To confuse the enemy and force him to scatter his forces, Savinkov and Perkhurov scheduled their rebellions at staggered times, with the Rybinsk operations to commence during the night of July 7–8 and the one at Murom the following night.
Perkhurov, who despite having little time had prepared the Iaroslavl rebellion with great precision, caught the Bolshevik authorities completely by surprise.159 The action began at 2 a.m. on July 6, when a detachment of officers seized key points in the city: the arsenal, militia headquarters, the bank, and the post office. Another detachment proceeded to arrest leading Bolshevik and soviet officials, some of whom it is said to have shot. Officers employed as instructors in a local Red Army school promptly sided with the rebels, bringing along several machine guns and an armored car. Perkhurov proclaimed himself commander of the Iaroslavl Branch of the Northern Volunteer Army. These initial operations met with almost no resistance, and by daybreak the center of the city was in rebel hands. Soon others went over to the rebels, among them members of the militia, students, workers, and peasants: a Communist historian estimates that of the 6,000 participants in the Iaroslavl uprising, only 1,000 or so were officers.160 It was a genuine popular rebellion against the Bolshevik regime, in which the peasants from the nearby villages proved especially helpful. The rebels tried to enlist for their cause German POWs who happened to have been passing through Iaroslavl en route home, but they met with refusal, following which they interned the Germans in the city theater. On July 8 Perkhurov informed them that his forces considered themselves at war with the Central Powers.161
Whereas the Murom and Rybinsk uprisings, each involving 300–400 men, collapsed in a matter of hours, Perkhurov held out for sixteen days. The pro-Bolshevik forces, gathered in the suburbs, counterattacked the following night, but failed to recapture the city. They then subjected it to intense artillery bombardment, which destroyed the water supply, with disastrous consequences for the rebels because the Reds controlled access to the Volga River, the only alternative source. After a week or so of inconclusive fighting, Trotsky placed in charge of the Iaroslavl operation A. I. Gekker, an ex-captain of the Imperial Army who had gone over to the Bolsheviks on the eve of the October coup. Gekker attacked the city with infantry, artillery, and airplanes. In the heavy shelling, most of the city, with its celebrated medieval churches and monasteries, was gutted.162 The rebels, so short of water they scooped it up from gutters, finally had to give up. On July 20, their representatives approached the German Repatriation Commission and declared they wished to surrender: since they were at war with Germany, they expected to be treated as prisoners of war. The head of the German commission accepted these terms and promised not to turn the rebels over to the Red Army. On July 21, the rebels laid down their arms and for a few hours Iaroslavl was under the occupation of German POWs. That evening, however, confronted with an ultimatum from the Bolsheviks, the Germans broke their promise and turned over to them the prisoners. The Red Guards sorted out some 350 officers, ex-officials, affluent citizens, and students, marched them out of town and had them shot.163 It was the first mass execution by the Bolsheviks. One consequence of the Iaroslavl uprising was that Moscow ordered indiscriminate arrests of former Imperial officers: many of them were shot without a trial even as others were being inducted into the Red Army.
90. Lieutenant-Colonel A. P. Perkhurov.
Savinkov managed to escape from Rybinsk. He later joined Admiral Alexander Kolchak’s armies and organized raids behind Bolshevik lines. After Kolchak’s defeat, he fled to Western Europe, where he kept busy organizing anti-Bolshevik movements and smuggling agents into the Soviet Union. In August 1924, under the illusion that he could play an important role in post-Leninist Soviet Russia, he allowed himself to be lured by the GPU (the successor to the Cheka) into illegally crossing the frontier. He was promptly arrested. At a public trial later that year, he confessed to all his crimes, stressing the alleged involvement of the Allies in his subversive activities and pleading for mercy. His death sentence was commuted to ten years’ imprisonment. He died the following year in jail under highly suspicious circumstances: officially, he was said to have committed suicide, but it is more likely that he was killed by the GPU—according to some accounts, by being pushed from a window.164
