| Submit your comments on this article |
| Caucasus/Russia/Central Asia |
| Book Review: A. L. Nosovich. White Agent in the Red Army: Memoirs, Documents, Articles |
| 2021-12-01 |
| Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited. by Andrey Martynov [Regnum] It cannot be said that Major General Anatoly Nosovich (1878−1968), a member of the white movement, was not known to the Soviet reader. In a somewhat caricatured form, Alexei Tolstoy mentioned him in the novel "Bread", and the general's memoirs published under the pseudonym Chernomorets were quoted in the 1930s in the newspaper "Pravda" by the "first red officer" Klim Voroshilov. Finally, already in the post-Soviet period, some of his memoir articles were published as a separate book. What attracted the Bolsheviks to Nosovich? Indeed, in contrast to such open enemies of the Soviet regime as General Sergei Markov (the same Tolstoy wrote about him in "Walking through the Torments") or Admiral Alexander Kolchak (from Soviet writers, Nikolai Aseev spoke about him not without sympathy in "Semyon Proskakov" ) Nosovich, on the instructions of the Moscow anti-Bolshevik underground organization, was introduced into the ranks of the Red Army (RKKA). That is, there was no "honest" or "open" battle, but "deception" or "betrayal". Nevertheless, there was interest in him. The fact is that in the essay "Red Tsaritsyn" the general described the future Soviet leader as follows: “It is not in the rules (...) of a person like Stalin to get away from the business he just started. We must give him justice that his energy can be the envy of any of the old administrators, and the ability to apply to business and circumstances should be learned by many." It is interesting that after the XX Party Congress this assessment of Stalin given by Nosovich was confirmed in a private conversation by Anastas Mikoyan. As a member of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, in a conversation with the writer Yuri Trifonov, he confessed to the latter: "Yes, he was a very good administrator. And very humble." Note that at the congress itself, Mikoyan, even before Khrushchev's famous speech, used the expression "personality cult" to criticize Stalin. The memoirs of Anatoly Nosovich and documents associated with him, collected by the historian Andrei Ganin in the book, depict the general's underground activities at the headquarters of the Red Army during the defense of Tsaritsyn (here he just met Stalin), as well as stories about other military and party leaders. For example, the former colonel of the imperial army Joachim Vatsetis, who joined the Red Army (he was the commander-in-chief of the Red Army in 1918-1919), was perceived by the memoirist extremely negatively: “an evil Latvian: he will not be tormented by his conscience at the sight of destroyed Russia, which he hates with all his soul” But about the former Colonel Sergei Kamenev who replaced him, on the contrary, he spoke with empathy: "probably his passionate nature was the reason that he was carried away by an adventure and fell into the mainstream of the Bolshevik stream." Taken together, these testimonies create a more objective picture in which Stalin turns out to be not only a talented manager, but also a cruel politician who admitted that his party members were ready to "destroy out of ten - nine innocent out of a hundred - ninety-nine" for the sake of catching one enemy. A separate question: is it possible to be a successful administrator with such arithmetic? A separate article dealing with documents relating to Nosovich can be found here. |
| Posted by:badanov |