The fate of one family
The tragedy of one particular family reflects the history of the entire nation as if in a mirror. A large, hardworking family lives in peace. A large farm, love for the land, and caring for children unite adults and children. The house has everything: love, respect, patience. The Melekhovs are an ordinary Cossack family: father, mother, daughters, sons. War destroys everything. Family ties weaken, brotherly feelings fade away, and are replaced by irritability and fear. The father of the family, Pantelei Prokofievich, knows the reason for the breakup of the family - it is war. The brothers disperse in different directions, one for the Reds, the other for the Whites. Wives grab guns and kill those who deprived them of their husbands. People carry out executions themselves, looking for blood and those who can be deprived of their lives.
Attitude to war
Everyone has a different attitude towards war. Some people are happy about battles and know how to find benefit in military everyday life. This includes Petr Melekhov. He sees himself as an officer, a man for whom the war opens up prospects and a bright future. The war pleases Peter; he takes from the vanquished what he could not obtain by honest labor. For people like Peter, war is a means of profit.
Gregory does not accept the war. She "sucks the color out of her face." The author says that the war “...painted him with bile.” What is this? Malice, cruelty, bestiality? War awakens the bestial essence in a person, it’s hard if there’s not enough of it. Men become weak or, conversely, cruel and vile. Monstrous scenes of rape of women, executions, and death of children were a delight for some, and horror for others. Grigory is trying to avoid injustice, but it is impossible to be at war and find himself outside of it. The Civil War as a tragedy of the people in “Quiet Don” ran like a red line through the image of the main character.
Civil war essay on the topic
/> The civil war in Russia still attracts the close attention of historians today. To questions such as. for example, when this major drama of the twentieth century began and when it ended, there are ambiguous answers. According to V.I. Lenin, civil war as a phenomenon, as a form of class struggle, took place from October 1917 to October 1922. The time was from the summer of 1918 to the end of 1920, when the intervention and the Civil War merged into one the whole, when the military issue became the main one, and armed struggle the main political means, most historically define it as the period of the Civil War in the history of the Soviet state. This periodization prevails in educational and scientific literature. February 1917 essentially became the prologue to the Civil War. After February, tension grew in the country and confrontation intensified. October 1917 caused a new split in society, a further escalation of violence and class confrontation. Landowners who lost their land; capitalists who lost factories and factories; bankers who lost their capital; a privileged part of society that has lost its privileges; the parties of the Cadets, the right Socialist Revolutionaries, who lost power - they all opposed Soviet power. Attempts to unite the socialist forces of Russia led nowhere. A bloc with the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries, due to the complete rejection of the Bolshevik position, turned out to be impossible. The bloc of the Bolsheviks with the Left Socialist Revolutionaries did not last long, resulting in an armed clash (revolt of the Left Socialist Revolutionaries, July 1918). After the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, the terrorist activities of the counter-revolution intensified. In the spring and summer of 1918, with funds from the Entente and the internal counter-revolution, underground military-conspiratorial organizations were created - the National Socialist Revolutionary Union for the Defense of the Motherland and Freedom, which organized armed anti-Soviet riots throughout Russia. They were supported by part of the officer corps, former officials, Cossacks, clergy, and part of the intelligentsia who did not accept the proletarian revolution. The impending famine caused emergency food measures by the government, which caused discontent among wealthy peasants and kulak revolts. In the spring of 1918, England, France, the USA, and Japan moved from a “hidden” form of intervention (in the form of providing assistance to internal counter-revolution) to open military intervention, an invasion of the territory of Soviet Russia. The British landed in Murmansk (March 1918), the Japanese and Americans in Vladivostok (April 1918), Romania captured Bessarabia (January 1918). In February-March, Germany invaded Russia, which was a real intervention. Having signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, Germany continued its intervention in Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltic states. By mid-April, German troops captured Crimea, and in April landed in Finland. In Ukraine in April 1918, the Germans replaced the bourgeois-democratic Central Rada with their protege, Hetman P. Skoropadsky. In May 1918, a rebellion began in the Czechoslovak Corps, formed from Czech and Slavic prisoners of war, which was supposed to be transported to Europe for the war with Germany and whose echelons stretched throughout Siberia to Vladivostok. France declared the corps part of its armed forces and its strike force. At the beginning of June 1918, relying on the help of the Czechoslovaks, the so-called Committee of the Constituent Assembly (“Komuch”), a counter-revolutionary organization of Mensheviks and right-wing Socialist Revolutionaries, seized power in Samara, declaring its power in the Volga region. Then “provisional governments” were formed in Ukraine and Siberia, and a connection was established between the Czechoslovaks and the Entente landing party in Murmansk, and with counter-revolutionary uprisings in other parts of the country. On the Don, Kuban, and in the areas of Cossack troops, large armed formations of the “Whites,” as the opponents of the Bolsheviks called themselves, “Reds,” operated. By the summer of 1918, there was a simultaneous uprising of the forces of internal and external counter-revolution, their merging into a single anti-Soviet front. The Civil War began in all the terrible meaning of the word. The main stages of the Civil War and intervention: the first. - the beginning of the Civil War as a period in the history of the USSR. The deployment of the military intervention of the Entente (summer 1918 October 1918); second . - strengthening of the Entente’s intervention and the collapse of its attempts to defeat the Soviet Republic on its own (November 5, 1918 - March 1919); third . - decisive victories over the forces of internal and external counter-revolution (March 1919 - March 1920); fourth . - Soviet-Polish war and the defeat of the White Guard troops of Wrangel (1920). In 1920-1921, when the Soviet country transitioned to peace, the last local centers of counter-revolution were eliminated. The civil war in Soviet Russia was the largest in scale of all internal wars. The White Guard troops reached 1.5 - 2 million people, the interventionist troops - up to 1 million people. Numerous rebel groups also opposed Soviet power. During the civil war, from the small detachments of the Red Guard, Periodization is given according to the encyclopedia “Civil War and Military Intervention in the USSR”. - M.: 1987. 0 a mighty Red Army was created, which by the end of 1920 reached 5 million people. Its formations included 22 armies, including 2 cavalry, 174 divisions, of which 35 were cavalry. Major battles broke out in the summer of 1918. The Soviet Republic found itself in a fiery ring of fronts, 3/4 of its territory was in the hands of the counter-revolution. On August 30, 1918, as a result of a terrorist attack, the Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars, V.I. Lenin, was seriously wounded. On September 2, the All-Russian Central Executive Committee declared the Soviet Republic a military camp. The Red Army troops went on the offensive on the Eastern Front and by November drove the White Guard troops beyond the Volga. In the fall of 1918, the international position of Soviet Russia changed dramatically. On November 11, 1918, Germany and its allies surrendered to the Entente. Revolutions took place in Germany and Austria-Hungary. On November 13, the Soviet government annulled the predatory Brest-Litovsk Treaty. But the Entente significantly increased its intervention. At the end of November 1918, English and French ships landed troops in Novorossiysk, Odessa, and Sevastopol. Their number reached 130 thousand people. Batum, Tiflis, and Baku were occupied, and interventionist ships appeared in the Baltic ports. New troops of British, American and Japanese invaders landed in Murmansk, Arkhangelsk, and Vladivostok. A military dictatorship was established in Omsk by Admiral Kolchak, who declared himself the “supreme ruler of Russia.” The White Guard army of General A. Denikin was deployed in the South. However, by that time the Soviet government had managed to strengthen its position. Foreign intervention caused a patriotic upsurge of the Russian people. The Red Army reached 1 million soldiers and launched a decisive offensive, as a result of which the intervention troops in the North were defeated; by the spring of 1919, important grain and fuel regions of Ukraine, the Volga region, as well as Belarus and the Baltic states, a territory with a total area of 850 thousand square meters, were liberated. km and with a population of over 40 million people. By the spring of 1919, the internal situation in the Soviet Republic continued to be difficult. The fuel and food crisis has worsened. The enemy's armed forces numbered more than 1 million people, and the interventionist fleet dominated the seas. At the beginning of March, Kolchak’s 300,000-strong army launched an offensive, captured Ufa and advanced towards the Volga. In May, the northwestern White Guard corps of General Yudenich launched an attack on Petrograd, where the English squadron approached. General Denikin advanced in the South, who by July captured Tsaritsyn, Kharkov, Donbass, and launched an attack on Moscow. Fierce fighting continued for several months. In October 1919, a turning point came. The troops of Kolchak, Denikin and Yudenich were driven back. The First Cavalry Army of S. Budyonny made a great contribution to the success of the Soviet troops. By the spring of 1920, the troops of Kolchak and Denikin were defeated. The remnants of the white armies took refuge in Crimea. The Entente countries, having suffered the defeat of their open intervention, made a new attempt to liquidate the Soviet state by armed means. With their help, the 740 thousand Polish army was armed, which in April 1920 launched an attack on Ukraine and occupied Zhitomir and Kyiv. General Wrangel's 100,000-strong White Army advanced in southern Ukraine. Fierce fighting on the Polish front ended with a peace treaty signed on October 12, 1920. In November, Wrangel's troops were defeated in the Crimea. The main military operations of the Civil War ended. At the end of 1922, Japanese intervention troops were expelled from the Far East. Lenin called the victory of Soviet power in the Civil War a “historical miracle.” Why did it become possible? The Bolsheviks turned out to be more consistent in achieving their goals than their opponents. The position of the bulk of the country's population - the peasantry - depended on the resolution of such a cardinal issue as the agrarian one. The Decree on Land, which declared land to be the property of the whole people with its free transfer to the peasants, attracted the overwhelming majority of the peasants to the side of Soviet power. This made it possible to create a military-political union of workers and peasants, build a new mass army, and provide the city and army with food. Despite the fact that grain was often confiscated by force, through surplus appropriation, the majority of peasants believed in Soviet power. At the same time, the White Guards resolved the land issue in the interests not of the peasantry, but of the landowner class. In the territory controlled by Denikin, an order was issued for the third sheaf, according to which a third of the collected grain went to the returning landowner. The old order was restored in the village. The property rights of peasants were infringed. They were subject to exorbitant taxes, as well as indemnities for supporting Soviet power. Denikin's land policy was one of the main reasons for the defeat of his regime and the strengthening of the positions of the Bolsheviks. . Kolchak and Wrangel also decided to seriously affect landownership. The Kolchak government postponed the solution to the agrarian question indefinitely - until the convening of the National Assembly, and unauthorized land seizures were prohibited. Thus, Kolchak weakened his regime and helped strengthen the Bolshevik government. National programs. The leaders of the White movement, brought up with great-power traditions, were built on the sole idea of preserving a united and indivisible Russia; any significant concessions to the oppressed peoples were rejected. This contrasted with the policy of the Soviet government and its officially proclaimed principle of “self-determination up to the formation of independent states.” The Bolsheviks were able to make the population of the outskirts, where the decisive battles of the Civil War took place, their ally against those who strived for a “united and indivisible” Russia. The leaders of the anti-Soviet movement relied on Western assistance, which ultimately did not bring the expected results. . The Allies' policy was determined not by the interests of Russia, but solely by the intention to protect, first of all, their enormous capital invested in the Russian economy. As “compensation” for the assistance provided to the White Guards, the allies received the opportunity to plunder Russia’s national wealth. In order to “develop” the Far East, the interventionists opened representative offices, offices, bank branches, and joint-stock commercial and industrial enterprises in many cities of the region. In the USA, a special commission was created to exploit the riches of the Far East. The Americans' targets for profit were coal mines, mines, fisheries, railways, water transport, etc. In just three months of 1919, the interventionists exported more than 3 million valuable fur pelts, and in 1919 - 14 million poods. herring; Since 1918, large quantities of timber have been exported. Kolchak said in 1919: “My opinion is that they are not interested in creating a strong Russia... They need it.” The anti-Soviet movement was defeated because its leaders failed to achieve unity and coherence. between themselves. The interests of the common cause required the concentration of forces and power; instead, their fragmentation occurred. On the contrary, the ideas of the Communist Party, addressed to the vital interests of the majority of working people, united the people of Russia. Boris Savinkov, head of the Union for the Defense of the Motherland, bitterly admitted: “The armies of Kolchak and Denikin did not produce results because the “valiant” generals did not understand that an idea cannot be defeated with bayonets, that an idea must be opposed by the same idea, not read from books and not nurtured in traditions of Karamzin, but living, vital, understandable to every illiterate soldier and close to their hearts.” The Bolshevik Party turned the country into a single military camp and achieved the unity of the front and rear. Victory over anti-Soviet forces was impossible without the Red Army. Since the summer of 1918, the Soviet government moved from the voluntary principle of recruitment to compulsory military service for workers. The organizational principles of building a regular army were the following: centralism and unity of command, military discipline, maintaining constant combat readiness. A central military apparatus was created for the formation and management of the regular army, headed by the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic (chaired by L.D. Trotsky). As a result of mobilizations, the number of personnel in the armed forces by the end of 1920 exceeded 5 million people. The development of technical military troops began. In 1919, about 60 air and 45 armored detachments operated. At least 19 thousand internationalist fighters fought in the ranks of the Red Army. Officers and generals from the old army were recruited to serve in the Red Army, which was one of the greatest successes of Soviet power: A. Brusilov, D. Karbyshev, S. Kamenev, A. Egorov, A. Kork, I. Vatsetis and others. The role of partisan and underground movement in the white rear 1. . 0 It covered vast areas, especially in Ukraine, the North Caucasus, Siberia and the Far East. The communist Foreign Collegium in Odessa, which included French, Polish, Romanian, Serbian, Greek and English groups, was active among the soldiers of the Entente countries. The victory of Soviet power was also facilitated by the support of working people in foreign countries, who spoke out under the slogan “Hands off Soviet Russia!” In December 1919, Bordeaux port workers refused to load military shells for the interventionists and White Guards. In 1920, a number of strikes took place in France against the sending of military materials to the White Guards. In Great Britain in the fall of 1918, participants in workers' rallies threatened a general strike if the British government did not abandon attempts to suppress the Russian revolution by military force, etc. The speeches of workers in many countries of the world in support of Soviet Russia greatly contributed to the fact that the Allies were forced to withdraw their troops from Russia and then stop the armed intervention. References To prepare this work, materials from the site stroy.nm.ru were used
Civil War Difference
The most terrible of wars is civil. In it, relatives stand against each other: brothers, fathers and sons. Those who were a strong core become separate links of different fruits. Civil massacre reveals people. The division between whites and reds becomes stronger than family ties. Enemies appear in one family. It’s hard for a mother to sit at the table with her son’s killer, but her daughter chooses him as her husband. Hatred fills and hardens hearts.
The author shows how families collapse. The farmer, the peasant, who was thinking about the harvest, about bread, begins to calculate death and murder. The internal breakdown of a person is the essence of civil war. The attitude of literary scholars and historical figures of Russia to the description of battles is surprising. Stalin found the image of the White Guard Kornilov soft. Many tried to redirect Sholokhov's pen and change Melekhov's image. They wanted to see him as a real Bolshevik, but the author had a different goal. He showed the truth of life, the realities of the civil war, its true cruelty. The beauty of revolutionary events was revealed from a different side.
Essay on the topic: “My attitude to the civil war”
Essay on the topic: “My attitude to the Civil War.”
The Civil War is one of the greatest national tragedies that befell the Russian state. There are no and cannot be winners and losers in it. And it is no coincidence that it is called fratricidal. We, our descendants, will never understand or comprehend how fathers and sons, brothers, who stood on opposite sides of the barricades, generously and for a long time shed each other’s blood, how Russians shot at Russians. But each side fought for its own Russia, for its tomorrow, which it saw and understood in its own way.
Let's try to consider what were the reasons for such a fierce struggle and for what purposes the blood was shed.
I probably agree with the opinion of many historians who, among the causes of the war, highlight the violent seizure of political power by the Bolsheviks and a change in the form of ownership in the first place. The Bolsheviks abandon the principles of parliamentarism and disperse the Constituent Assembly, which was the collapse of the democratic alternative for the development of the country. The agrarian policy of the Bolsheviks in the spring-summer of 1918, which actually abolished the Decree on Land, made a significant part of the population doubt the policies pursued by the Bolsheviks. In addition, the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, concluded by the Soviet government, was regarded by wide circles of the Russian intelligentsia as humiliating and predatory for the state.
So, the Civil War in Russia has broken out. How does the Soviet leadership behave in this extremely difficult situation?
One of the greatest achievements, I believe, is the creation of a regular army. The Soviet government returned to the old type of army, which means discipline, strict hierarchy and maximum combat effectiveness. And Article 19 of the Constitution of the RSFSR, adopted by the Fifth All-Russian Congress of Soviets, imposed on all citizens of the republic the duty to defend the socialist fatherland, established universal military service, and the “honorable right to defend the revolution with arms in hand” was granted “only to the working people.”
A huge plus in the positive outcome of events was the fact that L.D. was appointed to the post of Chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council. Trotsky. He was a very energetic, decisive, tough man who was able to stop the tide of partisanship and anarchy.
It should also be noted that during the formation of the Red Army, old officers, former officers of the tsarist army, and experienced combat commanders were involved.
A military regime was proclaimed in the country. The Defense Council, which was headed by V.I. Lenin, dealt with the most important problems of ensuring the defense capability of the Republic. The Bolsheviks managed to mobilize all economic resources.
Probably, speaking about the reasons for the victory of the Bolsheviks, it should be noted the widespread support for the Soviet government among workers and peasants, and the high organizational abilities of communist leaders, which made it possible to unite society, as well as the propaganda of the social and national liberation goals of the war.
If we talk about the reasons for the defeat of the White movement, then first of all, in my opinion, we should note its fragmentation and the presence of internal contradictions, which led to the impossibility of developing a coherent program. Perhaps it would have been more expedient for White to gather the main forces in one region, making it an alternative center, but they considered it necessary to capture Moscow and Petrograd, and this required a significant army.
The civil war lasted 2 years. Bloody battles, famine and disease crippled Russia. The Soviet country lay in ruins. The economy was in shambles. Those who could not come to terms with the new regime left their homeland forever. In the foreign policy arena, Russia has also weakened its position.
But the Soviet Republic was able to preserve itself as a single state and became the nucleus for the subsequent unification of the peoples of the former empire.
