Yaroslavl Uprising
야로슬라블 봉기
The anti-Bolshevik armed uprising of 6 to 21 July 1918 in the Volga city of Yaroslavl, organised by Boris Savinkov's underground Union for the Defence of the Motherland and Freedom. Officers led by Colonel Alexander Perkhurov seized the city centre and abolished the Soviet bodies, but the companion risings in Rybinsk and Murom were crushed at once and the Allied landing at Arkhangelsk they had counted on came only in August. After Red artillery and aircraft had destroyed most of the city the rebels surrendered on 21 July, and mass executions followed.
In depth
With the approval of the Volunteer Army's leaders Kornilov and Alekseyev, Savinkov had founded the Union and sent its chief of staff, Perkhurov, to Yaroslavl. Before dawn on 6 July about a hundred conspirators raided an arms depot; the city militia and an armoured-car unit went over to them, and by morning the governor's house, the post office and the telegraph were in rebel hands. The Bolshevik leaders Semyon Nakhimson and David Zakheim were killed without trial on the first day, and some two hundred communists and Soviet workers were held on the so-called "death barge" anchored in the middle of the Volga. Perkhurov styled himself commander of the Northern Volunteer Army group, abolished every Soviet body and decree on 13 July, and called for the Constituent Assembly and the repudiation of the Brest-Litovsk peace. About six thousand volunteers enrolled but only part of them fought, and with two field guns and fifteen machine guns the rebels stayed on the defensive.
The Reds gathered Latvian Riflemen, Red Guards from neighbouring towns and internationalist units, shelled the city from across the Kotorosl and from the railway station, and bombed it from aircraft. On the night of 15 to 16 July Perkhurov slipped away by steamer with fifty men to seek reinforcements; the remaining rebels surrendered on 21 July to a German prisoner-of-war commission interned in the city, which promptly handed them over to the Reds. 428 people were shot on the first day alone, and up to 80 per cent of the buildings in the rebel district, 2,147 houses and the Demidov Juridical Lyceum were destroyed, leaving 28,000 people homeless. Soviet historiography called the event a "rebellion" from the 1930s, and at his 1924 trial Savinkov took responsibility for Yaroslavl, calling it "a fruitless and bloody attempt".