The Adventures of Commandant Keene
On the second floor of the city executive committee building there is a gallery of portraits of Kharkov leaders. Among the smiling merchants, nobles and Soviet workers, the gloomy face of a man in a jacket with a pipe in his teeth stands out. This Pavel Andreevich Kin (1881-1943), twice chairman of the city council and city commandant. This man was one of four pre-war heads of the city council who died a non-violent death.
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Bolshevik nicknamed "Andrey"
Pavel Andreevich Kin was born in 1882 in the Mizirichi colony, Surazh district, Chernigov province. Mother is Russian, father is German. At the age of twelve he came to Kharkov and became an apprentice at the confectionery factory of Georges Bormann, where he worked for three years. Then Pavel could be found in Lugansk among the workers of the locomotive plant. In 1902, Keene worked in Baku, where he became close to the Social Democrats. His party experience was counted from the following year, 1903.
In August 1905, Keen appears in Yekaterinburg. Local historian N. Berdnikov reports: “When the first Yekaterinburg Council of Workers’ Deputies arose in 1905, the foundry worker of the Yates plant, the Bolshevik P. Kin, became its deputy chairman.” Thus, Pavel Andreevich turned out to be one of the first experimenters in Soviet construction.
Pavel Kin never left his pipe
In February 1917, he reappeared in Kharkov, where he organized detachments of the Red Guard and workers' militia. In April of the same year, he became a deputy of the city council of workers' and soldiers' deputies.
It must be said that the council was a body that simultaneously performed the duties of both the municipality and the trade union. It existed in parallel with the city duma, which was re-elected in the summer. In Kharkov, 9 political parties and blocs took part in the elections to the city duma on July 1917, 13.
The Social Revolutionaries (46,4% of the votes, 54 seats), the Cadets (13,5% of the votes, 16 vowels), the Mensheviks (13 vowel portfolios), and the Bolsheviks (11 vowels, including Pavel Kin) were elected to the vowels. The city leadership became “two-headed”: the functions of the “city mayor” were divided between the mayor himself, Sergei Stefanovich, and the chairman of the city duma, Yakov Rubinstein.
The majority in both the council and the Duma belonged to the Socialist Revolutionaries and Mensheviks. However, in August the council elected a Bolshevik, Pavel Kin, as its chairman. N. Valentinov described him in 1919 as follows: “Language-tied, he spoke not entirely smoothly, in simple working language, but efficiently and with conviction. The face is characteristic, expressive, energetic. It’s clear that before you is a man of iron will who will stop at nothing.”
If in the capitals socialists of all stripes did not get along with each other, then in Kharkov they successfully collaborated - together they introduced an 8-hour working day at enterprises, distributed food and maintained order on the streets, because the provisional government disbanded the tsarist police, and appeared in a gendarme uniform on the street was simply unsafe for life.
The presence of a common cause pushed inter-party contradictions to the stage. It was on the stages of Kharkov theaters and clubs that lectures, performances and discussions took place, and Kharkov residents (at that time they were Kharkov residents) not only gladly attended such substitute performances, but also paid money for admission. If Keen or his party comrade Artyom (To Sergeev), someone said that ninety years later, if people would pay for participation in rallies, they would laugh in their faces.
Commandant in action
By the beginning of 1918, it was completely unclear who the authorities were in the city. It was only possible to clearly say who had nothing to do with the city - the Central Rada until April 8. The Soviet government of Ukraine appeared in our city, but was perceived by the local population as a group of exiles on foreign territory, awaiting delivery to Kyiv or anywhere else outside the province. The Central Council of People's Commissars, headed by Lenin, was just beginning to build, as they would say now, a vertical of power. The City Duma was, like a bankrupt enterprise, in the process of liquidation. The local council slowly took full power and, together with its neighbors, on the ruins of the empire, created the Donetsk-Krivoy Rog Republic, headed by the undisputed leader of both Kharkov and the entire surrounding industrial region, the Bolshevik Artem.
Commandant's office of Kharkov
It was he who came up with the idea of establishing the position of city commandant with emergency powers. And Pavel Kin took this place. And he had to simply restore order in the complete absence of any legislative framework. Here are just a few examples of his rule-making activities. V. Kornilov discovered them in newspapers of that time: “March 9, 1918 toThe commandant of Kharkov, Pavel Kin, issued an order banning travel around the city in carriages and cabs with inflated tires. The order is quite strange. It would seem that it would be more profitable for any mayor to achieve greater safety of pavements through the use of tires. But according to Keene, inflated tires were a “luxury item” and therefore subject to ban».
The commandant of Kharkov also issued an order aimed at combating drug addiction: “From this date, all pharmacies and drug stores and warehouses of pharmaceutical goods are prohibited from dispensing COCAINE and MORPHINE without a proper doctor’s prescription. Those guilty of failure to comply with this order will be punished by me to the fullest extent of wartime.” By the same order, Keen fined the owners of the pharmacy on Dmitrievskaya, 12 Zalman, Shaev and Shapiro for selling cocaine: “For the first time I’ll fine you a thousand rubles. with replacement by arrest for one month in case of insolvency.”
Of course, Keene had to act tough and in a situation of complete disintegration of military units. E. Zub reports: “...once Comrade Kin managed to arrest one hundred and six people at once. And not some “class enemies,” but comrades in arms—soldiers of the security company at the General Staff for the Fight against Counter-Revolution. Precisely because they fought too zealously. For taking possession of someone else's property."
Who was the military force of the commandant? The Cheka had not yet been properly formed, the army became the main source of concern... Keene had several armed formations on which he could rely. Firstly, this is Sanovich’s detachment, about which nothing is known. V. Kornilov believes that the then well-known Stepan Saenko was hiding under this pseudonym (more about him below).
The newspaper “Vozrozhdenie” (not at all communist!) wrote: “Sanovich’s detachment consists of one hundred people and contains all types of weapons: there are scooter drivers, machine gunners, bomb throwers. The detachment's premises are a real fortress, possessing colossal power of resistance. There is a machine gun mounted directly opposite the front door, ready to tear uninvited visitors to shreds. Machine guns were placed against every window on the second and third floors of the house. The entire Mironositskaya Square is under target and can be cleared of all living things at any moment.”
Stepan Saenko
Secondly, party units. And not only the Bolsheviks. Menshevik fighting squads and detachments of Jewish socialist organizations - “Bund” and “Tseire-Ziona” - came to Keene’s aid. The Social Revolutionaries and anarchists also tried to stop the barrage of banditry.
Exactly how much can be understood from the third paragraph of the “Order for the mountains.” Kharkov No. 8”: “On the night from the 17th to the 18th of this year, when checking police stations, it was discovered that in most of them the service was carried out carelessly, the stations were not guarded, as a result of which robbers could even attack the stations themselves. At the 1st precinct, reserve police officers were playing cards for money, while the officer on duty was sleeping. In the 4th and 6th sections, no security has been established for the site. Considering such a security arrangement unacceptable, I reprimand the police commissioner and the collective administration...” This document was signed by the assistant city commandant, Comrade Svet, on the morning of March 19, 1918. And already at 22.00 his lifeless body arrived at the anatomical museum. The entire leadership of the DKR came to his funeral.
On April 8, when the Kaiser’s troops took the city, the commandant was one of the last to leave. Of the entire commandant’s team, only Moisei Tevelev did not have time to evacuate and was shot. Keene promised to return and kept his promise less than a year later.
The commandant remained popular. N. Valentinov later wrote: “It came to the point that when the Germans approached Kharkov closely, the bourgeoisie decided, if Kin did not disappear, to intercede for him, to defend him.” Keene promised to return and kept his promise less than a year later.
Another Kin and “dear Stepochka”
Kin managed to be both the commandant of Lugansk and the head of the Kazan Cheka. He was also in Sumy. The Red commander, and later diplomat N. Ravich, wrote in his memoirs about the clothing of the patrols of the city of Sumy. The local commandant outfits wore red riding breeches, red caftans and caps with a red band. The city commandant P.A. Keen justified that this was simply necessary to distinguish patrol officers from variegatedly dressed Red Army soldiers.
He returned to Kharkov only in February 1919, again as commandant, and then as chairman of the provincial executive committee. And then it began...
Veteran A.I. Selyavkin recalled: “On January 3, 1919, the 5th Glukhovsky Regiment of the 2nd Ukrainian Division and the Red Cossack Regiment were the first to enter liberated Kharkov. An armored detachment also entered the city with them. Even during the battles on the outskirts of Kharkov, KhPZ workers captured the Balashovsky railway station, and then, together with the railway workers, occupied the South Station. Restoration in Kharkov…
Victims of Petliura's terror and fighters and commanders who died as heroes during the capture of Kharkov were buried on Cathedral Square (now Universitetskaya Gorka). When our regiments entered the city, the soldiers of the German division, who had not yet had time to evacuate from Kharkov, were in the barracks. They declared neutrality, but they greeted us with red flags from their windows.
Soon, representatives of the German soldiers' committee came to the military commandant of the city, P. A. Keene, with a request to allow them to give military honors to the fallen fighters of the Russian revolution.
Keane, with an ever-smoking pipe in his teeth, who invariably maintained icy composure under all circumstances and dangers, upon hearing this request, put the pipe on the table and began to carefully examine the delegation. The German soldiers were concentrated, serious, smart, dressed in uniform, but without shoulder straps.
- Fine! “Kin finally said, this time pronouncing the letter “r” clearly, and immediately called Artem. He agreed and warned Pavel Andreevich about taking the necessary measures in case of possible provocations from the German command.”
It was not scattered detachments of incomprehensible party affiliation that were settling scores with the Kharkovites who were found to have connections with the Germans and their Ukrainian protégés, but the already fully formed Cheka led by Sylvester Pokko. The most memorable security officer of that time was Stepan Afanasyevich Saenko, who remained in the stories of Arkady Averchenko, and in the poems of Velimir Khlebnikov, and in the novel by gr. Alexei Tolstoy "Walking through torment." I won’t talk about it for a long time; there is enough literature on this matter. Let me just say that, on Keene’s instructions, he organized a concentration camp on the street. Tchaikovskaya (now house number 16). The bodies of those killed after torture were dumped in nearby Koshachiy Yar. Stepan Afanasyevich lived a long life and died in 1973. At the 2nd cemetery you can still see his grave with the epitaph “Sleep well, dear Styopochka.”
But the Kharkovites didn’t recognize Kin. N. Valentinov wrote: “Every rally, every speech clearly demonstrated: not a trace remained of the old Kin: there is a cruel Kin, as strong in character and strong will as before, but somewhere his relative humanity has disappeared, somewhere all that which reconciled the bourgeois groups with him... And when general disappointment began in the Bolsheviks and among these lower classes, Kin was the last to lose confidence... In December, greeted as welcome, in July he left, accompanied by hatred and contempt.” Now Kharkov residents saw liberators in the Volunteer Army.
But even after the arrival of the White Guards, Kina’s sister was not handed over to counterintelligence. Throughout the reign of the Whites, she, a simple seamstress, was hidden in his home by one of the most active supporters of General Denikin, a member of the City Duma from the Cadet Party, Doctor Yurchenko. In 1921, Keane appeared at the trial as a witness for the defense and saved his family's benefactor from the "highest measure of social security."
After the defeat of Denikin, Pavel Andreevich led various regions of Ukraine and Russia, and for some time was the head of the NKVD of the Ukrainian SSR. His last position was chairman of the Tuapse district executive committee. It is known that Keen remained in economic work until his death in 1943.
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