Uritsky Moses Solomonovich

Uritsky Moisey Solomonovich (1873-1918). In October 1917, a member of the Military Revolutionary Center of the Bolshevik Party for leading an armed coup and overthrow of the Russian government. From March 10, 1918, Chairman of the Petrograd Extraordinary Commission. From April 1918 he combined this post with the post of Commissioner of Internal Affairs of the Northern Region. Responsible for the arrests and executions of opponents of the Bolshevik coup and repressions against representatives of social classes hostile, in the opinion of the Bolsheviks. After October, Uritsky was appointed a member of the Military Revolutionary Committee, temporary commissar of the Military Revolutionary Committee in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and commissar for the affairs of the Constituent Assembly, and after the government moved to Moscow, chairman of the PetroChka and People's Commissar of the Northern Commune for foreign and internal affairs. Lenin recommended him for this post, despite the fact that Uritsky was an irreconcilable opponent of the Brest-Litovsk Peace Treaty with Germany. Apparently, Uritsky’s extremely defiant behavior during the arrest of members of the imperial family and the dispersal of the Constituent Assembly played a role here. For example, on the statement of one of the arrested about the disgusting conditions in the cell, he wrote the following resolution: “We didn’t build it, it’s not for you to complain.” The answer is purely Leninist, especially considering the hothouse conditions in which Uritsky himself was kept in the Lukyanovskaya prison under tsarism. How Uritsky behaved as chairman of the Human Rights Watch is quite well known. Here, for example, is what Margulies writes in his book “The Year of Intervention”: “The secretary of the Danish embassy, ​​Peters, told how Uritsky boasted to him that he had signed 23 death sentences in one day.” They say that Uritsky was not cruel by nature. But his positive inclinations began to disappear in the bloody atmosphere of the first year of the revolution. It is possible that Aldanov (Landau) is also right, who wrote in his essay “The Murder of Uritsky” that such behavior of Uritsky can be explained by his late joining the Bolsheviks, which gave him a feeling of guilt before the revolution. But one should not discount his weakness of will and unwillingness to resist the bloodthirsty pressure of Zinoviev and Lenin. This was especially evident after the murder of Volodarsky on June 20, 1918, when Lenin sent the following telegram to Zinoviev: “June 26, 1918. Also to Lashevich and other members of the Central Committee. Comrade Zinoviev! Only today we heard in the Central Committee that in St. Petersburg the workers wanted to respond to the murder of Volodarsky with mass terror and that you (not you personally, but the St. Petersburg Tsekists or Pekists) kept it back. I strongly protest! We are compromising ourselves: even in the resolutions of the Council of Deputies we threaten with mass terror, but when it comes down to it, we slow down the revolutionary initiative of the masses, which is quite correct. This is impossible! Terrorists will consider us wimps. It's arch-war time. It is necessary to encourage the energy and mass character of terror against counter-revolutionaries, and especially in St. Petersburg, whose example is decisive.” Uritsky knew very well that in those days there were no calls for mass terror in any of the St. Petersburg newspapers or at any rally. But he did not dare to confront Lenin and Zinoviev. It was this mass terror that served as the main cause of Uritsky’s death, since one of his victims was a certain Perelzweig, a close friend of Kannegiser. On August 30, 1918, he was killed in the lobby of the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs by Leonid Kannegiser, who stated that he was taking revenge for the shooting of his friend, a cadet of the Mikhailovsky Artillery School.