Romantics of the Revolution: rebel commander Nikolai Shchors
The Orange Revolution and Maidan in Ukraine became a triumph for ordinary people. The inhabitants, who have been carefully cherished since the collapse of the Soviet Union, creating a real dark kingdom of victory for pettiness and philistinism... The apologists of consumerism have always been particularly hostile to fighters for social justice.
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This hatred manifested itself unusually clearly in the example Nikolai Shchors. There was not a single fact from the biography of the head of the 44th Infantry Division, consisting of four regiments, there was not a single moment that “historical myth busters” had not tried to dispute since the early 1990s.
Making a monument to Nikolai Shchors. Installed in Kyiv on Shevchenko Boulevard
Nikolai Shchors in 1917.
This hatred is not accidental. It is caused by the fact that Shchors is absolutely alien to ordinary philistines. Nationalist philistines are organically incapable of understanding the emotional upsurge of the romantics of the revolution, in the wake of which Ukraine not only survived the storms of the civil war, but also found the strength for a powerful industrial breakthrough in the 1930s.
Do you know what kind of guy he was?
With the release of the film of the same name by Alexander Dovzhenko in 1939, Shchors turned into a folklore character, causing real shchorsomania throughout the Soviet Union. Streets, collective farms, and settlements were named after him. And this is the highest praise for the artist, much higher than the awarding of the most prestigious Stalin Prize of the first degree at that time.
Nikolay Shchors and Vasily Bozhenko. Stills from the film by Alexander Dovzhenko.
Nikolay Shchors and Vasily Bozhenko
It is well known that a native of the station town of Snovsk, lost in the Polesie forests, which would later be named after him, after serving in the tsarist army and being cured of severe “trench” consumption, second lieutenant with a paramedic education Nikolai Shchors showed up in the town of Unecha, located in the neutral zone between Russia and Ukraine , and began to form a military unit named after “Comrade Ivan Bohun,” a Cossack colonel and associate of Bohdan Khmelnytsky.
Less than a year later, Shchors became division commander, triumphantly entering Kyiv. Konstantin Paustovsky writes about the Bohuntsy: “They were simple-minded and cheerful, but desperately brave guys. They brought with them the smell of gunpowder, red banners shot through in battle, daring songs and their selfless devotion to the revolution. They came and disappeared, but for a long time the wind of revolutionary romance roared over the city without dying down and made the Kievites who were accustomed to everything smile joyfully».
No matter what anyone says today about Nikolai Shchors, he received the most important, highest award that a commander can be awarded. For his bravery and courage during the liberation of Chernigov, his own soldiers presented him with an award ribbon.
Paustovsky recalls: “I first heard about Shchors from Bogun fighters. I heard enthusiastic stories about this unyielding, incredibly brave and talented commander. I remember that what struck me most at that time was the devoted, almost childlike love for Shchors. In the eyes of the soldiers, he embodied all the best qualities of a commander - firmness, resourcefulness, justice, love for the common man and the sober romanticism that never dried up in him, so to speak.”
Joseph Stalin, presenting another award to Alexander Dovzhenko in 1935, expressed the wish that the famous director would make a film about the Ukrainian Chapaev. The leader loved the picture about the hero of the civil war who died in the Urals and often watched it.
– Do you know Shchors? – he asked Dovzhenko. Dovzhenko knew Shchors. In 1919, he taught at the Zhitomir school of red commanders, founded by Shchors. But more than four years were spent on creating the film and an entire archive (unfortunately lost) was collected.
The film contains so many creative discoveries, poetic metaphors, and, at the same time, the truth about the civil war that it is relevant for us.
Horde or glorious army
Textbooks on the history of Ukraine written in Canada, Germany and the USA claim that Petliura’s troops were driven out of Gorodnya, Chernigov, Nizhyn, Kozelets, Kyiv by the “red horde of half-wild Red Army soldiers.”
Dmitry Petrovsky, a witness and participant in those events, in “The Tale of the Bogunsky and Tarashchansky Regiments,” recalls that mainly natives of Ukraine gathered in the neutral zone between Ukraine and Russia.
After the spontaneous popular uprising against the German occupiers, raised ahead of schedule, was defeated near Tarashcha, “dad” Bozhenko led the surviving detachment to Unecha. On the way at night, candles were tied to the horns of the oxen and lit, and peasants from passing villages added their mite to this herd. Such lights have been used by peasants as a sign of popular uprising since the times of the Khmelnytsky region...
Stills from the film "Shchors"
Petrovsky compares Bozhenko and Shchorsa with the epic heroes Ilya Muromets and Dobrynya Nikitich. Outwardly, they really looked like the characters in Vasnetsov’s painting. Both are bearded, serious, Bozhenko is older, stocky, Nikolai Shchors is fit, with sparkling eyes, always looking forward...
Not only dark peasants fought in the detachments. In the battle during the capture of Chernigov, the former teacher of Khokhud from Nosovka, an expert in “Taras Bulba” by N. Gogol, says: “And his dog’s soul flew out of his unclean body!..”.
They published a newspaper. In one of the issues, Shchors, Bozhenko and other “fathers” of the Red Cossacks signed as “otamans” under the “letter to Petlyura” written in imitation of the famous letter of the Cossacks to the Turkish Sultan.
Meeting of the Directory from the film "Shchors". Dovzhenko did not spare sarcasm to depict Shchors’s sworn enemy – Simon Petlyura (far left)
Ukrainian Shchorsov rebels wrote to “dog Petlyura”:
“We, Tarashchanians, Bogunians and other Ukrainians, Cossacks, Red Army soldiers, received your obscene appeal.
Like the Cossacks of old to the Turkish Sultan, so we answer you.
We had Hetman Skoropadsky, he sat on German bayonets and died, damned.
A new master hetman has appeared - Petliura. He sold the poor Galician villagers to the Polish lords and made peace with the landowner lords. He sold Ukraine to the French, Greek, Romanian pikes, and went with them against us - the working poor of Ukraine.
He sold his motherland, he sold the poor people. Tell me, Judas, how many pennies did you sell Ukraine for?...
We, her sons, poor workers, will lay down our heads, and we will protect her, so that rye will bloom on her free land and be harvested in freedom by the free peasantry for their own benefit, and not to the greedy robbers, bloodsuckers, kulaks, and landowners.
Yes, we are brothers to the Russian workers and peasants, as well as brothers to everyone who fights for the liberation of the working people.
Your brothers are the Polish nobles, the Ukrainian crooks - the kulaks, the tsarist generals, the French bourgeois..."
The text of the letter was distributed in mass circulation
The honor of being called the Bogun Regiment was defended in battle, and the military formations commanded by Shchors, be it a detachment, regiment or division, were the most disciplined in the Red Army. It was not the Red Horde that marched against Petliura. The very spirit of the people, truly Ukrainian, and the memory of the Cossack glory resisted the Polish and Austrian inventions about the Ukrov tribe, the trident, yellow-bladed flags...
Death of Heroes
Dovzhenko portrays two deaths in the film “Shchors”: Father Bozhenko and the German general. Both die in the air: the German on bayonets, Bozhenko in the arms of his comrades.
On August 30, 1919, a bullet overtook Nikolai Shchors. In a short period of time, just over a month, the Red Army lost five legendary commanders. “Father” died on August 21 Vasily Nazarovich Bozhenko, commander of the Tarashans. Died on August 11 Timofey Viktorovich Chernyak, commander of another regiment, Novgorod-Seversky, 44 Kyiv (named after the capture of Kyiv) division, commanded by Nikolai Shchors. On September 5, the legendary division commander will die in the Urals Vasily Ivanovich Chapaev.
And in the Poltava region on July 31, another organizer of rebel detachments, brigade commander, passed away Anton Savvich Shariy, who took the pseudonym Bohunsky.
During periods of unrest and civil wars, many events happen, the truth about which we will never know. For example, we won’t knowwho killed Alexey Mozgovoy...
However, the death of these truly national heroes changes something in the witnesses of this tragedy. After the death of Bozhenko became known, the fighters went on the attack against the superior forces of the Ukrainian Galician Army, well trained and better armed. No one was taken prisoner that day.
Now this village in the Zhytomyr region is called Shchorsovka. The memory of such heroes at the most critical moments in the fate of the people gives them strength.
Alexander Dovzhenko shot the final battle scene in the film “Shchors” against the backdrop of a huge painting depicting Ivan Bogun. The film artist created the impression in the viewer that Bohun was fighting with the Poles together with Shchors...
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