Назаренко Кирилл Борисович родился в 1976 г., окончил с отличием кафедру русской истории исторического факультета Санкт-Петербургского государственного университета в 1998 г. В 2001 г. защитил кандидатскую диссертацию на тему: «Морское министерство России в 1905–1914 гг.». В 2010 г. защитил диссертацию доктора исторических наук на тему «Морское ведомство России (1905–1921 гг.): Личный состав, структура, политическая роль».

С 2002 г. по сегодняшний день работает на кафедре источниковедения истории России исторического факультета (института истории) СПбГУ. С 2014 г. – профессор.

К. Б. Назаренко автор монографий:

«Мозг» флота России: от Цусимы до Первой мировой войны. СПб.: СПбГУ, 2006. 212 с.

Флот, революция, власть в России (1917–1921 гг.). М.: Квадрига, 2010. 485 с.

Морское министерство России: 1906–1914. СПб.: Гангут, 2010. 256 с.

Kirill Nazarenko

Nazarenko Kirill Borisovich, Doctor of History, Professor, Department of source study on history of Russia, St. Petersburg State University, St. Petersburg, Russia, k.nazarenko@spbu.ru

The research was supported by grant for Researches of the Russian Humanitarian Science Foundation № № 15–31–01267.

During the Russian Revolution of 1917 the Baltic Fleet played an important political role. Both sailors and navy officers tried to influence the situation in the country in ways accessible to them.

The sailors should be regarded as a specific socio-professional group that showed great activity at a certain historical moment, but at the same time undergone serious internal changes. These changes were of a qualitative nature. It is hard to imagine how the number and fate of that small percentage of seamen who were not leaders but also were not “at the tail” of the masses, but actively participated in the revolutionary events of 1917 – early 1918 should be estimated. It is this active minority of sailors who created the image of “the beauty and pride of the revolution”. Both contemporaries and descendants transferred the characteristic features of this group to all people dressed in sailor uniform. In our opinion, the phenomenon of the sailors of the revolutionary navy ceased to exist in the spring and summer of 1918. Undoubtedly, among those who served in the navy in 1919–1921 there were a lot of sailors who served in the pre-revolutionary times and in 1917 too. But the yeast, the “leaven” of the revolutionary sailors of 1917 by 1921 already occupied some positions in the Red Army, in the Soviet apparatus, someone laid down heads in the fields of the Civil War, someone was in underground as an anarchist or an socialist-revolutionist.

Leaders of revolutionary sailors, primarily Pavel Dybenko, showed themselves to be people who were not intimidated by the prospect of being at the head of the naval department, and then – and at the helm of the state. The peak of the political influence of the sailors was the period between the October armed uprising in Petrograd (October 25, 1917) and the defeat of the sailor detachment of Dybenko in the battles with the Germans (March 3–4, 1918). The most vivid example of their political influence was the dispersal of the Constituent Assembly, despite the direct disposal of Lenin.

Sailors were imbued with spontaneous-democratic sentiments, so it is deeply natural that Dybenko and his sailor detachment became a symbol of the idea of revolutionary volunteer army and a symbol of its collapse under the specific conditions of Russia at the beginning of 1918. The aggravated social struggle demanded the immediate creation of a battle-worthy army and navy, which could be carried out only on the old organizational principles of discipline and subordination, experts in tactics and strategy – officers. It was a dialectical process – a natural aspiration for social justice, people’s democracy came across objective boundaries, both in terms of the correlation of class forces, and in the form of a specific historical situation.

The officer corps of the Russian navy before 1917 was a structure, the study of which allows us to make a number of important observations on the transformation in the conditions of an industrial society of a social and professional group that has developed in a traditional society. By the beginning of the World War I, naval officers in Russia had been divided into several groups, while the real elite were executive officers, while the engineers, the admiralty officers and the reserve officers were much more democratic in composition.

On the example of the officers of the Russian navy in 1905–1917 it is possible to trace the process of destruction of the class structures that was accelerated by the World War I, far moved forward by the February revolution and finally completed in November 1917. Armed forces of all states of the world at that time had to switch to new principles of manning the officer corps when the high origin and elite education ceased to be decisive. New values – personal abilities and political loyalty – came to the forefront. In Russia, this process was radically accelerated in late 1917, with the abolition of military ranks and the abolition of the old army and navy, which allowed the construction of the Red Army and Navy, to a certain extent, from scratch.

The political role of naval officers in 1917 was peculiar. If in 1825 the officers showed themselves as a force capable of leading the political movement, then at the beginning of the XXth century, it turned out to be “in the tail” of events. The sailors were less educated, but showed more political maturity than officers. A feature of the behavior of politically active officers of the Baltic Fleet in late 1917 – early 1918 was the desire to adjust to the spontaneous democratic sentiments of sailors and use them for their own purposes. This process took place according to a single scheme, a model of which could be the events in Murmansk in the spring of 1918 and in Baku in July-August of the same year. In this scenario, events developed in Petrograd, but the arrest of Alexey Schastny and the failure of the performance of the Torpedo Division allowed to prevent the development of the situation on the Murmansk or Baku pattern.

The liquidation of independent sailors’ detachments in April-July 1918 led to a sharp drop in the real political weight of sailors and their leaders. The removal of Dybenko from the post of commissar for naval affairs and the trial of him were a symbolic point in the short history of the sailors of the navy, who tried on the role of the Praetorians of the revolution.

Shooting away of Schastny is the same symbolic point in another political process, in the process that began before the World War I by the conferences of the “Young Turks” of the Naval General Staff. The links of this chain were the intrigues of the Cherkassky-Rengarten group in late 1916 – early 1917, the attempts of the group of admirals to influence the situation in Helsingfors in October-November 1917, intrigues in Kronstadt, when Shchastny tried to convince the sailors that the Bolsheviks were German agents and smoothly brought the matter to the “naval dictatorship of the Baltic Fleet.” Shooting away of Schastny meant the collapse of the hopes of a part of the officers that they would be able to turn the revolutionary process relatively quickly into an acceptable way for them.