Solovyov and Larionov

3

As we know, Crimea was transferred from Russia to Ukraine in 1954, under an order from Nikita Khrushchev. It should be noted that this circumstance drew General Larionov’s attention in its day. The unexpected addition to Ukraine made no less of an impression on him than the launch of the trolleybus line. And yet the aged general was not at all inclined to dramatize this circumstance.

‘Russians, do not regret Crimea,’ he announced, sitting on the jetty one May day in 1955.

Public statements were a great rarity for the general and a crowd quickly gathered around him. Flashing his erudition, the general reminded the listeners that Crimea had belonged to the Greeks, Genovese, Tatars, Turks, etcetera, at various times. And though their dominion was fleeting in historical terms, they had all left their own cultural traces here. In touching on Russia’s traces, the general sketched out, in brief energetic strokes, an impressive panorama, from elegant parks and palaces to the lady with the lapdog. His speech concluded with military clarity: ‘As a person who has defended these places, I am telling you: it is impossible to hold your ground here. For anyone. That is characteristic of the peninsula.’

The general knew what he was talking about. He had needed to hold the line in Crimea twice in 1920, in January and November. The events of October and November ended up being the final collapse of the White Movement. He was unable to hold on to Crimea.

Even so, the first defense (which nobody considered possible at the time) in January ended up being successful. It was this defense that held off the Reds’ capture of the peninsula for nearly a year. Researchers assess the situation that took shape toward the beginning of 1920 more or less identically. The decline of the White Movement was becoming more obvious at this time.

‘After all, we’re not going to the fair, we’re coming back from the fair,’ is what General Larionov whispered in his horse’s ear one sunny January morning.

For everyone observing that scene, the general’s words took the form of a small cloud of steam. In the absence of witnesses, it remains a mystery how that phrase could have reached the public domain. There is no denying the multiple references in the historical literature to the trusting, nearly human relationship between the horse and General Larionov, who called the animal my friend and addressed lines specifically to the horse. And yet it would be ridiculous to imagine that the horse could respond to the general in kind, even more so that the horse was chatting right and left about what had been whispered in her ear.

The general, however, addressed the exact same words to a British envoy in November of that same year. The text arrived by telegraph because the general himself was securing his army’s evacuation from Crimea and heading up the last line of defense. Needless to say, in the telegram to the British envoy (it has been preserved) there is not a word about the phrase not being addressed to him alone. Be that as it may, in scholarship—as, for example, in Vitaly Romanchuk’s In Decline—the text in question is quoted with a reference to January. What is more, it is quoted fairly frequently in scholarship, yielding in popularity only to the well-known explanation of the reasons for the Whites’ defeat. This explanation, which the general formulated with disheartening directness, is in the introduction to the reminiscences that Dupont discovered. It reads, ‘A clod of dung, of medium size, began rolling through Russia. It grew with incredible speed due to the adherence of similar material, of which, alas, there turned out to be very much in Russia. We were crushed by that clod.’

And so the situation that had taken shape by January 1920 was anything but simple. The lethal clod depicted so elegantly by the general was rolling through Northern Taurida, which was the threshold to Crimea, and no one envisioned a force capable of impeding it. In fact, the supreme command of the White Army did not intend to defend Crimea. The Whites’ primary forces were retreating and there were battles in those two directions, the Caucasus and Odessa, from where a counterattack was subsequently planned, after respite and regrouping of forces. If events developed favorably, they intended to force the Reds from Crimea with the return of troops that were encircling the peninsula in two streams rushing north. But that was a matter for the future. In January 1920, Crimea was tacitly destined for surrender. The limited forces sent to defend it shattered everyone’s last doubts about that. Everyone’s but General Larionov’s.

As we know, Dupont’s article, ‘Leonidas and His Children’, presents a rigorous enumeration of troops at the general’s disposal during the defense of Crimea. So as not to force the reader to chase down this work, which is generally difficult to find, we will reiterate, in brief, the data cited in the article:

The troops enumerated had twenty-four light and eight horse-drawn weapons at their disposal. In the course of organizing the defense, General Larionov also succeeded in procuring six tanks (three heavy and three light) as well as eight armored trains. Despite all the armored trains turning out to be defective, they became a big source of moral support for the son of the railroad department’s director.

For anyone with even the slightest knowledge of military matters, the above enumeration leaves no doubt: the White Army had decided, at the highest level of command, to relinquish Crimea. Only 3,500 fighters were sent to protect the front, which stretched for 400 versts. The general was aware that it was impossible to defend Crimea in Northern Taurida. And so he did not even begin to do so.

Without a doubt, General Larionov was inspired by a brilliant idea from Spartan king Leonidas, who decided to fend off the Persians in a narrow gorge. As we know, Leonidas’s military contingent was extremely limited (a tenth of what General Larionov had at his disposal, not to mention the complete absence of armored trains), but that did not prevent him from fighting in the worthiest manner. This battle was analyzed in depth during tactical lessons at the Second Cadet Corps, where the future general studied back in the day. King Leonidas’s feat made an indelible impression on cadet Larionov.

As life would have it, the general took part in battles that unfolded on emphatically open terrain. These were flood plains, boundless rye fields, or steppes that were parched until they cracked. During World War One, Larionov happened to fight in the mountains for a time, but those mountains turned out to be the Carpathians, which by 1914 had become thoroughly weathered and were not at all suitable with respect to defense. General Larionov mentally thanked fate that it was not the Persians opposing him in these tactically unsuitable circumstances. Only in January 1920 did he sense that his hour had come. Like the renowned Spartan, the Russian general was visited by the abrupt realization that the only chance for a successful defense was to narrow the front. He decided against defending Northern Taurida and moved his troops toward Perekop.

The Perekop Isthmus was probably the most joyless place in Russia’s south. It was difficult to breathe there in the summer heat because of fumes from the dead waters of the Sivash, lagoons often referred to as the Putrid Sea. A wind would come up from time to time, rolling dried-out seaweed along salt-splotched soil but bringing no feeling of freshness. The wind became an utter disaster in the winter. It drove stinging drifting snow over an uninhabited icy expanse where there were not even any shrubs to stop it. The wind carried away all hope of warming up. It crept behind the lapels of army overcoats and froze fingers to gun barrels, extinguished campfires made from cart debris and strewed Perekop’s lunar landscape with ash. It is not surprising that territory of this sort made a most unfavorable impression on General Larionov. And so he decided not to defend it.

After familiarizing himself with the history of the defense of Northern Crimea, the military commander noticed that a common mistake of defenders each time was their absolute determination to stand firm on the Perekop rampart. Meanwhile, in light of the climatic conditions already described, simply being on the Perekop Isthmus sapped a huge amount of strength, resources, and morale because there is nothing more ruinous for an army than sitting in trenches in the bitter cold. The road to Crimea was opened after defenders were thrown from the Perekop ramparts. The resourceful general acted differently so as not to repeat his predecessors’ mistakes. He decided to grant his adversary this expanse drifted with snow and deprived of any form of habitation. They did not wait for the Reds on the Perekop Peninsula; only a small outpost was left there and its role boiled down to informing the main forces of an attack. They waited for the Reds at the exit from the isthmus.

The Red Army lived up to the general’s expectations. Their cavalry, reinforced by the infantry, was drawn onto the isthmus immediately after the White Army’s troops abandoned it. The Red Army soldiers began feeling anxious at sunset, after walking along the icy desert the entire day and not encountering an enemy with which to do serious battle. Advancing so late at night seemed dangerous to them. They thought they were choosing the lesser evil by deciding to spend the night on the frozen steppe.

Many researchers consider that as early as January 1920 the commander of Red troops in the Crimean zone was Dmitry Zhloba (1887–1938), the son of a peasant and a graduate of the Moscow Aviation School (1917). There is an opposing opinion, too, according to which, by January 1920, Dmitry Zhloba was still continuing his training because of his failure to complete his flight hours under the school’s program.

Everyone familiar with this aviator’s story, of course, also knows of the vexed relations that developed between him and the other students at the aviation school. On the whole, they were far younger than Zhloba and indulged themselves in mocking the peculiarities of his appearance (the nearly complete absence of a forehead plus the presence of two extra upper teeth) and kept him away from the flying machines however they could. Bullied by his younger comrades, the aviation school pupil only had the opportunity to fly at night, thus restricting his qualification. Night flights were not scored as flying time for Zhloba. As a result, it was recommended he fly the required number of hours again—now in the daytime—something he undertook with varying success until 1920. In the end, he was appointed commander of the First Cavalry Corps and ceased his dangerous experiments in aerial expanses.

Zhloba the cavalryman turned out to be more fortunate than Zhloba the aviator. He was able to exert his influence over the personnel of his corps, particularly the horses. The animals unquestioningly obeyed the peasant’s son’s booming voice, which was intolerable at close range, and rushed to attack at his first shout. As he charged to attack the enemy with his unsheathed saber, Dmitry Zhloba imagined that it was his former fellow pupils from the Moscow Aviation School before him. The frenzy he displayed in battle did not just make an impression on the adversary; after a certain point in time, it even began causing apprehension within the corps subordinate to him.

Nobody objected when Zhloba announced they would spend the night on Perekop. Even if another, more acceptable plan had existed, it is unlikely that anyone would have dared contradict the commander. There was no such plan, though, and there could not have been. Everything that happened with Zhloba’s troops after that hour was helping to realize General Larionov’s strategy. The Red forces spent the night under a chilly Perekop sky. And then another night. Their overwhelming numerical superiority went untapped. Without the opportunity to fully deploy their battle formations, they could not resolve to attack the Whites first. The longed-for battle seemed to have evaded Dmitry Zhloba.

After spending a third night on Perekop, half the corps’ personnel were sick and the aviation school alumnus realized he risked losing his troops without a battle. He decided to act. At dawn on the fourth day, the Reds moved toward the exit from the Perekop Isthmus and came under brutal fire to their flank, from the Yushun side. Their attack ended with a messy escape and the capture of prisoners. It should be noted that prisoners were the primary source of replenishment troops for the White Army. Those taken prisoner were placed on active duty again and began moving in the exact opposite direction. They fought with just the same inflexibility as before captivity. Such was this war.

Dmitry Zhloba left in order to return. After gathering his forces, he once again attempted to burst into Crimea but—just like the first time—did not succeed in moving further than Perekop. The White general had built lines of defense that seemed insurmountable. Larionov, however, knew that they, too, were vulnerable. According to the Russian battle captain, General Winter had rendered an invaluable natural service by freezing the Red attack but was now threatening to switch to the enemy side. The winter of 1920 was so harsh that something unexpected happened. The Sivash, which is as briny as a barrel of salted cucumbers, began to freeze. On the days when Dmitry Zhloba was stubbornly hitting at the isthmus’s stopped-up exit, General Larionov was sending men to the Sivash to monitor the formation of ice.

Initially, thin glass-like layers covered the gulf’s water in the mornings. The general grew anxious when it stopped thawing under the daytime sun. Only a few days later, the ice was so solid it could hold a lightly armed infantryman. The general began sending loaded carts to the Sivash to test the firmness of the ice at night, so as not to give away the object of his apprehensions. The general’s Thermopylae plan would crumble in an instant if the ice were to freeze a little more firmly, because the infantry and cavalry and all the Reds’ available heavy weaponry could cross over the Sivash’s ice. In fact, it appeared to have been frozen for several days but Dmitry Zhloba, distracted by yet another storm of the Perekop Isthmus, was paying no attention whatsoever.

The panic that began mounting in Crimea after the Reds’ occupation of the isthmus gradually subsided. Institutions unpacked the paperwork they had hastily tossed into plywood crates. Everything was prepared for evacuation in those days. Thousands of refugees from central Russia, who had broken free of the Bolsheviks and were deathly afraid of landing back there, were planning to evacuate with the army. ‘Deathly’ is what they said, and they were not far from the truth. Only a very few of those who were not able to join the evacuation to Constantinople survived.

It is interesting that the establishment of Soviet power in Crimea was the topic that Prof. Nikolsky assigned to Solovyov in his fourth year of study. Solovyov did not know then that he would study the general’s fate, but from then on, the topics he cultivated grew ever closer to what would become the main focus of his research in the future. Solovyov approached his work with all possible meticulousness and found several unpublished reminiscences in the archives, which would serve as the basis for a paper at the end of his fourth year.

It concerned primarily Sevastopol, which turned out to be a harbinger of the Communist spring. Solovyov described how notices were hung up in the city, inviting all formers to gather at the city’s circus for job placement. Despite his efforts, the researcher was unsuccessful in clarifying why the circus had been chosen. Whether that would become a portent of prevailing absurdity, whether the gathering place hinted at ancient tearing to shreds by wild animals, or whether the circus was simply the only hall the Bolsheviks knew… none of the formers sensed a ploy. These were noncombatant formers; those who had been in combat were already in Constantinople. Former accountants, secretaries, and governesses all arrived obediently at the square in front of the circus. When the square was filled, troops encircled it and strung up barbed wire. So many people had come that they could not even sit down. Several thousand formers stood in the square for two days. On the third day they were taken outside the city and shot.

And that was only the beginning. After collecting data for all Crimea’s cities, Solovyov reached the conclusion that around 120,000 people were put to death on the peninsula during the first months of Soviet power. This exceeded the data cited in Ratsimor’s Encyclopedia of the Civil War by 15,000. The data on the elderly, women, children, and injured who were killed by firing squad diverged seriously and needed to be increased.

The paper was written very capably, using abundant factual material attested to by 102 footnotes. Prof. Nikolsky saw the paper’s narrative style—which seemed excessively emotional to him—as a minus. He requested that Solovyov remove rhetorical questions as well as passages that expressed the researcher’s attitude toward the Reds’ actions. From the professor’s point of view, the figures were the most eloquent part of the paper. In the final reckoning, they needed no detailed commentary.

In his fifth year of study, Solovyov wrote his diploma thesis on ‘The Role of Latvian Riflemen in the October Coup and Latvia’s Loss of Independence in 1939’. In his account, the two events reflected in the title turned out to have both a cause-and-effect relationship as well as, even more so, a moral and ethical relationship. According to Solovyov, by fighting on the coup plotters’ side, the Latvian riflemen were supporting a regime that also subsequently devoured Latvia, its independence, and the riflemen themselves. This time, his paper was not accompanied by rhetorical questions. There was minimal commentary.

Despite the young historian’s paradoxical thinking (or perhaps, actually, thanks to it), Prof. Nikolsky published the paper in the journal Past and Present in 1996. Several months later, a brief but forceful review of Solovyov’s article, signed by ‘The Council of Veterans’, appeared in Der Kampf, a popular Riga publication. Its authors saw no connection between the specified events and, for their part, discussed the possibility of an alternative course of history in 1939. They saw Latvia’s hypothetical future in the rosiest of hues.

Prof. Nikolsky considered it essential to stand up for his student under the circumstances and so published his own ‘Response to the Riga Veterans’ in Past and Present. He began with a theoretical introduction that validated the importance of the moral factor in history. In the scholar’s opinion, moral inferiority deprived states of the energy they needed for a trouble-free existence. The professor showed how this ravaged them from within, transforming them into empty shells flattened by the very first wind. Within this context, he examined the fall of the great empires of the ancient world and the modern age.

True to his theory regarding the absence of all-encompassing scholarly truths, the professor also indicated that it is only possible to speak of tendencies, not of rules. By way of exception, he offered the example of the English and Americans, who conducted separate talks with the Bolsheviks behind General Larionov’s back during that same year, 1920, and did not suffer in the least as a result. In the Petersburg professor’s opinion, distance, and the fact that both Anglo-Saxon states were surrounded by water, turned out to be the decisive factors in the matter’s happy outcome. The geographical factor also allowed those states to bide their time entering World War Two, until the circumstances had been clarified to some extent. Water played a deciding role in these cases; Nikolsky met Solovyov halfway here.

In making his conclusions, however, the professor admitted that his view of things might be excessively gloomy and Latvia’s big future really had been taken away from it. From Prof. Nikolsky’s point of view, his skepticism could be explained by the fact that historians deal primarily with the deceased and so are, for the most part, pessimists. The Russian professor concluded his essay unexpectedly, saying history is the science of the dead and there is little room there for the living.

Needless to say, the aphoristic form of that statement was intended, first and foremost, to underscore the necessity of maintaining a certain distance from the material under study. Even so, Solovyov’s advisor’s remark made an indelible impression on Solovyov. He was in a rather dejected condition when he entered the graduate program at the Institute of Russian History. The marble in the Large Conference Room, where he took his entrance exams, reminded him of an anatomical theater. Solovyov was able to come to terms with the historical figures awaiting his study only because they were still alive during the period of their activity.

Graduate student Kalyuzhny’s departure definitively saved Solovyov from a crisis in his worldview. Solovyov inherited from the general’s melancholic admirer not only a scholarly topic, but also one single bibliographical card and a fundamental research question: why did the general remain alive? The card contained—but of course!—data on Dupont’s book. Solovyov read the book and found the topic interesting and little-studied. On top of all that, General Larionov was absolutely dead and was, thus, a lawful object for scholarly research. Even under the strictest of historical measures, it was already possible to work with him.

But the general was not simply dead. Unlike many historical figures, even when he was alive, he had considered death to be an unavoidable fact of life.

‘Look at them,’ he would say about those figures, ‘they’re acting as if they don’t know that death awaits them.’

The general knew death awaited him. He was preparing for it as he marched in the foothills of the Carpathians and checked posts on the Perekop Isthmus. And afterwards, whenever someone knocked on his door late at night, the thought flashed through his mind, every time, that it was death knocking. And, yes, of course he was expecting death when he was an old man sitting on the jetty in his folding chair. He was surprised that it hadn’t come sooner, though he never regretted that.

The general was once photographed in a coffin. He stopped by a funeral home, bringing a photographer with him, and requested permission to use a coffin for a short time. They could not refuse him. The general smoothed the fold lines on his creased uniform, lay down in the coffin, crossed his arms on his chest, and closed his eyes. A photographer took several shots amidst the undertakers’ uneasy silence. The most successful shot is almost as renowned as the famous photo on the jetty. It accompanies the majority of publications about the general. Few people know the shot was taken during this prominent person’s life. Without suspecting the level of their own astuteness, some researchers have noted the absence of signs of death in the shot. Moreover, employing a figurativeness traditional for these purposes, they expressed opinions to the effect that it looked as if the general was sleeping. In reality, the general was not sleeping. Looking out from under his squinting eyelids, he was observing the reaction of those gathered and imagining what they might have said about him in the event of his actual death.

It is possible he was sorry that he would not see his own funeral and had thus decided to arrange a sort of rehearsal. It cannot be ruled out that this sort of conduct was an attempt to either deceive death (I died long ago, why bother looking for me?) or to hide from it. The general did not hide from death in his younger years, but people do change in old age…

Another explanation—one originating from the general’s long-standing and almost intimate relationship with death—appears more pertinent. Was what happened a way to flirt with death or—this is entirely possible, too—a manifestation of a particular elderly coquetry? It is impossible to answer these questions accurately now, just as it is impossible to reason in any reliable way about how life and death come together in someone’s fate. All that can be ascertained is that in the end the general met with his death. It found him without any particular effort when the time came.

In pondering the topic of death in General Larionov’s story, Solovyov sought to understand the psychology of a person for whom a preparedness to die is the first and primary requirement of their profession. Solovyov was attempting to get a feel for the state of a person on the eve of battle, when any action, thought, or recollection might be his last. Was it possible to grow accustomed to that? It is known that on the evenings before battle, the general gazed at himself for a long time in a pocket mirror as if he were attempting to memorize himself at the very end. He slowly turned his hand, as if he were imagining it lying in the next trench. The inseparability of the human body’s limbs seemed overstated to him on those evenings.

Did a person have a right to attachments under those circumstances? War-time friendship is piercing, just as war-time love is piercing: everything is as if for the last time. This is grounds for experiencing those attachments with the utmost keenness or, conversely, for renouncing them completely. What did the general choose at the time?

He chose reminiscences. In the event of the possible absence of a future, he extended his life by experiencing his past multiple times. The general sensed, almost physically, a living room with silk wallpaper, along which his shoulder glided when he was escaping the attention of guests after—obviously at his parents’ order—one of the servants had abruptly brought him here, into a kingdom of dozens of candles, clinking dishes, cigars, and huge ceiling-high windows that were recklessly thrown open in Petersburg’s Christmas twilight. The general firmly remembered that the windows were open, against the usual winter rules; he remembered because for a long time he continued considering Christmas the day when warmth set in. Remembering that, he knew he had been mistaken.

But the general had a certain something else to recall on his evenings before battle: his first visit to the Yalta beach. It is described in detail in the portion of the general’s memoirs published by Dupont, which permits stopping at key moments of that event while omitting a series of details. What affected the child more than anything else was the sea’s calm force and the power of a frothy, ragged wave that knocked him from his feet and carried him away during his first approach to the water. Unlike the other members of his household, he was not afraid. As he leapt on shore, he was purposely falling on the very brim of the surf, allowing the elements to roll his small, rosy body. Overcome by all the sensations, he jumped, shouted, and even urinated slightly, observing as a trickle that nobody noticed disappeared into a descending wave, vintage 1887.

The beach occupied a special place in the child’s life from that point on. Even in the 1890s, when circumstances did not always permit him to appear there naked, the joy of the future military commander’s encounter with the beach was not diminished. As before, he encountered the waves with a victorious cry, though he still did not allow those excited behaviors that marked his first meeting with the watery element.

Despite the ceremoniousness of the nineteenth century, this period had its own obvious distractions. In those years, when dresses had just barely risen above the ankle and no one was even dreaming of uncovered knees, fully undressing was, in a certain sense, simpler than now. Nude swimming among peasant men and women and, what is more, the landed gentry, was not something out of the ordinary in the Russian village and was by no means seen as an orgy. This simplicity of values concerned the beach at times, too. Prince Peter Ouroussoff’s Reminiscences of a Vanished Age notes that visitors to private beaches in the early twentieth century could even bathe naked.

Even so, the beach had arrived as a Western European phenomenon, bringing its own series of rules. One needed to dress for the beach, albeit in a particular way: not in usual undergarments but in a special style of tricot that was striped and clung to the figure in an interesting way. The shortcoming of a beach outfit, however, was the same shortcoming of other clothes from that time: it left hardly any parts of the bather’s body uncovered.

When fighting in continental Europe, the general invariably recalled the beach: the damp salinity of the wind, the barely discernible smell of cornel cherry bushes, and the rhythmic swaying of seaweed on oceanside rocks. With the ebb of a wave, the seaweed obediently replicated the stones’ forms, just as a diver’s hair settles on his head like a bathing cap that gleams with the water that flows from it. The general remembered the smell of blistering hot pebbles after the first drops of rain fell on them and heard the special beach sounds: muted and somehow distant, consisting of children’s shouts, kicks at a ball, and the rustling roll of waves on the shore.

For the general, the beach was a place for life’s triumph, perhaps in the same sense that the battlefield is a place for death’s triumph. It is not out of the question that his many years sitting on the jetty were brought on by the possibility of surveying (albeit from afar) the beach, legs crossed, in his trusty folding chair under a quivering cream-colored umbrella. He only looked at the beach from time to time, his body half-turned, but that gave him indescribable pleasure. Only two circumstances clouded the general’s joy.

The first of those was the presentiment of winter, when a beach drifted with snow transformed into the embodiment of orphandom, becoming something contrary to its initial intended designation. The second circumstance was that everyone he had ever happened to be with at the beach was long dead. Hypnotized by the beach’s life-affirming aura at the time, the general had not allowed even the possibility that death would come for those alongside whom he was sitting on a chaise longue, opening a soft drink, or moving chess pieces. To the general’s great disappointment, none of them remained among the living. No, they had not died at the beach (and that partially excused them) but still they had died. The general shook his head, distressed at the thought. Now, after the passage of time, it can be established that he has died, too.