Red Hogwarts. Series 7. Students

Banal of this photo is that family pictures. Student group of fellow students photographed as a souvenir - what could be more trivial? Who among those who studied at universities and, especially, who lived in a dormitory, does not have such photos with roommates? Students are also quite commonplace and do not stand out with anything special — a technical college, future engineers. The two are older, the rest are almost the same age at the age of "barely twenty." Twenty-one, to be exact. In modern times - children, practically. Since the university is a capital, and the contingent is common, it is reasonable to assume that we have provincials who have gathered in Belokamennaya from all over the country. So it is - here there is Linen Kostroma, and oil Baku, and the fire-Kalanchevsky Vitebsk, and then foreign Chita, the capital of a foreign country with the name “Far Eastern Republic”, recognized, however, only by Soviet Russia.

They are given out except that the eyes are too heavy a look at these twenty-year-old boys. Usually, experienced men look like this, life is thoroughly broken and boiled in many lye. The answer is on the calendar: 1922. On the outskirts of the country, the last centers of Civil still burn, the war is still in the Far East, native to one of them, but by and large in Russia the terrible seven-year-old bloody meat grinder finally calms down, almost turning the country into oblivion. The “fun time” ends, as his peer called him, not by years, but by fate - by the name of Arkady Golikov. The same dashing red commander, who has yet to become the creator of the great Soviet children's literature, Arkady Gaidar. The terrible monster of the Troubles falls asleep, during the damned waking times of which these young men, peers of the turbulent and turbulent XX century, had to grow up.

Barely celebrated their twenty-first birthday, they saw everything in this life. Each of them exchanged their account long ago, and could repeat it with a clear conscience after the poet:

We saw death pretty close
and perhaps they themselves could die
we went wherever we could walk,
and looked at everything you could look at.
...
And, honestly, we did not dream
when, curled up in a corner,
we were dozing in a car flying without headlights
or on the hard floor.

We had a clear conscience of people
looked into the eyes of the war.
And we saw too much during the day,
to see more in a dream.

Some publicists called these peers of the century "wolves of the Revolution", but this is not true: if they were wolves, then terribly long ago - a war ago. Each of them went through the Civil from the beginning to the end, and in the war they either grow up quickly or do not grow up at all. In this photo - not youngsters, and not even just early grown-up men. These are the best fighters, many times veterans tested in the case. Those same "broken", which are a dozen unbeaten. And young age - no hindrance to this, as one of them rightly remarked, “at that time people matured early — living conditions and the events themselves were growth stimulants” . These were the children of the Revolution, often under its banners at the age of 15-16 years. I did not accidentally mention Gaidar. Usually, his fate is remembered as a unique example of a unique career - look, this is the kind that happened, a man in 16 years already commanded a regiment! And they forget that Gaidar himself always said that he had an “ordinary biography in extraordinary time . ” And this is indeed the case, it was very often, which is convincingly proved by the fate of the people depicted in this photo.


Arkady Golikov, future Gaidar, 15-year-old adjutant to the commander of the defense of all railways, 1919

They are barely over twenty, but most of them have already achieved great ranks. Now they are students, but even their students did not just happen. It is not their decision, it is the will of the party. This is the “steel cohort of veterans,” the best of the best were sent to eliminate another breakthrough — a cadre.

Yes, 1922 is not 1919. Already fought off, the Republic is no longer in the steel ring of enemies, but hunger and devastation can destroy it no worse than the White Guards and the invaders. The first state in the world of workers and peasants was desperately in need of competent engineers and production managers who were able to revive the ruined industry. Therefore, the party sent its best target fighters to study.

And here they are - in the first technical institution of higher education created by the Soviet Union - the Moscow Mining Academy. One of these boys, life later, will recall this time in his memoirs: “Young people came here from all over the country. They fought with Denikin, Kolchak, Wrangel, participated in the creation of the first organs of Soviet power, performed heroic deeds without themselves being aware of their heroism. For some reason, a student Petrov was remembered - he never smiled. I once asked:
“Why is Petrov always so gloomy?”
“You will be sullen if you come back from the next world,” answered a close friend of Petrov.
And told how this guy, along with dozens of other Bolsheviks, whites shot. Those who survived were finished off with bayonets, and Petrov was unconscious and was considered dead. Then he woke up and got out of the pile of corpses - from the bottom of the ravine, where he was thrown after the execution. ... Among the students were political commissars of regiments and divisions, secretaries of provincial committees, regional committees and party committees, and chairmen of executive committees . ”

And this is the real truth - as I have already said, there were enough people in big ranks and in high positions among the newly minted students of the academy. What to go far - even in this picture we see both the leader of the trade union movement of a considerable republic, and the brigade commissar, and a party worker at the level of the secretary of the district committee. That's just all these posts and titles now had no meaning - they are in the past, and these people have always lived not in the past, but in the future.


Another photo of the same general company, only in a reduced composition

The present briefly level them all in the gay and shebut status of the student. It so happened that, having matured in the war, after the war, they received an unexpected gift from fate - an opportunity to return to youth for at least a few years and live the ordinary life of their peers: with tests and "fierce teachers", part-time work and drunkenness, "tails , Student weddings, etc.

And the future ... As always, the future will fall out for everyone. Some of them will graduate from the institute, someone will transfer to another department, someone will be expelled for academic failure. Someone will marry and will live soul to soul with his wife all his life, another will not have a family life and he will go through several divorces. Some will make a brilliant career, others will work their entire life as an engineer at the factory.

Just like in life.

In general, this is really quite a trivial and ordinary snapshot. And he would never have gone beyond family albums if not a single circumstance - at least four boys in this photo became legends, and in completely different spheres of human activity.

And this, frankly, inexplicable.

Well, yes, to be honest, in the whole world it is not uncommon for a situation when friends of each other “pull”. But at all desire, the rocketman will not help a ballet dancer with a career - but here is such a case.

No cronyism, no mutual support, yes, there — in general, no probability theory can explain how the future chairman of the State Committee of the USSR Council of Ministers on atomic energy, the future general secretary of the Writers Union of the USSR, the future geologist-discoverer could live in one room of the student dormitory Volga-Ural oil and gas province and the future Minister of metallurgical industry of the USSR.

Nuclear Scientist, Writer, Geologist and Metallurg. Ok right

There is no rational explanation, therefore all sorts of speculations about the "place of Power" or "Inferno breakthroughs" come to mind. The temptation is all the more so because the Quartet’s list of legendary graduates was by no means exhausted, just others literally remained behind the scenes. But about them, or rather about him - a little later.

So, if you go back to all the “spirals of fate” that interweave their fate together, then I confess honestly - when studying the biographies of my heroes, it is difficult to get rid of the impression that their appearance in the hostel in Staromonetny Lane is some kind of long-running joke of Destiny. They seemed to be specially brought together in this hostel, hastily converted from a monastic shelter at the Martha and Mary monastery, because none of them should have been in Moscow in the 20s, their entire biography vehemently protested against it. Judge for yourself, it's time to meet you.

Writer

See in the upper left corner of the big-eared big guy in a jacket? This is Sasha Bulyga, born in 1901. In 21 years of his life, as I have already said, there was a lot of things, so don’t be angry for “mnogabukv”, I will try my best to be more concise.

Born into a family of professional revolutionaries, his father and mother met when comrades asked Russianized Antonina Kuntz under the guise of a “fictitious bride” to go to a prison in St. Petersburg to meet a convict of the People's Volunteer and pass the package “out of will”. The fictitious bride soon became real, and in June 1897 the young men were married in Shenkursky exile. Following Tatiana’s daughter in 1901, their first son, Sasha, was born, and in 1905, the third child, Volodya’s son.

Since early childhood, Sasha has demonstrated extraordinary abilities, today he would have been called a child prodigy and would have been shown in some kind of “Best of All!” Program with Maxim Galkin. ” The child remembered the ABC in three and a half years, watching from the side, as they taught Sister Tanya. From the age of four he avidly reads books, literally memorizes their pages and composes stories himself, striking adults with irrepressible imagination.

When Sasha was not even five, his parents dispersed - Alexander Ivanovich was a fierce ideological fighter, he understood only serving the Revolution as the meaning of life, and his family tied him up and bound him hand and foot. Shortly after the divorce, he was arrested, sentenced to hard labor in Siberia, and in 1916 he died from tuberculosis, and did not live to the desired fall
autocracy.


Here it is at the turn of the century, in 1900.

In fact, the children were raised by his stepfather, Gleb Svitych, whom his mother met during the underground work in Vilna. The life of a revolutionary does not contribute to a quiet life, so Sasha’s early childhood is endlessly moving: Kimry, Kursk, Vilna, Ufa ... Tired of gypsy life, the mother accepts the invitation of her elder sister, and in the autumn of 1908 a large family arrives in Vladivostok.

It was in the Far East that Sasha found his small homeland. This austere, wild, uninhabited, but stunningly beautiful land, the boy fell in love immediately and forever. The family, where soon two more sons were born and five children, lived in Chuguevka, which at that time was a deaf taiga village that had no connection with the outside world for months. Therefore, when the boy grew up, in 1910 he was sent to civilization, to his aunt, to Vladivostok.

Vladik The most distant, most exotic, most strict and most beautiful city of the Empire. The Golden Horn Bay, Chinese junks and Russian cruisers, tigers and the ocean, gold prospectors and hunhuzes, islands and sunsets, sailor huys and Chinese braids, cinematography and opiocilli, sea water splashing on piers and concrete forts of the Vladivostok fortress, riding the hills ...

Believe me, this unique city is capable of falling in love without memory not only a ten-year-old boy.



Sasha lives with her aunt, in the Sibirtsev family, studies at the Vladivostok Commercial School, reads Maina Reed, Jack London and Fenimore Cooper avidly, writes a story about the adventures of scouts in Canada, and in Chuguevka wanders for days in the taiga, spending the night at homemade huts. Happy childhood, you say, and I agree.

But the politics of the life of our heroes has not disappeared anywhere and could not get away - the whole of Russia was saturated with it. The Sibirtsev family was the center of attraction for young Vladivostok Social Democrats and Social Revolutionaries, and it was not by chance that Sasha’s cousins, the Sibirtsev brothers, later became the most famous revolutionaries of the Far East. And even Sasha himself, as a child, carried out the instructions of the underground committee of the Bolsheviks, which, however, was completely unsurprising.

In 1914, began the "seven-year bloody" of Russia. Stepfather Sasha, medical assistant Gleb Svitych, was drafted into the army, and sent to the front, where he died from typhus, April 28, 1917. And when the centuries-old abscess breaks through the revolution, 16-year-old Sasha will rush into politics recklessly, with a head. It seems that his father's genes had an effect - the revolution he gave himself to everything, without a trace. Politics came to the people itself, without asking anyone for permission.

Events raced at a gallop, everything flashed like an old celluloid film in a cinematograph - an English cruiser Suffolk on the roads, a Bolshevik committee, a mysterious murder of two Japanese in the Isido office, a Japanese intervention, Semenovtsy, Kolchak, a rebel Czechoslovak corps ...

On June 29, 1918, a counterrevolutionary insurrection occurred in the city, the Vladivostok Council was arrested, headed by its first Bolshevik chairman Konstantin Sukhanov, who would soon be brutally murdered, according to the official version “while trying to escape”. And in September 1918, a student of the eighth grade of the Commercial School, who was familiar to us, joined the RSDLP (b). Soon after, Sasha dropped out of school, deciding to devote himself entirely to revolutionary activity.

When he became a Bolshevik at the age of 17, our hero, with his fatherly obstinacy, until his death always considered himself a party soldier, who was “mobilized and called upon.” However, pretty soon he had the opportunity to become just a soldier. The time of the party discussions was over. How sang the namesake of a classmate of Sasha Pavel Tsoi: “What will be worth a thousand words when strength of hand is important?”.


A group of students of the Vladivostok Commercial School. Standing - Pavel Tsoi and our hero.

In April 1919, the Far Eastern Regional Party Conference decided to strengthen the partisan movement in the region with Vladivostok Bolsheviks. With a fake passport in the name of Alexander Bulyga, our hero makes his way from Vladivostok to the Suchan valley, the partisan capital of the Far East. And, as they would have written today, “becomes a member of an illegal armed group”.

Red partisan Alexander Bulyga fought for three years - do not forget that in the Far East the Civil War lasted two years longer than in European Russia. As he himself wrote later: “As a writer, I owe my birth to this time. I knew the best sides of the people from which I came out. For three years with him, I walked thousands of kilometers of roads, slept under one coat and ate from one pot . ”

Then about these events will add songs. "In the valleys and hills" remember? How it sang: "These days the glory will never cease, it will never fade - the guerrilla groups occupied the cities." And so it was - in January 1920 we see our fighter of the “Special Communist Detachment” jubilant on the streets of Spassk-Dalny, from which the guerrillas had just knocked out the White Guards and occupied the city.


The twelfth regiment of the Red Army FID, the Far East, 1921

The young partisan fought heroically: youth does not believe in death, so Sasha climbed into the thick of it. At first he fought with the White Guards, then with the Japanese interventionists. In a battle with the Japanese near Spassky, he was seriously wounded - fellow soldiers carried him out of the battlefield in his arms. His combat path was long - and in the literal sense of the word, too. Having recovered, Bulyga, on the instructions of the party through Harbin on the Chinese steamer U-tong, made his way to Blagoveshchensk, then with his detachment went to Transbaikalia to eliminate the "Chita traffic jam", where the soldiers of the People's Revolutionary Army of the Far Eastern Republic desperately cut with the ataman Semyonov's soldiers.

Somewhere on those endless roads, that young romantic lost himself, raving about adventures in the spirit of Bret Garth. In Chita, we already see an authoritative field commander who knows a veteran, who paid for combat experience with his own blood and took someone else's blood. In January 1921, a list of commanders with brief characteristics was prepared in the division. There are only two words against the Bulyga family: “good is great”.

A month later, in February 1921, the Communists of the People’s Revolutionary Army of the Far Eastern Republic elected Comrade Bulyga, who served as Commissioner of the 8th Amur Rifle Brigade, as their delegate to the 10th All-Russian Congress of the RCP (B.). Only six delegates with a decisive vote from the vast Far Eastern Republic, and among them - the 19-year-old commissioner, authoritative Comrade Bulyga.


The mandate of the delegate to the X Congress of the RCP (b) A. Bulygi.

We must go to Moscow. Our hero did not know then that this trip would forever divide his life into “before” and “after.”

He traveled to Moscow in the same carriage as another delegate to the congress, Commissioner of the 2nd Verkhneudinsk Infantry Division Ivan Konev. Yes, thereby - the future "Marshal of Victory", the commander of the 1st Ukrainian Front, who took Berlin and liberated Prague from Zlatu. As Ivan Semenovich himself later recalled: “For almost a whole month we were traveling together from Chita to Moscow in one compartment, eating from one pot. Both of us were young: I was on my twenty-fourth, he was the twentieth; both sympathized with each other. "


Dashing red commander Ivan Konev

Having become friends, both Far Easterners and at the convention settled into one room in a hotel. Together we went to meetings, together with an indescribable delight looked at the leaders of the party, whose articles they dismantled in the light of oil lamps for tens of thousands of miles from the capital. As Alexander later admittedly admitted: “I was so close to Lenin that I could not resist and sneak a little touch of his jacket . ”

Together they walked with rifles in their hands over the ice of the Gulf of Finland under the fire of naval guns that hit the fragmentation ones - like most delegates, Alexander and Ivan immediately after the congress went to suppress the Kronstadt uprising. In general, life was like in the famous poem: “We were led by youth in a saber campaign, we were thrown by youth on the Kronstadt ice”.


V. Lenin, L. Trotsky and K. Voroshilov with the participants of the suppression of the Kronstadt insurgency

During the suppression of the rebellion Bulyga was again wounded, and seriously. For several hours without memory he lay on the ice, then crawled to his own for almost two kilometers, leaving a trail of blood on the ice. He lost a lot of blood, he was very bad, the doctors at the hospital literally pulled him out of the dead. He was sent to the hospital, he was treated for a long time - almost half a year - according to the results of the medical consultation he was demobilized from the army for injuries.

So - at one moment - everything ended. And nothing left. After all, all that he managed to learn in life is the ability to qualitatively kill enemies. After demobilization from the army, the twenty-year-old Communist Bulyga had to start life anew. In the representative office of the Far Eastern Republic in the RSFSR, where he became registered as a foreigner, he received the recommendation of the party. Since he was in the capital, the party sends him to study - good, age allows, and with education, everything is fine with him! An unfinished commercial school is an unattainable height for other communists, many of whom are painted with some difficulty.


After discharge from the hospital. 1921

Bulyga did not think long, he recalled the miner’s Suchan, where his fighting path had begun - and chose the Moscow Mining Academy. Soon he already elatedly wrote to a friend: “Listen! Would you believe damn it! if someone told you that Sasha, who so despised math and loved Russian and political economy until he lost consciousness, underwent algebra, geometry, trigonometry, physics and arithmetic in one month and passed the exam at the Mining Academy? No, you would have sent the man to hell, and even something good, would have brought to justice for libel. But it's true! Karrumba! This gimp ended only yesterday, and here I am from the military commissaries — to the students! ”

Alexander Bulyga becomes a student at the Moscow Mining Academy, and only his closest friends knew that "Bulyga" is a party pseudonym like "Lenin" or "Stalin."

And the real name of Sasha is Fadeev.

(when writing an essay verses by K. Simonov are used)