Inveterate "illness" of prejudice against partisans". Relationships between G. Eiche, Commander of the 5th Army of the Workers' and Peasants' Red Army, and the insurgent forces of Western Siberia (1919-1920)

For a long time, Russian historiography has been avoiding the controversial and intricate episodes of the Civil War in Russia due to the specifics of a conformist nature. Such episodes include, among others, the problem of effort unification between the regular 5 th Army of RKKA [Workers' and Peasants' Red Army] and the insurgent (partisan) forces of Western Siberia during the elimination of the anti-Bolshevik regime of Admiral A.V. Kolchak (November 1919 - January 1920). The development vector of this process was largely determined by a personal factor, namely the will of Commander of the 5th Army, the "Red Lett" Genrich Eiche. The objective of this article is to consider the specifics of G. Eiche's personal interaction with the insurgent troops and the evolution of his views regarding the problem of using partisan forces in the context of military actions conducted by the 5th Army he had been leading within Western Siberia. The framework of the resource base for the research were materials from a number of Russian archives (Russian State Military Archive, State Archive of Novosibirsk Oblast, State Historical Museum) that were introduced to the academic circulation for the first time ever and archive documents that had been published earlier in regional subject digests. In this sense, a special attention should be justly paid to the operative documentation of the 5 th Army's directorship and the memoirs by G. Eiche and his major antagonist, one of the leaders of Altai partisans, Ya.P. Zhigalin. Based on the complex of these and other materials, the author succeeded in reconstructing the actions G. Eiche undertook on the verge of 1919/1920 to implement the insurgent forces of Western Siberia: on the one hand, as a source of march reinforcements for the 5th Army that was suffering from both combat losses and a typhoid outbreak and, on the other hand, as a strike advance force of RKKA in Siberia and a full participant of military actions. However, due to a number of reasons discussed in the article, these attempts on the part of the commander of the 5 th Army generally failed. Particular attention is focused on the unsuccessful experience of G. Eiche to direct vicariously the military actions of the insurgent groups in Altai and Yenisei Provinces of Russia that failed to execute any of the operative orders of the army commander. Finally, it was this particular experience that underlined the general mental disappointment of G. Eiche in the potential, fighting and moral qualities of the partisan movement of Western Siberia. These negative feelings proved mutual. Later, the insurgent veterans, when talking about G. Eiche's personality, noted that he possessed "a biased attitude" and "inveterate "illness" of a prejudice against partisans". The present research enabled to come to a conclusion that the negative perception of partisans by the commander of the 5th army had indeed taken place. However, it was not a result of his arbitrariness or prejudice, but, instead, was quite a well-grounded and, in many respects, just opinion of a military specialist.

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