How and where Vasily Ivanovich Chapaev died: history and interesting facts. Death of Chapaev
the river in which Chapaev drowned
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Vasily Ivanovich Chapaev died on September 5, 1919, and the circumstances of his death are still shrouded in mystery.
In a famous feature film, the actor Boris Babochkin created a very lively and memorable image of the red division commander Vasily Chapaeva- dashing, desperate, uncompromising, on horseback, with a saber in hand... However, in reality, both the life and death of the division commander were somewhat different.
Hungry childhood
Vasya was the sixth child in a large peasant family - there were 9 children in total, and all of them were constantly hungry. Vasily was born premature and weak, so his parents warmed him up on the stove, wrapping him in his father’s large fur mitten.
When he grew up, his mother and father decided to enroll their son in the seminary - he would become a priest and would always be well-fed... However, the boy did not like studying at the seminary - those who were guilty were locked in a windswept plank shed in only a shirt, and the frosts that winter were severe. The boy ran away and decided to become a merchant.
But this business did not work out for him either. He could not follow the main rule of traders: “If you don’t deceive, you won’t sell.” All nature resisted deception and falsehood.
Not Chapaev, but Chepai, but actually Gavrilov
If you believe the documents, initially the family of the future division commander bore an ordinary Russian surname Gavrilovs. Once, back in the 19th century, one of the Gavrilovs, together with his younger brother, was loading logs and shouted as an elder: “Chepai, chapai!”, which means grab, hold. Apparently, they heard this word from his lips so often that in the end it became a nickname, and the whole family began to be called Chepaevs.
They say that the legendary division commander became Chapaev only in the book Dmitry Furmanov- it seemed to the writer that this way the surname acquired greater euphony. Another version says that a banal typo is to blame. But the few documents that have survived from the Civil War call the division commander both Chepaev and Chapaev. Most likely, the surname was then perceived by ear and written down according to who heard it.
Not two classes, but a military academy
It is generally accepted that Chapaev was almost illiterate - they say, he had only two classes of parish school behind him. In fact, later Vasily Ivanovich continued his education - he, like many other fighters, was required to undergo training at a military academy in order to improve general literacy and teach him to think strategically.
One of the fighters who studied with Chapaev later recalled that it was unbearable for Vasily Ivanovich to sit at his desk and cram, he kept trying to quit studying and leave, cursing: “How is this possible - fighting men at a desk!”
During his short study at the academy, the hot-headed divisional commander constantly argued with the teachers. For example, when asked by the old general to tell what the Neman River is famous for, Chapaev cockily replied: “Do you know what the Solyanka River is famous for? Because I fought with the Cossacks there!”
Another legend tells how Chapaev disdainfully called the ancient Romans “blind kittens” who failed to win the battle of Cannes, and promised the famous military theorist, the famous general Sechenov, “show such generals how to fight!”
Not a horse, but a car
Chapaev was one of the first commanders of the Red Army to replace his dashing horse with a comfortable car. The fact is that the wound in the thigh received by Chapaev during the First World War did not allow him to ride a horse painlessly. Therefore, the division commander happily moved into the car at the first opportunity. And he spent a long time looking through car brands until he finally settled on a Ford, capable of squeezing 70 miles per hour off-road without any problems.
He was driven by a driver, whom the commander chose no less meticulously than the car. When the next driver candidate Nikolay Ivanov, met his expectations and the division commander sighed calmly - the driver was suddenly recalled to Moscow and made his sister’s personal driver Vladimir Lenin,Anna Ulyanova-Elizarova. Ivanov really didn’t want to change his boss; he had to be taken away from Chapaev almost by force.
Features of personal life
Chapaev's first wife, Pelageya Metlina, gave him three children. And then she left her husband, cheating on him with a neighbor. Chapaev was forced to watch how their daughter grew and blossomed - an exact copy of her beautiful mother.
Chapaev's second wife (civilian) was the widow of his military friend Petra Kamishkertseva. Her name was also Pelageya, and she also went on a spree with someone else. When the red commander caught them, he almost killed the insidious seducer. Pelageya, on reflection, decided to make peace with Chapaev after some time, but she was not allowed to visit him at his headquarters, following the orders of Vasily Ivanovich. The angry Pelageya, as they said, took revenge on the commander, one day revealing the location and number of the red troops to the white troops.
They were wounded not in the arm, but in the stomach, and they did not swim by themselves, but on a raft
It is still unknown exactly how Chapaev died.
Version one. In a battle with the Whites, Vasily Ivanovich was seriously wounded in the stomach. The soldiers ferried him across the Ural River on a raft, but the commander still died from loss of blood. He was buried in the coastal sand, covering his tracks so that the whites would not find him. Later, the river changed its course, and it became impossible to find Chapaev’s grave.
Version two. The Red Divisional Commander was wounded in the arm and tried to swim across the Urals on his own, but was unable to cope with the strong current and drowned.
Version three. He did not drown or die at all, but remained alive and came to Mikhail Frunze to be held accountable under martial law for the city surrendered to whites. He was first arrested, and then documents were drawn up about the supposedly dead hero, so that a beautiful heroic legend would be preserved in history. Chapaev himself was forced to live out his life under a false name.
The story is quite implausible, since in those years it would have been unlikely that an experienced military leader would have been so easily written off. Most likely, this is a legend composed by soldiers who really wanted their beloved commander to survive.
In which river did V.I. Chapaev drown?
- He was wounded and died from blood loss while crossing the Ural River.
- Drowned in the Ural River. This version has become a textbook, as it was used in the film and book about Chapaev. To many it seemed logical. After all, Chapaev was seen on one bank, but he did not swim to the second, and his body was not found.
- Killed in captivity by Kolchak officer Trofimov-Mirsky.
Death of Chapaev
Music: Y. Milyutin Words: Z. Alexandrova
Ural, Ural River,
No sound, no light.
Chapaev tore the rifle from the wall:
Guys, this is not the time to watch your dreams!
Cossack horses snore at the gates,
An alarming dawn rises over the village.
Ural, Ural River,
Heavy clouds.
Chapaev, luck has left you.
Everywhere and always you won the battle,
But friends die in this battle,
Enemies are surrounding you, and you can't hesitate...
Ural, Ural River,
The water is colder than a bayonet.
The last bullet was fired at the enemy.
Alive, hide on the other side
They fire after us: short, short...
And, wounded in the arm, Chapaev floats away.
Ural, Ural River,
His hand weakens.
The damned bullet caught up in the water.
Comrade Chapaev! Not visible anywhere.
Comrade Chapaev, our fighting friend!
Circles spread over his head.
Ural, Ural River,
His grave is deep.
Run to the red detachments, river,
Say that your beloved Chapaev died.
Let the cavalry rush, let the bullets whistle,
Let the Reds take revenge on the Whites!
Ural, Ural River,
Stormy and wide...
The exact cause of Chapaev's death has not been established. There are several versions of his death:
One version even says that Chapaev survived, swam out of the waters of the Urals, but lost his memory. At least, such legends circulated in Kazakhstan in the 60s of the 20th century.
Vasily Ivanovich Chapaev was born into a peasant family, where he was the sixth child. His father enrolled him in a parish school. Afterwards he worked as a carpenter.
He went to the front in 1915 and graduated with the rank of sergeant major. For his bravery he was awarded various awards: the St. George Medal and the St. George Cross of three degrees.
In 1917 he joined the Communist Party, and was subsequently appointed regiment commander, brigade commander, and then division chief.
Chapaev died in 1919 while crossing the Ural River, but it is still unknown how he died. There is an opinion that he died on the bank of the river, some in the middle of the river, and there is an opinion that he was generally in captivity.
In all likelihood, he drowned in the Dnieper or Ural river, as I remember from a book I read in my youth. The book was written from the words of eyewitnesses, and the author himself fought together with Chapaev. He kept notes and a diary; a bullet overtook him in the river while he was swimming across the river during a sudden battle, and he had no other choice.
According to one version, Chapaev drowned while swimming across the Ural River.
Chapaev did not drown. Two Hungarians (Petka), who transported the wounded Chapaev across the Urals, buried him at the gate in the damp coastal sand.
The first thing that allows us to doubt the official version is that Furmanov was not an eyewitness to the death of Vasily Ivanovich. When writing the novel, he used the memories of the few surviving participants in the battle in Lbischensk. At first glance, this is a reliable source. But to understand the picture, let’s imagine that battle: blood, a merciless enemy, mutilated corpses, retreat, confusion. You never know who drowned in the river. Moreover, not a single surviving soldier with whom the author spoke confirmed that he saw the corpse of the division commander, then how can one say that he died? It seems that Furmanov, deliberately mythologizing Chapaev’s personality when writing the novel, created a generalized image of the heroic red commander. A heroic death for the hero.
Vasily Ivanovich Chapaev
Another version was first heard from the lips of Chapaev’s eldest son, Alexander. According to him, two Hungarian Red Army soldiers put the wounded Chapaev on a raft made from half a gate and transported him across the Urals. But on the other side it turned out that Chapaev died from loss of blood. The Hungarians buried his body with their hands in the coastal sand and covered it with reeds so that the Cossacks would not find the grave. This story was subsequently confirmed by one of the participants in the events, who in 1962 sent a letter from Hungary to Chapaev’s daughter with a detailed description of the death of the division commander.
D. Furmanov, V. Chapaev (right)
But why were they silent for so long? Maybe they were forbidden to disclose the details of those events. But some are sure that the letter itself is not a cry from the distant past, designed to shed light on the death of a hero, but a cynical KGB operation, the goals of which are unclear.
One of the legends appeared later. On February 9, 1926, the newspaper “Krasnoyarsk Worker” published sensational news: “... Kolchak officer Trofimov-Mirsky was arrested, who in 1919 killed the captured and legendary division chief Chapaev. Mirsky served as an accountant in an artel of disabled people in Penza.”
The most mysterious version says that Chapaev still managed to swim across the Urals. And, having released the fighters, he went to Frunze in Samara. But along the way he became very ill and spent some time in some unknown village. After recovery, Vasily Ivanovich finally made it to Samara... where he was arrested. The fact is that after the night battle in Lbischensk, Chapaev was listed as dead. He has already been declared a hero, who steadfastly fought for the ideas of the party and died for them. His example shook the country and raised morale. The news that Chapaev was alive meant only one thing - the national hero abandoned his soldiers and succumbed to flight. The top management could not allow this!
Vasily Chapaev on an IZOGIZ postcard
This version is also based on the memories and conjectures of eyewitnesses. Vasily Sityaev assured that in 1941 he met with a soldier of the 25th Infantry Division, who showed him the personal belongings of the division commander and told him that after crossing to the opposite bank of the Urals, the division commander went to Frunze.
Documentary film "Chapaev"
It is difficult to say which of these versions of Chapaev’s death is the most truthful. Some historians are generally inclined to believe that the historical role of the division commander in the Civil War is extremely small. And all the myths and legends that glorified Chapaev were created by the party for its own purposes. But, judging by the reviews of those who knew Vasily Ivanovich closely, he was a real person and soldier. He was not only an excellent warrior, but also a sensitive commander to his subordinates. He took care of them and did not hesitate, in the words of Dmitry Furmanov, to “dance with the soldiers.” And we can definitely say that Vasily Chapaev was true to his ideals to the end. It deserves respect.
When the first gymnasium in the city of Balakovo, Saratov region, following the example of the Rossiya TV channel, conducted their survey “The Name of Balakov,” they were very surprised: in first place was... Chapaev. Already almost forgotten by the official country, the hero of the civil war is alive in people's memory! And not only because in Balakovo there is his house-museum, a street named after him, not only because there are a huge number of anecdotes about him. It’s just that young people (and not only) always admire courageous, strong and fair people. And this is exactly what Vasily Ivanovich was, whose years of childhood, youth and maturity fell on the Balakovo period of his biography. It is no coincidence that even during Chapaev’s life, during the years of the Civil War, legends were formed about him.
And today the identity of the legendary red commander causes a lot of controversy. Either they are trying to challenge his talent as a genius military leader, explaining Chapaev’s numerous victories by chance, or they are calling him almost an anarchist, who rushed with his troops between the Volga and the Urals, obeying no one. And in one of the recent publications, the ardent Bolshevik was presented as a deeply religious person and was almost offered to be canonized (!):
“Raised in an Orthodox family, seasoned in war, Chapaev carried his sincere faith in God throughout his entire life. He knew many prayers by heart and asked the Lord for help before every serious matter. He prayed in the trenches of the First World War and on the fronts of the Civil War. Even after becoming a division commander, before each battle he kicked everyone out of his room so that he could say prayer alone.
Only God's help can explain his constant, amazing victories over opponents who many times outnumbered the Chapaevites in numbers and weapons. Perhaps this is the main discovery that the hero’s great-granddaughter gives us on the occasion of the anniversary of her main ancestor. Trusting in the Lord God, calling upon Him for help in difficult circumstances more than made up for the lack of education that is so diligently shown to us in the feature film, books and anecdotes about Chapaev. Their authors did not understand at all, or concealed for political reasons, what was the secret of the invincibility of this unlearned commander. And he was in the righteousness and power of God. Truly “blessed are the poor in spirit”... division commanders.”
But the most mysterious and mysterious still remains his death.
It is believed that Vasily Ivanovich Chapaev died on September 5, 1919. The White Guards attacked the headquarters of his division in Lbischensk early in the morning. According to the official version, which was reflected in the Vasilyev brothers’ film “Chapaev,” Chapaev’s sentries fell asleep, so the White Guard attack was unexpected. In fact, everything was not like that.
Already in his famous story “Chapaev” Dmitry Furmanov asks the question: “it still remains surprising and unsolved: who took the divisional school off guard on that fateful night? Chapaev did not give such an order to anyone.” And in the essay “The Lbischenskaya Drama,” which was written a year earlier than the story, the writer-commissar had another question: why “didn’t they notice” the Cossacks approaching Lbischensk?
the reconnaissance pilots who flew on the eve of the tragedy, or the mounted reconnaissance, which was tasked with exploring the steppe as deeply as possible?
The “truth” was discovered by the daughter of the legendary division commander (chief of the division), Klavdiya Vasilievna. Having studied a huge number of documents, she came to the conclusion that the command of the 4th Army was to blame for the death of Chapaev. His inept, and perhaps deliberate, actions led to Chapaev’s headquarters in Lbischensk being isolated from his regiments, which were scattered dozens of miles from each other. Any White Guard unit would have broken through into such a “hole.” “A catastrophe could happen any day now,” Chapaev warned the army staff the day before the Lbischensk tragedy and, having learned that enemy patrols had appeared nearby, he ordered his troops to be on full combat readiness. And these guys are only 200-300 fighters from the training team, and even practically without weapons. Try to fight! And yet the Chapaevites gave the enemies a real fight!
According to the official version, the wounded Chapai, who was fleeing by swimming through the Urals, was caught by an enemy bullet in the middle of the river. However, when the Reds entered Lbischensk, they found neither witnesses to the death of the division commander nor his body. Thinking that he had been carried downstream, the command even announced a reward of 10 thousand rubles in gold for the one who found the hero. But alas...
In the early 60s. XX century Klavdia Vasilievna received a strange letter from a Soviet officer who served in Hungary. He wrote that after watching the film “Chapaev” in the cinema, two Hungarians approached him and said that Vasily Ivanovich did not die like that. According to them, when the division commander was wounded three times (in the arm, in the head and in the stomach), Commissar Baturin, who took command, ordered the commander to be transported to the other side of the Urals at any cost. In one of the courtyards, the gate was removed from its hinges, the seriously wounded Chapaev was placed on it, like on a raft, and, accompanied by four soldiers (these two Hungarians were allegedly among them), they were sent across the river. But during the crossing, Vasily Ivanovich died. The Chapaevites buried him on the shore so that the White Guards would not violate the body of their beloved commander. After such news, Klavdia Vasilievna tried to find her father’s body and went to Lbischensk. But it turned out that the Urals had changed its course, and the grave, if there was one, was most likely washed away.
And during the so-called perestroika (80-90s of the XX century), another version was published in some media: Chapaev, for his obstinacy and people’s love for him, was arrested by his own. They, after many years, having kept the hero in dungeons, shot him. This option was voiced quite recently, in the spring of 2008, in one of the television “series” of “The Battle of Psychics,” when clairvoyants were given the task of finding out from Chapaev’s belongings how he died.
And the imagination of a certain Vladimir Savchenko ran wild even more. In his story “The Fifth Dimension”, he put another, completely absurd “version” into the mouth of the “Chapaevite father”:
“He wasted his division there. Gave the Cossacks the opportunity to behead the headquarters. He barely escaped by swimming across the Ural River and hid in the reeds, wounded, until we recaptured Lbischensk... Well, we found him wounded in the reeds, barely alive. To the hospital, of course. Out of the division, of course. They wanted to put him on trial: they don’t let you do something like that in war, so that he would have his headquarters, the head of the division, destroyed. But... they hushed it up taking into account past merits. After recovery, I heard, he was assigned to a regiment. Not in twenty-five, of course. And then, to tell the truth, I lost sight of him. They said he fought on the Don, then in Central Asia - and not bad. Then, in 1930, I saw his book “With Kutyakov in the Ural steppes”…”
Comments, as they say, are unnecessary. It is enough to clarify that it was Kutyakov who wrote the book “With Chapaev in the Ural Steppes,” and everything immediately becomes clear. But an ignorant person would certainly perceive (and, perhaps, perceive) these words as “discovery”, “truth”. The only “excuse” for the author is that this story is fantastic and was published in the “Golden (!) Shelf of Fantasy” series.
And Chapaev’s great-granddaughter Evgenia is convinced that her great-grandfather died in battle, but she has repeatedly stated in her interviews that he was simply handed over to the whites: “At one fine moment, the Soviet government got in the way of Chapai, and he had to be stopped at any cost so that the revolution did not go along an unplanned channel.” Evgenia is trying to prove that Chapaev’s headquarters was deliberately left without cover. However, in her opinion, allegedly based on the memories of her grandmother, the daughter of the legendary division commander Claudia Vasilievna, his common-law wife is also to blame for Chapaev’s death:
“Pelageya became interested in the head of the artillery depot, Georgy Zhivolozhinov. Zhivozhinov rushed between the whites and the reds, just like Furmanov: whoever wins, we’ll join him. At that time, he was kind of for the Reds and couldn’t stand Chapaev. But fame flew across the country not about him, but about Chapaev. Envy led Zhivolozhinov to the idea of seducing Vasily Ivanovich’s common-law wife, Pelageya. And he began to visit her in the absence of Vasily Ivanovich. One day Chapaev came home from the front on leave and found his opponent in his house. His machine gunner Mikhail Zhivaev broke out a window and began firing a machine gun on top of the bed with his lovers. Pelageya immediately covered herself with Chapaev’s youngest son. Chapaev left for the front on the same day. The next day, Klavdia Vasilievna recalled, Pelageya took Chapaev’s youngest son Arkady and went to the front to make peace with him. The son was allowed to see his father, and the unfaithful wife was sent home. Pelageya got angry and on the way back she stopped at the Whites’ headquarters and said that Chapaev’s headquarters was not covered at all and the soldiers had training rifles... So Pelageya took revenge on her husband purely in a woman’s way. By the way, when Chapaev died, Zhivolozhinov continued to live with Pelageya, taking his children into his care as a guardian. They say that when the family sat down at the table, he took a revolver and shot off the ends of the children’s hair - such was his hatred of Chapaev, which he transferred to his children.”
At the instigation of Evgenia, this news spread like a fan through the media - “Chapaev died due to his wife’s betrayal.”
And in recent years, “White Guard” versions of Chapaev’s death have appeared.
The article “Chapayev – destroy!” was posted on the website of the educational, methodological, informational and organizational portal of military-patriotic education “Styag”. Author Sergei Balmasov calls the defeat of Chapaev’s headquarters in Lbischensk “one of the most outstanding and amazing victories of the White Guards over the Bolsheviks.” He even states that this “special operation... should go down in the history of military art.”
Balmasov claims that, “according to the most conservative estimates, during the Battle of Lbischen the Reds lost at least 2,500 killed and captured, and the total losses of the Whites amounted to only 118 people: 24 killed and 94 wounded.” The same article states that “the trophies taken in Lbischensk turned out to be huge. Ammunition, food, equipment for 2 divisions, a radio station, machine guns, cinematographic devices, 4 airplanes were captured.” But these figures do not fit in with the data that has been replicated many times by various publications, including those that are sympathetic to the fighters against Soviet power:
“The Reds there were 300 cadets of the division school, the headquarters and political department of the division, signalmen,” reports Valery Shambarov in the book “White Guard”.
In addition, according to Balmasov, “Combat General N.N. was placed at the head of a detachment with a total number of 1,192 people with 9 machine guns and 2 guns. Borodin." Shambarov claims that the White Guard detachment consisted of only 300 sabers, one gun and one machine gun and defeated the Chapaevites only thanks to an unexpected attack. And another “researcher” attributes the “merit” in the destruction of Chapaev not to Borodin at all, but to a certain Colonel M.I. Izergin, whose “finest hour” “was the Lbischensky raid of units of the 1st Ural Corps, planned by him and carried out under his leadership, which ended with the defeat of the headquarters of the 25th Red Infantry Division located in Lbischensk and the death of division commander Chapaev.”
All these “true” stories are nothing more than fiction or distortion of facts. This is indicated by the fact that they mention Chapaev’s assistant Pyotr Isaev, who allegedly saved the division commander. But, firstly, in fact, Isaev was never Chapaev’s adjutant. First, he served as commander of a communications battalion, then as regimental commissar, and finally, he was entrusted with special assignments: for example, delivering a report to army headquarters. And secondly, Isaev was not in Lbischensk that night. His life ended tragically later: he could not forgive himself for not being with Chapaev in the last minutes of his life, and committed suicide.
The testimony of another White Guard, a certain Nikolai Trofimov-Mirsky, is closer to the truth. They were kept for a long time in the secret archives of the NKVD-KGB-FSB and were published only in 2002 - in the Parliamentary Gazette. Trofimov-Mirsky admitted that Chapaev did not drown, but, on his orders, was hacked to pieces with swords. And then the Cossacks burned about three hundred Red Army soldiers in a barn. This partly explains why Chapaev’s body was not found.
This “version,” by the way, echoes the oral memories of some Chapaevites. When in 1934 the Vasilyev brothers’ film Chapaev, which became a world bestseller, was released on the country’s screens, many of those who fought under the legendary division commander were outraged by the fiction of the scriptwriters and directors. First of all, they didn’t like that Chapaev was portrayed as a tramp, semi-literate and sloppy. Their commander was different: he was always smart, disciplined and demanded the same from his subordinates. And he was, as they say, a strategist from God. Despite his parochial education, he thought big, like a real commander. It was not for nothing that he had St. George's crosses of all degrees and was considered practically invincible.
Among the dissatisfied Chapaevites was Arkhip Mayorov. A native of the village. Maloye Perekopnoye (a village not far from Balakovo), he created a detachment of Red Guards in his native village, liberated Samara from the White Czechs, and after the death of Chapaev, he led the vanguard of his 25th division. Mayorov did not believe that Chapaev could succumb to panic and retreat: the cadets could, but Chapaev could not. He told his niece Maria, who served for many years in the Balakovo police, that when the Reds, two days after the tragedy, entered Lbischensk, they saw that in the building where the Chapaev headquarters was located, there was blood everywhere, the furniture was all scattered and chopped up. This means that there was a real hand-to-hand battle going on here: Chapaev and his staff fought until their last breath...
However, by that time the official version of the hero’s death had already taken shape, and no one was going to find out the truth. And how will you find out if there are no witnesses left?..
By the way, when they learned about the death of Chapaev in Balakovo, the local executive committee, firstly, decided to bury the hero in his second homeland and sent a certain Rachkin for the body of the “leader of the Balakovo proletariat”, and, secondly, proposed to file a petition with the center to rename the city Balakovo to Chepaev (then the division commander's surname was written with an "e"). For preliminary expenses, 2 thousand rubles were even allocated from local departments. However, Chapaev’s body was not found, and the city was not renamed.
But the hero’s name was given to his division. By order of the RVS (Revolutionary Military Council) of the Turkfront on September 10 (according to other sources, October 4), 1919.
Chapaev became a symbol of the courageous and selfless struggle for a bright future. And not only in the USSR. In 1937-39, for example, the international battalion named after Chapaev was organized in the Spanish People's Army, which heroically fought against the fascist invaders. In this battalion a song was composed:
Franco and Hitler, destruction awaits you.
Here we are - a faithful stronghold of Spain!
After all, Chapaev’s son is each of us!
With the name of Chapaev they went on the attack during the Great Patriotic War. To raise the morale of the Soviet people and further strengthen their faith in victory, a short film “Chapaev is with us” was urgently shot, in which Chapaev (actor Babochkin) sails out of the Urals, puts on his famous burka and goes to beat the fascists.
This desire to “revive” your favorite heroes, to immortalize them, is characteristic of any nation. They could not ignore Chapaev with such special attention. In 1938 in the village. In Kurilovka, Kuibyshev region (now Samara), a fairy tale was written down that ends with these words: “Chapayev survived and changed his nickname, he began to call himself not Chapaev, but something else. For your mistake, it means that there is no shame in public. And now, people say, Chapaev is alive, he has become a big boss, so fair and kind.”
And in Balakovo they always remembered their fellow countryman. Even before the film appeared (at the beginning of 1934), the Balakovites came up with a proposal to organize a fundraiser for the construction of a squadron of Red Partisan aircraft, including an aircraft named after V.I. Chapaev, and raise money for a monument, restore the house in which he lived, installing a memorial plaque on it.
But the city council took up the matter only two years later. Then local residents and public organizations collected various documents, household items and carpentry tools that Chapaev used. The authorities restored the house and surrounded it with a fence, but did not manage to create a full-fledged museum: the war began.
It officially opened only in 1948. True, in the house in which not Chapaev lived, but his parents, after the death of their son.
This was immediately “forgotten” in Soviet times, and in 1969 a memorial plaque was installed on the house with the inscription “Vasily Ivanovich Chapaev lived in this house from 1897 to 1913.” This discrepancy between real and book biography became the reason for the fact that during the period of “democratic transformations” of the late 80-90s. XX century an attempt was made to overthrow the hero from his pedestal. In Balakovo, a huge building, built next to Chapaev’s house for a full-fledged museum, was given over to a communications center. But this attempt failed miserably. To destroy the myths of the past, we need to replace them with something. But there is nothing to replace it yet. Therefore, Chapaev still remains a legend that will be attractive to researchers for a long time.
P.S. The material was written in 2011. But last year, in the Samara archive, I found a passport for this house, drawn up in 1912 for the purpose of taxing city real estate, where it is written that Ivan Stepanovich Chepaev acquired it in 1900, and there were 6 people in his family. Thus, after all, the future people's commander grew up in this small and cramped house. I decided not to amend this text. Let it be seen how, over time, on the basis of newly identified documents, historical axioms change, the proof of which, it would seem, is no longer needed.
More details about this in the article “Legend returns registration”, which is posted on my page.