Red Hogwarts. Series 10. Students - metallurgist

Metallurg


Ivan Tevadrosovich Tevosyan, as you probably guessed, is Armenian by nationality. It was Ivan Tevadrosovich. The habitual “Ivan Fedorovich” is a Russified version. By the way, according to one of the versions, “Fedorovich” was made by none other than Comrade Stalin. Allegedly, the leader personally crossed out on the filed document the Armenian middle name and wrote “Fedorovich” from above. This, however, is almost certainly an invention. But the favorite of Armenian authors “Hovhannes Tevadrosovich” is not true either. I will not undertake to talk about the reasons, but the fact remains that the father of our hero, a poor tailor from the city of Shushi, in Nagorno-Karabakh, called all his children, except the younger Vartan, for non-Armenian names: Julia, Ivan and Isabella.Ivan was born either in 1901 (December 22, old style), or already in 1902 (January 4, in a new way), but one way or another - in this picture of MSA students he is the youngest.


Tevadros Tevosyan with children Julia, Ivan (standing), Isabella and Vartan (sitting).

The beginning of the twentieth century - to put it mildly, is not the best time for Armenians. And I'm not talking about the genocide in Turkey, in the Russian Empire was not much better. All the first decades of the new century are the ongoing mutual slaughter of Armenians and Azerbaijanis, with which the authorities, it seems, simply did not know what to do. When Van was not even four, the Tevosians fled to Baku after the terrible “Shushen massacre”. At first there was simply nothing to live on, and Julia and Vanya went with bowlers to ask for food from Russian soldiers stationed in nearby barracks. Then it became easier, but it was a shift from poverty to poverty, nothing more. At the age of eight, Ivan was sent to study, but the only thing that the family could “pull” was a two-year Russian Orthodox school. Vanya was the only Armenian in the class and at first he had a very hard time primarily due to poor knowledge of the language. However, by the end of the first year he already spoke Russian without an accent and wrote without mistakes. The boy turned out to be the ideal schoolboy: the notebooks were written in calligraphic handwriting without a single blot, the textbooks were kept in such an exemplary manner that they constantly joked about the makeovers of their eldest son in the family.

After the parish school, it was the turn of the three-year trade school, but already in their free time. First, Vanya rewrote school papers with his exemplary hand, then slowly tutoring, then, finally, he already worked full-time in the Volga-Baku Oil Society: clerk, accountant, accountant assistant ...



Then the revolution, troubled times, again mutual riots - much more terrible and ambitious. The young man never left the dream of secondary education and therefore entered the evening gymnasium. There, by the way, he was in search of the necessary history textbook, and met the young telegrapher Vasya Emelyanov. Soon the young people found out that they were in the same party, and Tevosyan had more party experience. In the spring of 1917, the elder sister Julia and her fiance Levon Mirzoyan confessed to Vanya that they had become members of the Bolshevik Party. Soon, the 15-year-old clerk of the Volzhsko-Baku Oil Society excitedly read Marxist literature and, at meetings and rallies, opened his mouth, listened to Stepan Shaumyan, Alesha Dzhaparidze, Ivan Fioletov, Anastas Mikoyan and other "Baku commissars."

A year later, in June 1918, 16-year-old Ivan Tevosyan became a member of the RSDLP (b). A couple of months later, in September, the Soviet power in Baku fell, 26 Baku commissars were shot and hacked to pieces on the stretch between the stations of Ahcha-Kuyma and Pereval, and the units of the Caucasian Islamic Army that entered the city in retaliation for the March massacre of Azerbaijanis committed unprecedented Baku in Baku Armenian pogrom. The Tevosians were saved only by sitting under the floor in their little house.


I.I. Brodsky. The shooting of 26 Baku commissars.

The Bolsheviks went underground, and one of the most active party activists unexpectedly for many was Vanya Tevosyan. As he himself wrote twenty years later in his autobiography:“The whole period, starting from the end of 1918 until April 28, 1920, worked in the Baku underground. Until March 1919 was a private. In March, with the organization of the underground City District Committee, he became a member of the committee. Then a member of the presidium, and from August 1919 the secretary of the City District Committee until the seizure of power . " It’s written dryly, but if you remember the date of birth, it’s easy to calculate that Tevosyan became one of the leaders of the Baku underground when he was under 18 years old.

His underground comrade Vasily Emelyanov was much more eloquent: "After ... dating, we began to meet regularly with Tevosyan in the evening gymnasium. Soon I learned that it was he who was the “Vanya”, who signed the orders and decisions of our district party organization. As secretary of the cell, I read out these decisions that we receive through Butikova at meetings. They were printed on thin tissue paper and were very short.
... Remembering the eventful April days of 1920, when the party organization was intensively preparing for the seizure of power, it is difficult for me to imagine that one of the active organizers of the underground work at this time was a skinny boy with a shock of thick black hair and large serious, always filled with care eyes. His name was then Vanya or Vano. Tevosyan was only eighteen years old at the time . ”

Then ... Then there was the preparation for the uprising, the illegal importation of weapons, the creation and training of armed workers squads. “Comrade Vanya” (he signed the documents) then becomes a member of the Troika of the City District for the organization of the uprising.

And this day has come - or rather, not the day, but the night. On the night of April 27-28, 1920, units of the Red Army crossed the border of Azerbaijan to support the rebels.


Kirov (second from left), Ordzhonikidze (third from left), Lewandowski (fifth from left), Mikoyan (first row, second from right) among Red Army men and commanders of the 11th army at a train station in Baku, May 1920

And in the city on this night, the workers' detachments seized one government building after another. Matvey Kantorovich, also Tevosyan’s fellow practitioner in the evening gymnasium, and an associate in the underground struggle, recalled: “On the night of April 29, I.F. Tevosyan and a group of comrades were detained in the premises of the former police chief of the arrested ... General Tlehas. Tired to exhaustion during the events of the first day of the uprising, they sat at the tables with their heads resting on their hands. Someone was lying on three rows of standing chairs, curled up. The author of these lines found such a picture at 5 am ... ". General Tlehas soon was sentenced by a revolutionary tribunal without special judicial formalities and was shot as a counter-revolutionary and Musavatist. And Ivan Tevosyan headed the City District Committee.

For more than half a year, Tevosyan led the district committee, created new authorities, accepted new Bolsheviks to the party, and in many of the party cards issued at that time, it was signed “Vanya”. At the same time in Baku, he met another young communist, Boris Vannikov. Yes, yes, thus, the “twice-seated Hero Three times,” a representative of the same brilliant pleiad of the “Stalinist marshals of industry,” to which Tevosyan himself belonged. By the way, almost simultaneously, in 1939, they will become members of the government: Tevosyan - People's Commissar of the shipbuilding industry, and Vannikov - People's Commissar of Arms of the USSR.


Legends of the Soviet industry. From left to right: df Ustinov, B.L. Vannikov, A.I. Efremov, V.A. Malyshev, 1943

But there are still many decades before that, but for the time being, in early 1921, the Baku Communists elect Ivan Tevosyan as a delegate to the Tenth Congress of the RCP (B.) With a decisive vote. After the congress - the suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion. According to Fadeev, Tevosyan then got into Sestroretsk, in the TAON group - heavy special-purpose artillery. He was more fortunate than his future neighbor in a hostel - unlike Fadeev, he remained safe and sound.


Ivan Tevosyan in the photo of participants in the suppression of the Kronstadt uprising. In the center is Kliment Voroshilov.

After Kronstadt, 19-year-old Tevosyan was summoned to Vozdvizhenka, in the Central Committee of the party. Many of the delegates who returned from Kronstadt were then called there - to express gratitude for their courage and devotion to the cause of the party. Verbal and not only. The secretary of the Central Committee of the RCP (b) Yemelyan Yaroslavsky spoke with Tevosyan. Thanking on behalf of the party and congratulating on the victory, he suggested the young Bolshevik to go to study at the Sverdlov Communist University, the most prestigious then educational institution specially created for the training of the Soviet and party elite. They say that you, Comrade Tevosyan, have been a Communist many times tested in the case, moreover, we now really need national cadres to lead the republics.

I think the problem was that Comrade Tevosyan did not want to be a national cadre. He wanted to be himself. Therefore, the flattering offer was rejected, but, if possible, he asked to give him the opportunity to study in a technical college - to fulfill his long-held dream of receiving an engineering specialty.

Nikolai Aleksandrovich Mikhailov, a well-known Soviet journalist and party functionary, recounts the final of this conversation in the essay “His Man” in the collection “People of the Country of Soviets”:

“I like your perseverance. We are going to meet you, because we will develop the industry. We need engineers, - said Yaroslavsky, looking at Vanya through thick glasses. “You have a character, and if you really want to become an engineer, you will be one.”

The very next day, Tevosyan received a direction with the following text: "The Central Committee of the RCP (B.) Is sending Tevanosyan Vanya ( that is, VN ) to the Mining Academy."