Sergei Georgievich Lazo(1894-1920) - Russian nobleman, second lieutenant of the Russian Imperial Army. During the collapse of the Russian Empire, he was a Soviet military leader and statesman who took an active part in establishing Soviet power in Siberia and the Far East, and a participant in the Civil War. In 1917 he became a Left Socialist Revolutionary, and in the spring of 1918 - a Bolshevik.
It is no coincidence that Sergei Lazo is sometimes called the Don Quixote of the revolution. He renounced his origins, everything that had been instilled in him since childhood, fought and died at the age of twenty-six, distant lands from his home - and all for ideals.
Only ideals could force a nobleman, an officer of the Imperial Army who received a good education, to rush into the abyss of revolutionary activity.
Sergei Lazo before the revolution
Sergei Georgievich Lazo was born in 1894 in Bessarabia, into a noble family of Moldavian origin. He studied at the St. Petersburg Institute of Technology and Moscow University. From an early age, he was distinguished by extreme maximalism and a desire for justice, so it is not at all surprising that during his student years he was a participant in the activities of revolutionary circles, of which there were plenty in the university environment.
In July 1916, Sergei Lazo was mobilized into the Imperial Army, and in December of the same year, Ensign Lazo was assigned to the 15th Siberian Reserve Rifle Regiment, which was stationed in Krasnoyarsk. Here, in Krasnoyarsk, Lazo became close to political exiles, joined the Socialist Revolutionary Party (SRs) and began, together with his party comrades, to conduct propaganda against the war among the soldiers.
In March 1917, news of the February revolution in St. Petersburg reached Krasnoyarsk. At a general meeting, the soldiers of the 4th company of the rifle regiment decided to remove from their duties Second Lieutenant Smirnov, who declared allegiance to the oath, and to elect Warrant Officer Lazo as their commander. In June, the Krasnoyarsk Council sent Sergei Lazo as a delegate to Petrograd to the First All-Russian Congress of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies. At the congress, Lazo was greatly impressed by Lenin’s speech; the ideas that were voiced by the leader of the world proletariat in this speech seemed to him even more radical, and, therefore, even more attractive to him than the ideas of the Socialist Revolutionaries. Sergei Lazo joined the Bolsheviks.
Sergei Lazo during the Civil War
At the end of 1917, Soviet power was established in Irkutsk, Omsk, and other Siberian cities, and Lazo took a direct part in this. However, already in the fall of 1918, Soviet power in Siberia fell and the dictatorship of the Supreme Ruler Admiral Kolchak was established. The Bolshevik Party goes underground.
Sergei Lazo becomes a member of the underground Far Eastern Regional Committee of the RCP (b), commands a partisan detachment of Primorye.
The Lazo detachment, like most partisan detachments during the Civil War, was very colorful. It consisted, for the most part, of the poorest proletariat, that is, from the very poor, as well as from criminals from the Chita prison, who were released by the Bolsheviks on the condition that the lads would go to fight for the world revolution.
In addition, two female commissars served in the detachment. One of them, a former high school student, daughter of the governor of Transbaikalia, is a convinced anarchist. She communicated with criminals exclusively “over a hairdryer” and famously handled a huge Mauser. The second - Olga Grabenko - was a Ukrainian beauty and a real Bolshevik. It was with her that Lazo had an affair, which ended in marriage. The young people spent their honeymoon trying to get out of the encirclement. Such are the vicissitudes of the Civil War.
Arrest of Sergei Lazo
In 1920, the Kolchak government fell. The partisans decided that the right moment had come to overthrow Kolchak’s governor, General Rozanov, in Vladivostok. And Lazo began to implement the plan.
On January 31, 1920, partisans, numbering several hundred, captured the city, primarily occupying the station, post office and telegraph office. Rozanov fled from Vladivostok. However, for some reason Lazo did not take into account the fact that Vladivostok was occupied by Japanese invaders. For the time being, they observed the events with samurai restraint, however, the famous Nikolaev incident, during which partisans and anarchists burned the city of Nikolaevsk and destroyed the Japanese garrison located in it, prompted them to action.
Lazo was arrested right in the Kolchak counterintelligence building. Together with him, two other active members of the underground, Sibirtsev and Lutsky, were arrested. They were kept there for several days, in the counterintelligence building. Then they transported it somewhere. Olga Lazo was looking for her husband, but the Japanese headquarters did not tell her where he was.
The mystery of the death of Sergei Lazo
The textbook version says that the Japanese handed Lazo, as well as Sibirtsev and Lutsky, over to the White Cossacks, and they, after torture, burned Lazo alive in a locomotive firebox, and his associates were first shot and then burned too. This was apparently told by a certain nameless driver who saw how the Japanese handed over to the Cossacks three bags in which people were fighting, and this was either at the Ruzhino station, or at Muravyevo-Amurskaya (now the Lazo station). However, this is difficult to believe for two reasons.
Firstly, why would the Japanese hand over those arrested to the Cossacks, and even drag them so far from Vladivostok? Secondly, the opening of the locomotive firebox was not large enough to push a person into it. It seems, fortunately for Lazo, such a terrible death is nothing more than a legend.
Monument to Sergei Lazo in Pereyaslavka, Khabarovsk Territory
Back in 1920, the Italian journalist Klempasco, an employee of the Japan Chronicle, reported that Lazo was shot at Cape Egersheld in Vladivostok, and his corpse was burned. Since Klempasko, and this is a documented fact, was not only a journalist, but also an intelligence officer who communicated with Japanese officers, this information has a high degree of reliability.
from birth
Events
marriage: Olga Andreevna Grabenko (Lazo) [Grabenki] b. 1898 d. 1971
1919 birth of a child: Vladivostok, Ada Sergeevna Lazo [Lazo] b. 1919 d. 1993
May 1920 death:
Notes
Sergei Lazo was born in 1894 in Bessarabia, and died 26 years later, far away.
Sergei Georgievich Lazo (February 23 (March 7) 1894, village of Pyatra, Orhei district, Bessarabian province, Russian Empire - May 1920, Muravyovo-Amurskaya station) - Russian revolutionary, one of the Soviet leaders in Siberia and the Far East, participant in the Civil War . Left Socialist Revolutionary, since the spring of 1918 - Bolshevik.
He studied at the St. Petersburg Institute of Technology, then at the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics of the Imperial Moscow University, and participated in the work of revolutionary student circles.
In July 1916, he was mobilized into the Imperial Army, graduated from the Alekseevsky Infantry School in Moscow and was promoted to officer (ensign, then second lieutenant). In December 1916, he was assigned to the 15th Siberian Reserve Rifle Regiment in Krasnoyarsk. There he became close to political exiles and, together with them, began to conduct defeatist propaganda among the soldiers.
He joined the Socialist Revolutionary Party and joined the left faction.
During the February Revolution, Lazo arrested the governor of the Yenisei province Ya. G. Gololobov and local senior officials. In March 1917 - member of the regimental committee, chairman of the soldiers' section of the Council. In the spring of 1917, he came to Petrograd as a deputy from the Krasnoyarsk Soviet and saw V. I. Ulyanov-Lenin for the only time in his life. Lazo really liked the radicalism of the Bolshevik leader. Returning to Krasnoyarsk, he organized a Red Guard detachment there. In October 1917 - delegate to the First All-Siberian Congress of Soviets. In October 1917, he took power in Krasnoyarsk into his own hands. The Commissioner of the Provisional Government telegraphed in those days to Petrograd:
“The Bolsheviks occupied the treasury, banks and all government offices. The garrison is in the hands of Ensign Lazo.”
Participated in the suppression of the uprising of cadets in Omsk and cadets, Cossacks, officers and students in December 1917 in Irkutsk. After this, he was appointed head of the garrison and military commandant of Irkutsk.
From the beginning of 1918 - a member of Centrosiberia, in February-August 1918 - commander of the troops of the Trans-Baikal Front. Under the command of Lazo, the red troops defeated the detachment of Ataman G. M. Semenov. At the same time, Lazo switched from the Socialist Revolutionary Party to the Bolshevik party. In the fall of 1918, after the fall of Bolshevik power in eastern Russia, he went underground and began organizing a partisan movement directed against the Provisional Siberian Government, and then the Supreme Ruler Admiral A.V. Kolchak. Since the fall of 1918 - a member of the underground Far Eastern Regional Committee of the RCP (b) in Vladivostok. From the spring of 1919 he commanded the partisan detachments of Primorye. Since December 1919 - head of the Military Revolutionary Headquarters for the preparation of the uprising in Primorye. One of the organizers of the coup in Vladivostok on January 31, 1920, as a result of which the power of the Kolchak governor - the chief commander of the Amur region, Lieutenant General S. N. Rozanov was overthrown and the Provisional Government of the Far East, controlled by the Bolsheviks, was formed - the Primorsky Regional Zemstvo Council.
The success of the uprising largely depended on the position of the officers of the ensign school on Russian Island. Lazo arrived to them on behalf of the leadership of the rebels and addressed them with a speech:
“Who are you, Russian people, Russian youth? Who are you for?! So I came to you alone, unarmed, you can take me hostage... you can kill me... This wonderful Russian city is the last one on your road! You have nowhere to retreat: then a foreign country... a foreign land... and a foreign sun... No, we did not sell the Russian soul in foreign taverns, we did not exchange it for overseas gold and guns... We are not hired, we defend our land with our own hands, we defend our land with our own breasts , we will fight with our lives for our homeland against foreign invasion! We will die for this Russian land on which I now stand, but we will not give it to anyone!” As a result, the school of warrant officers declared its neutrality in relation to the uprising, which made the fall of Rozanov's power inevitable.
On March 6, 1920, Lazo was appointed deputy chairman of the Military Council of the Provisional Government of the Far East - the Primorsky Regional Zemstvo Council, and at about the same time - a member of the Far Bureau of the Central Committee of the RCP (b).
After the Nikolaev incident, during which the Japanese garrison was destroyed, on the night of April 4-5, 1920, Lazo was arrested by the Japanese, and at the end of May 1920, Lazo and his comrades A.N. Lutsky and V.M. Sibirtsev were taken out by the Japanese troops from Vladivostok and handed over to the White Guard Cossacks. According to the widespread version, after torture, Sergei Lazo was burned alive in a locomotive firebox, and Lutsky and Sibirtsev were first shot and then burned in bags. However, the death of Lazo and his comrades was reported already in April 1920 by the Japanese newspaper Japan Chronicle - according to the newspaper, he was shot in Vladivostok, and the corpse was burned.
A few months later, allegations appeared with reference to an unnamed driver who saw how at the Ussuri station the Japanese handed over three bags containing three people to the Cossacks from Bochkarev’s detachment. The Cossacks tried to push them into the firebox of the locomotive, but they resisted, then they were shot and stuffed dead into the firebox.
“Soon help arrived in Irkutsk from other cities. The counter-revolutionary rebellion was liquidated, power passed to the Soviets. Sergei Lazo remained in Irkutsk. He was appointed commandant of the city and head of the garrison, being at the same time a member of the military commissariat of Central Siberia. Great assistance in this work was provided to him by the former Tsarist General Alexei Taube, who went over to the side of the revolution. He was a major military specialist and, working hand in hand with Lazo, passed on his experience and knowledge to him."
Twelve thousand kilometers separate the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic from the shores of the Pacific Ocean. In one of the regions of the republic, not far from the city of Orhei, there is the village of Piatra (now the village of Lazo).
At the entrance to the village there is an obelisk topped with a five-pointed star. The inscription on it says: “In this village, the legendary hero of the Civil War Sergei Georgievich Lazo was born in 1894 and spent his childhood.” In the house where Sergei Lazo spent his childhood, there is a school named after him and a classroom-museum.
Sergei Lazo's parents came from an old Moldovan noble family with advanced democratic traditions. Sergei's father Georgy Ivanovich Lazo in 1887, during the period of repressions by the tsarist government against revolutionary-minded students, was expelled from St. Petersburg University and moved to permanent residence in Bessarabia. Sergei's mother Elena Stepanovna had a higher agronomic education and devoted a lot of time to socially useful work among local peasants. Lazo's house had a large library, which was freely used by children. Parents did not fence their children off from communicating with peasants and village children, instilled in them work skills, discipline, toughened them physically, instilled in them honesty and respect for working people,
At that time, Moldova was a backward, oppressed outskirts of Russia. The situation of working Moldovans, especially peasants, was completely intolerable. They were mercilessly exploited by landowners and tsarist officials, brutally suppressing the slightest manifestations of national self-awareness.
Sergei Lazo was born on March 7, 1894 in the village of Piatra, Republic of Moldova. The boy was born into a wealthy noble family. In the fall of 1912, after graduating from high school, the young man entered the St. Petersburg Institute of Technology, but two years later he returned home. Due to his mother’s illness, he lived for some time in the village and in Chisinau. In the fall of 1914, he entered the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics of the Moscow State University named after Mikhail Lomonosov and at the same time the historical and philosophical department of the Moscow City People's University named after Alfons Shanyavsky.
In July 1916, Lazo was mobilized into the army. After graduating from the Alekseevsky Infantry School in Moscow, he was promoted to officer. In December 1916, he was assigned to the 15th Siberian Reserve Rifle Regiment in Krasnoyarsk. It was there that he became close to political exiles and, together with them, began to conduct propaganda against the war among the soldiers. Soon he joined the Socialist Revolutionary Party of the left faction.
In the spring of 1917, Lazo arrived in St. Petersburg as a deputy from the Krasnoyarsk council. Then for the only time in his life the young man saw Lenin live. Sergei Georgievich really liked the radicalism of the leader, and it was then that he decided to become a Bolshevik.
On the night of October 29, Lazo raised a combat alert for the Bolshevik military units of the garrison, which quickly occupied all government institutions, and the highest officials were almost immediately imprisoned.
Two months later, a performance of cadets, Cossacks, officers and students took place in Irkutsk. The “Left Bloc” sent detachments of Red Guards led by Vladimir Kaminsky, Sergei Lazo and Boris Shumyatsky to help the Bolsheviks in Irkutsk. At the end of December 1917, fierce fighting took place in Irkutsk. A combined detachment of soldiers and Red Guards under the command of Lazo, after many hours of fighting, captured the Tikhvin Church and launched an offensive along Amurskaya Street, trying to break through to the White House, but by the evening a counterattack by the cadets forced the Red units out of the city. The commander himself and his soldiers were captured. In the following days, Soviet power in Irkutsk was restored, Lazo was released and appointed military commandant and head of the Irkutsk garrison.
From the beginning of 1918, Lazo was appointed a member of Centrosibiria. From February to August of the same year he was commander of the troops of the Trans-Baikal Front. In the fall of 1918, after the fall of Bolshevik power in eastern Russia, he went underground and began organizing a partisan movement directed against the Provisional Siberian Government, and then against the Supreme Ruler, Admiral Alexander Kolchak. During the same period, Lazo acted as a member of the underground Far Eastern Regional Committee of the Bolshevik Workers' and Peasants' Party in Vladivostok. Since the spring of 1919, he commanded the partisan detachments of Primorye. At the end of 1919, Sergei Georgievich became the head of the Military Revolutionary Headquarters for preparing the uprising in Primorye.
In January 1920, the Far Eastern Committee of the RCP (b) appointed head of the joint operational headquarters of the military-revolutionary organization. Since March of the same year, he joined the Revolutionary Military Council of Primorye and the Far Eastern Bureau of the Central Committee of the RCP (b). At the same time he was a member of the military council of the Primorsky zemstvo government.
By decision of the IV Far Eastern Regional Party Conference, held from March 16 to 19, 1920 in Nikolsk-Ussuriysky, Sergei Lazo was appointed commander of the armed forces of the Far East. The military leader led the formation of the Primorsky Revolutionary Army, created by the end of March 1920 and numbering 25 thousand bayonets and sabers, 32 machine guns and 76 artillery pieces.
After news of Kolchak's fall in Siberia, the Bolsheviks of Vladivostok decided to overthrow his governor, General Sergei Rozanov. Lazo himself insisted on this. However, it later turned out that this was a fatal mistake. Storming Vladivostok, at that time filled with Japanese troops, was a very difficult task, but the partisan detachment still managed to occupy the city. Rozanov fled to Japan by ship. The interventionists, who numbered about 20-30 thousand people, initially only acted as observers. Under these conditions, Lazo wanted to proclaim Soviet power in Vladivostok. The commander’s soldiers began to execute executions of the “bourgeoisie” who turned to the Japanese garrison for help.
The Japanese performance took place on the night of April 4-5, 1920. As a result, almost all the Bolshevik leaders and many partisans were arrested. Sergei Lazo was arrested in the building of Kolchak’s former counterintelligence office, located on Poltavskaya Street.
Sergei Lazo, after long torture on April 20, 1920, was burned alive in a locomotive firebox, and his comrades, Alexei Lutsky and Vsevolod Sibirtsev, were first shot and then burned in bags. This happened at the Muraravevo-Amurskaya station, now the Lazo station of the Far Eastern Railway. There is another version of Lazo’s death, put forward by one of the Primorye local historians, according to which Lazo, under the name of warrant officer Kozlenko, was shot by the White Guard Cossacks on Egersheld and then burned there.
Memory of Sergei Lazo
Streets in many cities and towns of the country are named after Sergei Lazo:
In Russia:
In Tambov, a street was named in honor of Sergei Lazo
After Lazo’s death, the Muravyov-Amursky station of the Ussuri Railway, where he died, was renamed Lazo station.
In Samara there is Sergei Lazo Street. Also in the city of Kinel in the Samara region there is Lazo Street. In the city of Syzran there is also Lazo Street.
In the Primorsky Territory there is the Lazovsky district, the regional center is the village of Lazo, in the Dalnerechensky urban district - the village of Lazo.
In the Khabarovsk Territory - the Lazo district.
In Ulan-Ude there is a village within the city called Lazo.
In the Amur region there is a village called Lazo.
In Vladivostok, in the park next to the Primorsky Drama Theater, a monument to Sergei Lazo was erected on the pedestal of the destroyed monument to Admiral Zavoiko.
In the Verkhnebureinsky district of the Khabarovsk Territory, in the rural settlement of Alonka (the station of the same name on the BAM), a bust of Sergei Lazo was erected near school No. 19. This is due to the fact that this facility was designed and built by the Moldavian SSR.
In the city of Ussuriysk, Primorsky Territory, on October 25, 1972, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the end of the Civil War in the Far East, a locomotive-monument El-629 was erected, in the firebox of which revolutionaries were burned.
In the city of Chita, a monument to Sergei Lazo was erected, at the intersection of Lazo and Yaroslavsky streets.
In the city of Spassk-Dalniy, Primorsky Territory, there is a microdistrict named after Sergei Lazo.
Project 1171 large landing ship "Sergei Lazo" (1975-1994) as part of the Pacific Fleet.
In Stavropol, S. Lazo street
In Balakovo there is Sergei Lazo Street
In Tomsk there is an alley and Sergei Lazo street
In Kolomna there is Lazo Street
In Simferopol there is Sergei Lazo Street
In Krasnoyarsk there is Sergei Lazo Street
In Nelidovo there is Sergei Lazo Street
In St. Petersburg there is Lazo Street
In Moldavia:
The Bessarabian village of Piatra, where he was born, was also renamed Lazo after the region was annexed to the USSR, and after Moldova gained independence in 1991, it was again renamed Piatra. Lazo streets in several Moldovan cities, except Chisinau, and the Lazovsky district of the former Moldavian SSR were also renamed after the collapse of the USSR.
From 1944 to 1991, the Moldovan city of Singerei was called Lazovsk.
In Chisinau, a monument to Sergei Lazo was erected at the intersection of Decebal and Sarmizegetusa streets.
During the Soviet years, the Kotovsky and Lazo Museum functioned in Chisinau, but was liquidated in the 1990s.
The Chisinau Polytechnic Institute bore the name Lazo.
In art
In 1968, the biographical film of the same name “Sergei Lazo” was shot. Regimantas Adomaitis plays the role of Sergei Lazo.
In 1980, the premiere of composer David Gershfeld’s opera “Sergei Lazo” took place, in which Maria Biesu performed one of the main roles.
In 1985, the Moldova Film studio produced a three-part feature film directed by Vasile Pascaru, “The Life and Immortality of Sergei Lazo.” The film tells about the life path of Sergei Lazo from the moment of baptism until the last minute of his life. The role of Sergei Lazo was played by Gediminas Storpirshtis.
In the USSR, the IZOGIZ publishing house published a postcard with the image of S. Lazo.
In 1948, a USSR postage stamp dedicated to Lazo was issued.
The song “Waltz” by the rock group “Adaptation” mentions one of the versions of the death of Sergei Lazo.
The death of Sergei Lazo is mentioned in the song “Birds” by the rock group “Mongol Shuudan”: “I saw Lazo beating against the coals in the stove.”
Victor Pelevin’s story “The Yellow Arrow” mentions “a faceted bottle of expensive Lazo cognac with a flaming locomotive firebox on the label.”
Family of Sergei Lazo
Father - Georgy Ivanovich Lazo (1865-1903). In 1887, during the period of repressions by the tsarist government against revolutionary-minded students, he was expelled from St. Petersburg University and moved to permanent residence in Bessarabia.
Mother - Elena Stepanovna. Received higher agronomic education in Odessa and Paris. She devoted a lot of time to socially useful work among local peasants. In Chisinau she organized a hostel for female workers. Lazo's house had a large library, which was freely used by children. Parents did not fence their children off from communication with peasants and their children, instilled in them work skills, discipline, strengthened them physically, and instilled in them honesty and respect for working people.
Wife - Olga Andreevna Grabenko (1898-1971), historian, candidate of historical sciences. Teacher at the Frunze Military Academy. She was buried at the Novodevichy cemetery.
Daughter - Ada Sergeevna Lazo (1919, Vladivostok-1993, Moscow). Philologist, editor of Detgiz. In 1940 she married Vladimir Vasilyevich Lebedev (1891-1967).
Sergei Georgievich Lazo
Lazo Sergei Georgievich (23.II.1894 - May 1920) - hero of the civil war, Soviet military leader, Member of the Communist Party since 1918. Born in the village of Piatra (Chisinau province, now the village of Lazo, Orhei district). He studied at the 1st Chisinau Gymnasium, then at the St. Petersburg Technological Institute; in 1914 he transferred to the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics of Moscow University. In June 1916, he was mobilized into the army and sent to the Alekseevsky Military School in Moscow. In December 1916, with the rank of ensign, he was assigned to the 15th Siberian Reserve Infantry Regiment in Krasnoyarsk; here he became close to political exiles and carried out revolutionary work among the soldiers. After the February Revolution of 1917, he was elected a member of the regimental committee. In March 1917, during the first plenum of the Krasnoyarsk Council, Lazo brought his company to the disposal of the Council; was elected chairman of the soldiers' section of the Council. In December 1917, Lazo participated in the liquidation of the counter-revolutionary rebellion in Irkutsk, then became the military commandant of Irkutsk. From the beginning of 1918 - a member of Centrosiberia, from February 1918 - commander of the Trans-Baikal Front. Under the leadership of Lazo, Semenov's White Guard gangs were defeated. Since the fall of 1918 - a member of the underground Far Eastern Regional Committee of the RCP (b) in Vladivostok. In the spring of 1919, he was appointed commander of the partisan detachments of Primorye. Since December 1919 - head of the military-revolutionary headquarters for the preparation of the uprising in Primorye. On the night of January 31, 1920, the White Guard power in Primorye was overthrown. Lazo was appointed a member of the Revolutionary Military Council and a member of the Dal'buro of the Central Committee of the RCP(b); did a lot of work on organizing the revolutionary army. On April 4-5, 1920, Japanese interventionists seized power in Vladivostok and arrested members of the Revolutionary Military Council. At the end of May 1920, Lazo and other members of the RVS were taken by Japanese interventionists to the Muravyevo-Amurskaya station (now Lazo station) and, after torture, were burned in a locomotive furnace.
Soviet historical encyclopedia. In 16 volumes. - M.: Soviet Encyclopedia. 1973-1982. Volume 8, KOSSALA – MALTA. 1965.
Sergei Georgievich Lazo (1894-1920) belonged to those quite prosperous young people of the upper class who were irresistibly drawn to the reorganization of the world. Coming from the nobility of the Bessarabian province, after graduating from the Chisinau gymnasium, he studied at the St. Petersburg Institute of Technology and Moscow University, but devoted most of his time to activities in illegal student circles.
During World War I, Lazo graduated from a military school in Moscow and was promoted to officer, and in December 1916 he was assigned to the 15th Siberian reserve rifle regiment in Krasnoyarsk. Here he became close to political exiles and, together with them, began to conduct defeatist propaganda among the soldiers. In March 1917, he got the opportunity to move from words to action: he arrested the governor of Krasnoyarsk and local senior officials. In his political views, Lazo was then a left Socialist-Revolutionary internationalist (according to the revolutionary terminology of that time, “internationalist” meant defeatist) and in this capacity headed the soldiers’ section of the Krasnoyarsk Soviet of Deputies. However, he quickly became friends with the Bolsheviks and together with them prepared a coup. He created a Red Guard detachment in Krasnoyarsk and in November 1917 seized power in the city. Standing guard over the “conquests of the revolution” in Siberia, Lazo brutally suppressed the resistance of the cadets in Omsk and the December 1917 uprising of cadets, Cossacks, officers and students in Irkutsk, where he became a military commandant. He was also the initiator of the destruction of the “group of monarchists” in Tobolsk (that is, people who sympathized with the Tsar’s family imprisoned there), as well as the suppression of the anti-Soviet protest in Solikamsk.
From February 1918, Lazo commanded the Transbaikal Front, directed against the Cossacks, led by the esaul G.M. Semenov. He carried out repressions against the Siberian, Irkutsk, Transbaikal and Amur Cossacks. In the fall of 1918, after the fall of Bolshevik power in Siberia, he went underground and began organizing a partisan movement directed against the Supreme Ruler of Russia, Admiral A.V. Kolchak. By the summer of 1919, he united rebel groups from Transbaikalia to the Pacific Ocean under his leadership. These partisan detachments terrorized the local population, destroyed railroads, blew up and fired at trains, and killed officers, government officials, railroad workers, and miners in the mines.
Since December 1919, Lazo has been the head of the Military Revolutionary Headquarters for the preparation of an uprising in Primorye. In January 1920, when the Red Army occupied Siberia, this uprising succeeded; in Vladivostok, the “pink” Provisional Government of the Primorsky Regional Zemstvo Government was formed, and Lazo became a member of the Revolutionary Military Council and a member of the Far Bureau of the Central Committee of the RCP (b). On his initiative, in March of the same year, on the bridge over the Khor River near Khabarovsk, the Red partisans carried out a massacre of 120 captured officers and soldiers of the Horse-Jager Regiment, during which unarmed people were stabbed with bayonets, chopped with sabers, and their heads smashed with rifle butts. In the spring of 1920, the gangs of Yakov Tryapitsyn and Nina Lebedeva-Kiyashko, directly subordinate to Lazo, attacked Nikolaevsk-on-Amur and, in a few weeks of Red Terror, exterminated thousands of residents of this city, including almost the entire intelligentsia. During these operations, the Japanese garrison guarding the Japanese mission was also exterminated by the partisans. The Japanese could not forgive this: in April 1920, they arrested Lazo in Vladivostok, took him to the Muravyevo-Amurskaya station and, together with two other prominent Bolsheviks, burned him in a locomotive furnace.
Villages in the Khabarovsk and Primorsky territories and in Yakutia are named after this killer. Until recently, there was a village in Moldova called Lazo, but now it has been returned to its former name Singerei. In the Perovsky district of Moscow and the Krasnogvardeisky district of St. Petersburg there are Lazo streets.
The black book of names that have no place on the map of Russia. Comp. S.V. Volkov. M., “Posev”, 2004.
Essays:
Diaries and letters, Vladivostok, 1959.
Literature:
Sergey Lazo. Memories and documents. Sat., M., 1938; Lazo O. A., People's Hero S. Lazo, Irkutsk, 1957; Gubelman M., Lazo. 1894-1920, M., 1956.
It is no coincidence that Sergei Lazo is sometimes called the Don Quixote of the revolution. He renounced his origins, everything that had been instilled in him since childhood, fought and died at the age of twenty-six, distant lands from his home - and all for ideals.
Only ideals could force a nobleman, an officer of the Imperial Army who received a good education, to rush into the abyss of revolutionary activity.
Before the revolution
Sergei Georgievich Lazo was born in 1894 in Bessarabia, into a noble family of Moldavian origin. He studied at the St. Petersburg Institute of Technology and Moscow University. From an early age, he was distinguished by extreme maximalism and a desire for justice, so it is not at all surprising that during his student years he was a participant in the activities of revolutionary circles, of which there were plenty in the university environment.
In July 1916, Sergei Lazo was mobilized into the Imperial Army, and in December of the same year, Ensign Lazo was assigned to the 15th Siberian Reserve Rifle Regiment, which was stationed in Krasnoyarsk. Here, in Krasnoyarsk, Lazo became close to political exiles, joined the Socialist Revolutionary Party (SRs) and began, together with his party comrades, to conduct propaganda against the war among the soldiers.
In March 1917, news of the February revolution in St. Petersburg reached Krasnoyarsk. At a general meeting, the soldiers of the 4th company of the rifle regiment decided to remove from their duties Second Lieutenant Smirnov, who declared allegiance to the oath, and to elect Warrant Officer Lazo as their commander. In June, the Krasnoyarsk Council sent Sergei Lazo as a delegate to Petrograd to the First All-Russian Congress of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies. At the congress, Lazo was greatly impressed by Lenin’s speech; the ideas that were voiced by the leader of the world proletariat in this speech seemed to him even more radical, and, therefore, even more attractive to him than the ideas of the Socialist Revolutionaries. Sergei Lazo joined the Bolsheviks.
During the Civil War
At the end of 1917, Soviet power was established in Irkutsk, Omsk, and other Siberian cities, and Lazo took a direct part in this. However, already in the fall of 1918, Soviet power in Siberia fell and the dictatorship of the Supreme Ruler Admiral Kolchak was established. The Bolshevik Party goes underground.
Sergei Lazo becomes a member of the underground Far Eastern Regional Committee of the RCP (b), commands a partisan detachment of Primorye.
The Lazo detachment, like most partisan detachments during the Civil War, was very colorful. It consisted, for the most part, of the poorest proletariat, that is, from the very poor, as well as from criminals from the Chita prison, who were released by the Bolsheviks on the condition that the lads would go to fight for the world revolution.
In addition, two female commissars served in the detachment. One of them, a former high school student, daughter of the governor of Transbaikalia, is a convinced anarchist. She communicated with criminals exclusively “over a hairdryer” and famously handled a huge Mauser. The second, Olga Grabenko, was a Ukrainian beauty and a real Bolshevik. It was with her that Lazo had an affair, which ended in marriage. The young people spent their honeymoon trying to get out of the encirclement. Such are the vicissitudes of civil war.
Arrest
In 1920, the Kolchak government fell. The partisans decided that the right moment had come to overthrow Kolchak’s governor, General Rozanov, in Vladivostok. And Lazo began to implement the plan.
On January 31, 1920, partisans, numbering several hundred, captured the city, primarily occupying the station, post office and telegraph office. Rozanov fled from Vladivostok. However, for some reason Lazo did not take into account the fact that Vladivostok was occupied by Japanese invaders. For the time being, they observed the events with samurai restraint, however, the famous Nikolaev incident, during which partisans and anarchists burned the city of Nikolaevsk and destroyed the Japanese garrison located in it, prompted them to action.
Lazo was arrested right in the Kolchak counterintelligence building. Together with him, two other active members of the underground, Sibirtsev and Lutsky, were arrested. They were kept there for several days, in the counterintelligence building. Then they transported it somewhere. Olga Lazo was looking for her husband, but the Japanese headquarters did not tell her where he was.
The mystery of death
The textbook version says that the Japanese handed Lazo, as well as Sibirtsev and Lutsky, over to the White Cossacks, and they, after torture, burned Lazo alive in a locomotive firebox, and his associates were first shot and then burned too. This was apparently told by a certain nameless driver who saw how the Japanese handed over to the Cossacks three bags in which people were fighting, and this was either at the Ruzhino station, or at Muravyevo-Amurskaya (now the Lazo station). However, this is difficult to believe for two reasons. Firstly, why would the Japanese hand over those arrested to the Cossacks, and even drag them so far from Vladivostok? Secondly, the opening of the locomotive firebox was not large enough to push a person into it. It seems, fortunately for Lazo, such a terrible death is nothing more than a legend.
Back in 1920, the Italian journalist Klempasco, an employee of the Japan Chronicle, reported that Lazo was shot at Cape Egersheld in Vladivostok, and his corpse was burned. Since Klempasko, and this is a documented fact, was not only a journalist, but also an intelligence officer who communicated with Japanese officers, this information has a high degree of reliability.