors about the alleged terror penetrated the population, and people who did not receive passes (for evacuation - VN) rushed around the city in horror, looking for all sorts of means and opportunities to get out of the city. Some young, beautiful women from the bourgeoisie and the widows of the executed White Guards offered themselves as wives to the partisans to help them get out of the city, entered into relations with more or less responsible workers in order to use them for their salvation, threw themselves into the arms of Chinese officers from gunboats, to be saved with their help.
Fraerman, at risk to his own life, saved the priest's daughter Zinaida Chernykh, helped her to hide as his wife, and later, having appeared to her in a different situation, was not recognized as her husband.
There is no evidence of his participation in atrocities.
But he was there and saw it all. From start to finish.
***
Tryapitsyn, Lebedeva, Lapta and twenty other people who distinguished themselves in the destruction of Nikolaevsk were “finished off” by their own partisans, not far from the very village of Kirby, now the village named after Polina Osipenko.
The successful conspiracy was led by a former lieutenant, and now a member of the executive committee and head of the regional police Andreev.
They were shot by the verdict of a fleeting trial long before receiving any instructions from Khabarovsk, and even more so from Moscow.
Simply because after crossing a certain line, people must be killed - both according to human laws and according to God's laws, at least out of a sense of self-preservation.
Here it is, the executed leadership of the Nikolaev commune:
Fraerman did not participate in the massacre of the former commander - shortly before the evacuation, he was appointed commissar of a partisan detachment formed to establish Soviet power among the Tungus.
"With this partisan detachment, - the writer himself recalled in his memoirs, - I walked thousands of kilometers through the impenetrable taiga on deer ... ". The campaign took four months and ended in Yakutsk, where the detachment was disbanded, and the former commissar began working in the Lensky Kommunar newspaper.
***
They lived in the forests of Meshchera together - he and Paustovsky.
He also saw a lot of things in Civil War - both in occupied Kyiv, and in the independent army of Hetman Skoropadsky, and in the red regiment, recruited from the former Makhnovists.
More precisely, the three of us, because a very close friend, Arkady Gaidar, constantly came to them. This was even talked about in Soviet filmstrips.
The same Gaidar who once wrote in his diary: “I dreamed of people killed by me in childhood”.
There, in the unpolluted forests and lakes of Meshchera, they cleansed themselves.
They melted black demonic energy into chased lines of rare purity and tenderness.
Gaidar wrote The Blue Cup there, the most crystal-clear work of Soviet children's literature.
Fraerman was silent for a long time, but then he broke through, and in a week he wrote The Wild Dog Dingo, or The Tale of First Love.
The story, which takes place in Soviet times, but the city on the Amur, described in detail in the book, is very recognizable.
This is the same pre-revolutionary Nikolaevsk-on-Amur that did not exist for a long time.
The city they wiped out.
Paustovsky then wrote: “The expression “good talent” has a direct bearing on Fraerman. This is a kind and pure talent. Therefore, Fraerman managed with special care to touch such aspects of life as the first youthful love. Fraerman's book "Wild Dog Dingo, or The Tale of First Love" is a full of light, transparent poem about the love between a girl and a boy..
They generally lived well there. Something right, kind and fun:
Gaidar always came with new playful poems. He once wrote a long poem about all the juvenile writers and editors of the Children's Publishing House. This poem was lost, forgotten, but I remember the cheerful lines dedicated to Fraerman:
In the skies above the whole universe
We torment with eternal pity,
Looks unshaven, inspired,
Forgiving Reuben...
They allowed themselves to release their crushed demons only once.
In 1941.
You probably know about Gaidar, Paustovsky wrote to Fraerman from the front: “I spent a month and a half on the Southern Front, almost all the time, except for four days, on the line of fire ...”.
Paustovsky on the Southern Front.
And Fraerman ... Fraerman, who was already in his sixties, left in the summer of 41 to join the Moscow militia as an ordinary soldier. He did not hide from the front line, and therefore he was seriously wounded in 1942, after which he was commissioned.
The former Kharkov student and partisan agitator was destined for a long life - he lived for 80 years.
And every day, like a Chekhov slave, he squeezed out this black demon of the Civil War.
Unlike his friends Paustovsky and Gaidar, he was not a great writer. But, according to the recollections of many, Reuben Fraerman was one of the brightest and kindest people they met in their lives.
And after that, the lines of Ruvim Isaevich sound completely different:
“To live your life with dignity on earth is also a great art, perhaps even more complex than any other skill ...”.
PS And you still read "Cat the Thief", if not already.
Source: habr.com