To our executioner

On August 30, 1918, the chairman of the Petrograd Cheka, Moisei Solomonovich Uritsky, was killed in Petrograd, to which the Bolsheviks responded with the Red Terror. Coincidentally, on the same day in Moscow at the Mikhelson plant, Lenin was wounded; this attempt was attributed to the Socialist-Revolutionary Fanny Kaplan, who was soon shot. The new government covered the entire part of Russia under its control at that time with a wave of executions, but the terror turned out to be especially cruel in Petrograd. For Uritsky alone, 900 people were killed who had nothing to do with this act. The lists of hostages published starting September 6, 1918 in the Red Gazeta did not include those who were at least indirectly involved in the murder, but those whom the Bolsheviks simply could not wait to shoot, starting with the five Grand Dukes Romanov. After the first 279 names were published in the newspaper, the rest were shot without mention in the press.

The strangulation of parliamentarism
The name of Uritsky was preserved in Leningrad toponymy for a long time. Until 1944, Uritsky Square was the name given to the main square of the capital of the Russian Empire, Dvortsovaya. The Tauride Palace, the seat of the State Duma, became Uritsky's palace. And even the area of ​​Ligovo in the current Krasnoselsky district had to become Uritsk for a while. Under Soviet rule, there was also a city called Uritsky, ten miles from Bryansk.
What kind of historical figure is this, so widely reflected in city and even all-Union toponymy?
The significance of a person under the communists was determined either by his indisputable merits in Russian history (Suvorov, Pushkin, Yuri Gagarin), or by belonging to the number of revolutionaries - “loyal Leninists” (Dzerzhinsky, Krupskaya, Podvoisky, Kalinin), or by participation in the Civil War on the side of the Reds ( Frunze, Chapaev, Tukhachevsky, etc.). Uritsky advanced only as a party worker, a member of the RSDLP, who fought against tsarism. But how consistently he acted as Lenin’s opponent! At the fateful Second Congress of the RSDLP (1903), he became a Menshevik; In 1912, at the conference of Social Democrats in Vienna, he was the most active representative of the Trotskyist group in the RSDLP. “The purpose of the conference,” writes Mark Aldanov, “was to unite all organizations of the RSDLP, except for pure Leninists, and declare Lenin a usurper.” In the spring of 1917, having returned to Russia from emigration, he became a member of the “Mezhrayontsy” group, which united Trotskyists, Mensheviks and Bolshevik conciliators who had broken away from the party. In it, Uritsky - before Trotsky returned to Russia - became one of the leaders. Only at the end of July 1917 did he join the Bolshevik Party.
Uritsky actually took an active part in organizing the October coup, and immediately after the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks, he was appointed “commissar for the affairs of the Constituent Assembly” under the commission for convening the Constituent Assembly, which operated from the first weeks of the Provisional Government and did not recognize the powers of the “commissar” Uritsky. On November 28, the deputies elected to the Constitutional Court and who had managed to arrive in Petrograd went to the Tauride Palace to begin their work. They were met by the “Commissioner of Affairs” at the head of a sailor detachment, arrested some of the deputies, and did not allow the rest into the palace.
After the commission refused to obey its instructions, Uritsky, by decree of the Council of People's Commissars, took over the management of the commission's affairs, and on December 23 was appointed commandant of the Tauride Palace. However, the Bolsheviks still had to open the popularly elected Assembly on January 5 (18), 1918. But at the end of the night meeting, signed by Lenin and Uritsky, an order appears: “Comrade soldiers and sailors, do not allow violence against counter-revolutionary (!!! - Author) members of the Constitutional Court and freely release them from the Tauride Palace. Don’t let anyone in without a special (!!! - author) order.” That is, you won’t be allowed back into the meeting room to go out to the diner, or even to recover! Everyone knows what happened the next morning. Uritsky also took over all matters related to the liquidation of the Constituent Assembly.
Meanwhile, the First World War continues, the Germans are advancing on Petrograd. On December 9, negotiations began to conclude a truce. Uritsky acts as an implacable opponent of peace with Germany: “No peace, no war!” As a member of the Revolutionary Defense Committee, on February 22 he was among the members of the Central Committee and People's Commissars who issued a statement saying that the signing of peace demonstrates “before the whole world the powerlessness of the proletarian dictatorship in Russia, deals a blow to the cause of the international proletariat” and is a capitulation to the international bourgeoisie. What this “principledness” of the left communists cost Russia is also known. Peace was concluded at the beginning of March, but during these days the Germans managed to occupy our new territories, as a result of which Moscow and Petrograd were left without raw materials for industry and bread: in the spring of 18, famine began in Petrograd.

Hello from socially close
Moses Uritsky finally found his “true” place as the chief punisher of the north-west of Russia. In March, he took the post of People's Commissar of Internal Affairs of the Northern Labor Commune, which included Petrograd, Pskov and Petrograd provinces, Karelia, as well as the Murmansk and Arkhangelsk regions. On March 10, the day the Soviet government moved to Moscow, Uritsky also became chairman of the Petrograd Cheka.
“Uritsky’s life was pure prose,” wrote Mark Aldanov. - And suddenly everything fell at once: power - enormous real power over the lives of millions of people, power unconstrained by laws or forms of court... Famous writers asked him for a pass to leave the city! He had great princes in his prisons! And all this in the face of history! All this for socialism! Cut off heads with a sickle, crush skulls with a hammer!”
When workers' strikes began in Petrograd, caused by mass layoffs due to lack of raw materials and the ensuing famine, the Cheka immediately declared these actions to be “sabotage.” The death penalty was abolished by the Provisional Government, but the Bolsheviks ignored this ban from the very first months of their autocracy. And after the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, the announcement of the Council of People's Commissars of January 8, 1918 “On the creation of battalions for digging trenches from the bourgeois class of men and women under the supervision of the Red Guards” said: “Those who resist are to be shot.” And further: “Counter-revolutionary agitators should be shot at the scene of the crime.”
It is appropriate to remember that mass executions were intended almost exclusively for “enemies of the revolution,” although pacification actions should have been directed to other addresses: in Petrograd at the end of 1917 and in 1918, bandits were rampant, robbing demoralized citizens of things and money. It’s funny that in the same January 1918, robbers on Shpalernaya Street between the Smolny and Tauride Palaces took the fur coat from Uritsky himself and the coat from the acting People’s Commissar of Justice of the Latvian Bolshevik Peter Stuchka, who was walking with him. “Half-naked, trembling, they reached the Tauride Palace,” writes Zinaida Gippius in her diary.

The most humane
But not only the “enemies of the revolution” were destined to die from the punishing sword of “revolutionary justice” placed by the party in the hands of Uritsky.
It has already been said that the Bolsheviks had to suppress the protests of the Petrograd workers, exhausted by hunger and sudden unemployment, and keep in check the very proletariat, in the name of whose dictatorship the October “revolution” took place. Single - at first - executions did not solve the matter. We had to convince and come up with justifications for the policies of the new government. This was done by the Commissioner for Press Affairs of the Northern Labor Communes, Moses Markovich Goldstein, a revolutionary who spoke under the name Volodarsky (popularly called the “Minister of Chat”). He visited factories, made fiery speeches, but somehow did not fit into the leading triumvirate along with Zinoviev and Uritsky. On June 20, 1918, while rushing to another meeting in the Nevsky district near the bridge that still bears his name, he was killed by an unknown person who remained in history, “Socialist Revolutionary Sergeev,” a man who not only was not caught, but his name could not be established.
Even today, his fellow party member, the chief security officer of Petrograd, Moisei Uritsky, is suspected of involvement in his elimination.
The action to eliminate Volodarsky, carried out in public, with many witnesses, seemed to quickly be read by Uritsky’s services, and its perpetrators would be subjected to demonstrative execution. But the machine of proletarian justice spun noisily idle.
Such an ineffective reaction of the Petrograd Cheka to the murder of the “tribune of the revolution” Moisei Volodarsky caused bewilderment for Lenin himself. Here is what he wrote to the Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of the Northern Labor Commune about this: “Comrade. Zinoviev! Only today we heard in the Central Committee that in St. Petersburg the workers wanted to respond to the murder of Volodarsky with mass terror and that you (not you personally, but the St. Petersburg security officers or security officers) held back. I strongly protest! We compromise ourselves; Even in the resolutions of the Council of Deputies we threaten with mass terror, but when it comes down to it, we slow down the revolutionary initiative of the masses, which is quite correct. This is impossible! Terrorists will consider us wimps. It's arch-war time. It is necessary to encourage the energy and mass character of terror against counter-revolutionaries, and especially in St. Petersburg, whose example is decisive.”

Greedy Knights
The Petrograd Cheka has other problems in its sights. The ongoing hunger (the population is given 50 grams of bread a day - less than during the darkest months of the Leningrad siege, when they were given 125 grams) encourages individual groups of city residents to organize themselves in search of means of putting pressure on the authorities. The Red Newspaper is published on May 12 with the headline on the front page: “Black Hundreds are trying to cause food riots.” And on July 6 in Moscow, the Left Socialist Revolutionaries kill the German ambassador Mirbach and start an anti-Bolshevik rebellion. The threads of the conspiracy are not in Petrograd, but in the coming weeks the chairman of the Petrograd Cheka is organizing a ruthless hunt for the left Socialist Revolutionaries and their “accomplices.” Here Uritsky is at his best. “Counter-revolutionary organizations” and conspiracies, sometimes imaginary, are discovered. The case of the “Union for the Defense of the Motherland and People”, promoted by Dzerzhinsky, is being conducted, the underground organization “Camorra of People’s Retribution” has been “disclosed”. Just have time to shoot...
“The secretary of the Danish embassy, ​​Peters, told how Uritsky boasted to him that he had signed 23 death sentences in one day,” writes S. P. Melgunov in his book “Red Terror in Russia.” “But Uritsky was one of those who allegedly sought to ‘streamline’ the terror.”
Under Soviet rule, for three quarters of a century, the legend about the security officers as fearless knights of the revolution circulated. Now, when former communists have focused on ways to enrich themselves, betraying their idols along with the once unshakable tenets of faith, we can say out loud what “orderly” terror looked like in Petrograd. The security officers had food in abundance - after all, Moisei Solomonovich Uritsky demanded that items, money and gold items be confiscated during arrests. The security officers who carried out the searches, as can be seen from the protocols, also confiscated food, as well as wine and generally household items they liked.

The most worthy
In July 1918, the Petrograd Cheka received a denunciation of a counter-revolutionary conspiracy at the Mikhailovsky Artillery School and Academy. Uritsky immediately signs an arrest warrant for a number of cadets and teachers, including Vladimir Pereltsveig, who is not listed as a cadet. At a meeting of the Cheka on August 19, with Uritsky and Chumak refusing to participate in the vote, it was unanimously decided that Orlov, Kudryavtsev, Arnautovsky, Pereltsweig, Mostygin and Verevkin should be shot.
This protocol on a checkered piece of notebook paper was signed by the Chairman of the Petro Cheka, M. Uritsky, who “refused to participate in the vote.” In 11 days, a friend of the executed Pereltsweig, Leonid Kanegisser, will settle accounts with Uritsky himself.
It is impossible to establish exactly how many souls were destroyed by Uritsky’s department before the start of the Red Terror. Judging by the statement of the security officer G. Bokiy, who took his place, the total number of people shot by Uritsky in Petrograd was about 500 people. For the atrocities of the fascist invaders in the Leningrad region, their leader, General Remlinger, received a noose in January 1946 - he, along with a group of his assistant officers, was hanged near the Gigant cinema. The Bolsheviks assessed Uritsky’s actions differently: they named the main square of the capital of the Russian Empire after him. At house number 9 on the 8th line of Vasilievsky Island, a memorial marble plaque was hung, which read: “M. S. Uritsky, the first chairman of the Petrograd Extraordinary Commission, lived in this house.”
Now this board is not on the wall of the house. No, it was not removed during perestroika: a criminal case was opened into the theft. Governor Georgy Poltavchenko promised to restore the memorial plaque stolen in early summer in 2013. Experts estimated the preliminary cost of work to restore the memorial at 150 thousand rubles.
I appeal to respected experts: please calculate how much it will cost to expand the field of the board to place additional text on it and carve it on marble: “Bolshevik executioner of Petrograd.”

Georgy VASYUTOCHKIN