Death of General Dukhonin

On the morning of 3 December 1917 (20 November by the Julian calendar) the new commander-in-chief appointed by the Bolsheviks, Ensign Nikolai Krylenko, arrived by train with an escort of sailors at Mogilev, seat of the Russian Stavka. The town was taken without a fight. General Nikolai Dukhonin, who had been acting commander-in-chief since Kerensky’s flight and had been formally dismissed on 22 November for refusing to open armistice negotiations, was arrested and taken to Krylenko’s carriage at the station. A few hours later he was dead. A mob of soldiers and sailors dragged him out of the carriage and killed him on the platform.

The Stavka had been isolated for two weeks. The leaders of the moderate socialists had gathered there, hoping that a government headed by the SR Victor Chernov would be formed at general headquarters, but nothing came of it and they dispersed. Dukhonin tried to move headquarters to Kiev, but the Ukrainian Central Rada delayed its reply, and the soldiers of the garrison would not let the archives be taken away. Krylenko travelled slowly, removing one front and army commander after another along the way, and the units on which the Stavka had counted did nothing to stop him. On 1 December the Allied military missions left Mogilev for Kiev and the shock battalions, the only force ready to fight, marched away, and during the night the local soviet took power in the town. According to William Chamberlin, the general could still have escaped on the morning of 3 December, as the front commissar had obtained a car for him, but the Quartermaster-General, Mikhail Diterikhs, persuaded him to stay. Dukhonin believed that he could hand over his post only to a lawfully appointed successor.

The day before, on 2 December, Dukhonin issued his last order. He had the generals arrested after the Kornilov putsch released from prison in Bykhov. That same evening the prisoners left Bykhov. Anton Denikin and others set off in disguise by different routes for the Don, and Lavr Kornilov left at the head of the Tekke regiment that was loyal to him. The news of the escape, followed by a rumour that Kornilov was marching on Mogilev, enraged the men who had come with Krylenko and gathered at the station.

The sources describe the lynching in different ways. According to the most often repeated version, a crowd of soldiers, sailors and local peasants gathered by the carriage, demanding that the general be handed over. Krylenko spoke against a lynching and people began to disperse, but when he left, one of the sailors stirred them up again. Dukhonin was dragged onto the platform, someone shot him in the head, and then he was finished off with bayonets and rifle butts. According to the memoirs of one of the soldiers of Krylenko’s guard, published in 2013, he was killed by soldiers of the local garrison, and the sentries made no attempt to stop them. Denikin wrote that a “wild, enraged rabble of sailors” tore the general to pieces before Krylenko’s eyes and desecrated his body.

Krylenko announced that he had taken over command, and a few days later suggested to Trotsky that the authorities themselves drop the case, since questioning the sailors “would not be expedient”. No one was punished. Dukhonin’s body was taken to Kiev and buried in the Lukianivka Cemetery. The death of the general, not yet 41, who had not wanted to wage civil war, became a symbol of the disintegration of the old army. During the Civil War, “to send to Dukhonin’s headquarters” meant in Red parlance to shoot. The same day the Bolshevik delegation sat down with the military men of the Central Powers for armistice talks at Brest-Litovsk.