(1895 - 1925) Russian poet

On the eve of his death, Yesenin wrote a farewell poem:

Goodbye my friend, goodbye.

My dear, you are in my chest.

Destined parting

Promises to meet in the future.

Goodbye, my friend, without a hand, without a word,

Do not be sad and do not sadness of the eyebrows, -

In this life, dying is not new,

But to live, of course, is not newer.

Yesenin gave this poem to his Leningrad friend, the poet Wolf Erlich, who recalled: “Yesenin bends down to the table, pulls out from a notebook sheet, shows from afar: poetry. He says, folding the sheet in four and putting it in the pocket of my jacket: "For you." Ustinova (Erlich's friend) wants to read it. “No, you wait, he will be left alone - he will read ...” They said goodbye. I returned from Nevsky for the second time: I forgot my briefcase. Yesenin sat at the table calmly, without a jacket, throwing on a fur coat, and looked through old poems. A folder was unfolded on the table. We said goodbye a second time."

The poem remained in Erlich's pocket, but he read it only the next day, when Yesenin was no longer alive.

On the morning of December 28, 1925, the poet was found hanged in a room at the Angleterre Hotel in Leningrad. A district police officer was called, and the first document related to Yesenin's death appeared.

« ACT

On December 28, 1925, this act was drawn up by my accountant. warden 2nd from. L. G. M. N. Gorbov in the presence of the manager of the hotel International * comrade. Nazarov and witnesses. According to a telephone message, the manager of the hotel, grazh. Nazarova V. Mikh. about a citizen hanging himself in a hotel room. Arriving at the place, I found a man hanging on the central heating pipe in the following form: the neck was tightened not with a dead loop, but only on the right side of the neck, his face was turned to the pipe, and with his right hand he grabbed the pipe, the corpse hung under the very ceiling and his legs were about 1 1/2 meters, near the place where the hanged man was found, an overturned pedestal lay, and the chandelier standing on it lay on the floor. When removing the corpse from the rope and examining it, it was found on the right arm above the elbow on the palm side of the cut on the left arm on the hand, scratches, a bruise under the left eye, dressed in gray trousers, a nightgown, black socks and black patent leather shoes. According to the documents presented, Yesenin Sergei Alexandrovich, a writer who arrived from Moscow on December 24, 1925, turned out to hang himself.

Vsevolod Rozhdestvensky, P. Medvedev, M. Froman, and V. Erlikh (all writers) signed for those who understood this "Act".

Yesenin's friend, the poet Ivan Gruzinov, writes that a prominent party member, literary functionary Georgy Ustinov lived in the same hotel, who “I simply adored Yesenin both as a poet and as a friend. Sergei knocked on his door before hanging himself. Georgy Ustinov was not at home. If a conversation had started, a noose would not have been tied up and a somewhat provincial death poem would not have been written.

The death of the poet shocked his contemporaries. “Hundreds of people have asked me; "Why did he do it?" - Yesenin's friend Anatoly Mariengof writes and tries to find the answer to this question in his memoirs.

“Somewhere, once I happened to read the biography of a Scottish princess of the 15th century. If memory serves, her name was Margarita.

Dying, the princess said:

- Don't care about life!

She was nineteen years old.

Nobody heard Yesenin's last words. And it is unlikely that in the dull room of the Angleterre hotel in St. Petersburg at the last minute he talked to himself. I never noticed this bad theatrical habit in him. But since 1963, that is, after returning from a honeymoon trip abroad (with Isadora Duncan), the whole meaning of his existence was the same as that of the Scottish princess:

Yesenin - Chaliapin (daughter of the singer).

Yesenin and Chaliapin

Yesenin - Duncan.

Yesenin and Duncan

Yesenin-Tolstaya (granddaughter of Leo Nikolaevich).

Yesenin and Tolstaya

And his only love, according to Mariengof, Zinaida Reich, Yesenin missed.

Yesenin and Zinaida Reich

“In the last months of his tragic existence,” continues Mariengof, “Yesenin was a man no more than one hour a day.

From the first, morning, glasses, his consciousness was already darkening.

And after the first, as an iron rule, followed - the second, third, fourth, fifth ...

From time to time, Yesenin was taken to the hospital, where the most famous doctors treated him with the latest methods. They helped as little as the oldest ways that they also tried to treat him.

... By the end of 1925, the decision to “leave” became manic for him. He lay down under the wheels of a suburban train, tried to jump out of the window, cut a vein with a piece of glass, stab himself with a kitchen knife.

And the day before, Yesenin was with Nikolai Klyuev. Among the glowing lamps, he read poems to his "elder brother" in poetry.

Klyuev was sitting on an unpainted oak bench under the icon of Mykola the Wonderworker.

- Well, how? - Yesenin asked quietly. - Poems?

Yesenin and Klyuev

The elder brother kissed him three times:

— Sensitive, Serezhenka. Sensitive lyrics. They should be printed on vellum paper, with vignettes: cupids, doves, lyres. And weave in morocco. Or in brocade. And so that with a golden edge. For young ladies from Zamoskvoretsk ... Do you remember how Nadson was intertwined? And then - Severyanin Igor, the king of poets. If only, Serezhenka, we could intertwine your poems the same way. After these words, Yesenin began to cry.

It was his last meeting…”

And the conclusions of Mariengof are as follows: “The Yesenin tragedy is extremely simple. Doctors called it a "clinic". He himself in The Black Man said frankly: Alcohol showers brains. That cursed alcohol and showered brains, showered life.

In 1990, another discussion unfolded around the death of Yesenin. This time on based on posthumous photographs of the poet, taken in a hotel, during a forensic examination, at the funeral, the voluntariness of his departure from life was called into question. In these photographs, the supporter of the version of violent death claims, one can see “a black round hole, in addition to the brine on the forehead. Sometimes they tried to assure me that it was just a hematoma. The forensic experts I contacted believe it looks like a bullet or impact mark.”

Another adherent of this version also refers to photographs found in the archives, in particular, to one where “Yesenin is lying on the sofa ... his hair is disheveled, his upper lip is swollen, his right hand hangs in the air in stiffness. It has cut marks on it. And no matter how much I peered into the photograph, I did not see signs of death from suffocation. There was no tongue sticking out of the mouth, giving the face of the gallows a terrible expression. Yes, and the very fact that the corpse was laid on the sofa was surprising, because the muscles of the bladder and other muscles weaken in hanged men.

The above arguments are based only on photographs, which, as you know, could be retouched. Until the negatives are found, these arguments will remain rather dubious. In addition, there is evidence of people who saw Yesenin after his death. So, Ivan Gruzinov wrote about the funeral of the poet: “An alien face lay in the coffin. Always lush curls were combed smoothly back. This
made the face a stranger and a barbershop. All the illuminating expression was gone. And we remember a face not by its features, but by the expression of the eyes and lips. I stood in my head: badly smeared abrasions on my face were visible. It was Seryozha who fought against the steam heating, already hanging.

However, supporters of the version of violent death are looking for other evidence. So, one of them wonders how “Sergey Aleksandrovich, so neat in life, even in a moment of despair, could turn everything in the room literally upside down, turn the contents of his suitcase inside out. It is strange, but already in the course of examining the room by the local authorities, the poet's jacket mysteriously disappeared from the back of the chair. The conclusion of those years that the mark on Yesenin's forehead is a burn mark from a hot water heating pipe is highly illogical. In those days it was warm in Leningrad and the heating did not work. It is obvious that a person with a fractured skull and wounds on his body could not himself climb a high bedside table (1.5 meters high) and hang himself ... ".

The room where Yesenin died

If you carefully read the memoirists of Yesenin's contemporaries, then you can find counterarguments to many of the arguments of the supporters of the version of the murder. For example, the myth about the accuracy of the poet is easily dispelled by such a recollection of Mariengof, dating back to 1923: “... [Yesenin] lifts the lid. In a huge suitcase are a stupid pile - wine-drenched silk shirts, gloves torn at the seams, ties, handkerchiefs, mufflers and brown-stained hats. But Yesenin was once a neat man!

So the controversy continues.

On the night of December 27-28, 1925, Sergei Yesenin was killed. His body was found in the fifth room of the Angleterre Hotel. The investigation named the cause of death as suicide. This drawn version aroused distrust among the poet's contemporaries and descendants...

Yesenin in the Angleterre room. Rice. V. Shilov



January 1926, Leningrad

That evening the "pompolite" K* arrived in the fifth room of the Angleterre Hotel. After supper, Comrade K * sat down at his desk, wishing to work before going to bed. He was haunted by his party colleague. It was feared that he would pass Comrade K* up the party ladder very quickly. Comrade K * decided to act immediately, the fate of the competitor was decided ...

The hands on the clock showed midnight. Comrade K* felt an inexplicable piercing cold... Then someone's heavy steps were heard behind him, causing inexplicable horror in the "pompolitan"... The guest wanted to scream, but his voice did not obey... Comrade K* felt that his legs were getting cold and he could not move from place. The unknown person approached him and stopped... Obeying an unknown force, the "pompolit" slowly turned his head...

... Comrade K * was found on the floor of the room in the morning. When he came to his senses, he began to laugh hysterically, chatting some indistinct nonsense. An experienced party fighter kept talking about a ghost with a rope wound around his neck. The head of the hotel ordered that an ambulance brigade of the psychiatric hospital be called immediately so that the anti-Soviet propaganda of obscurantism, obsessively repeated by Comrade K*, would not embarrass respectable Soviet citizens.





The ghost of the Angleterre Hotel

Rumors about the ghost of the poet Yesenin began to appear immediately after his death. Of course, all stories about the supernatural were officially attributed to anti-Soviet obscurantism.





Photo of Yesenin a month before his death, November 1925

Now it is difficult to say exactly what he was. Judging by the photo, this is a kind person



In January 1926, at the request of Sofya Tolstaya, Yesenin's wife, the photographer Presnyakov took a photo of the hotel room where the poet's body was found.

In the photo you can see that the frills of the curtains are added with strokes by hand. If you look closely, you can see that the painted strokes hide the white silhouette of a human figure.

Curtain on the right with painted edges



You can, of course, explain it by a printing defect, but then why did the poet’s wife keep this particular low-quality photograph (the photographer must have taken several pictures)? And why were the edges of the curtains added?

“The souls of people forcibly killed do not soon leave the places of their death. The soul of a person who died here could appear in the photograph, ”one of the psychics expressed the opinion.









The old hotel building was destroyed in the 80s of the last century and rebuilt. Despite the fact that the Angleterre Hotel is a remake, there are still stories from guests about the ghost of a poet who roams the corridors. Ghosts are attached to the place of the tragic death, even if the house was demolished.

This is how the photo looked without the added edges



Facts are a stubborn thing

Yesenin himself feared murder.

"They want to kill me! I feel it like a beast!” he said.

The discrepancy between the facts in the version of suicide was noticed by forensic investigators who decided to look into the circumstances of the death of the poet decades later.









E.A. Khlystalov, senior investigator of the Main Department of Internal Affairs of Moscow (since 1963) notes: “And no matter how much I peered into the photograph, I did not see signs of death from suffocation with a noose. There was no characteristically protruding tongue from the mouth, giving the face of the gallows a terrible expression ... "

“On the forehead of the corpse, just above the bridge of the nose, a lifetime injury is clearly visible. About such bodily injury, forensic experts conclude that it was caused by a blunt solid object and is classified as dangerous to human life and health ... ".





Photo of the murdered Yesenin on the sofa of the hotel. There is a dent on the forehead at the bridge of the nose from a blow.

Cuts on hand



Raises a question and the wound on Yesenin's hand. Supporters of the version of suicide claimed that the poet first cut his veins, and then changed his mind and decided to hang himself.

Criminalist E.A. Khlystalov writes about this:

“Having carefully studied the whole situation in the hotel room, I realized that this version does not stand up to criticism. Judge for yourself. The poet cuts his arm deep and waits for profuse bleeding to begin. Waiting. Consciousness does not lose. After some time, he decides to hang himself. Starts looking for rope. Finds. Unties from the suitcase. Then it climbs high under the ceiling (3 meters 80 centimeters) and begins to tie it to a vertical riser. To reach the top, the poet had to place an object with a fulcrum of about two meters. (His height is 168 centimeters). Moreover, with the obligatory condition that this item should stand next to the riser. There were no such objects near the place of the alleged hanging.”

Yesen's death mask. The dent from the impact on the forehead at the bridge of the nose is clearly visible



It is also surprising that the supposedly dying poem, written with blood from a cut vein. “While you write a line, you will bleed…”- notes the researcher E.A. Khlystalov.

It should be noted that the “death letter” was not examined by experts, no analysis was carried out - therefore, there is no evidence that it was written in Yesenin’s blood.

A cut on Yesenin's right hand. He was not left-handed. If he wanted to cut his veins, he would have cut his left hand.

The text of the poem itself in meaning does not resemble a suicide note, the addressee of which he called by myself Wolf Ehrlich, who served in the OGPU. And it is strange that the dying lines were addressed precisely to the represented party spy. Goodbye my friend, goodbye.

My dear, you are in my chest.

Destined parting

Promises to meet in the future.

Goodbye, my friend, without a hand, without a word,

Do not be sad and do not sadness of the eyebrows, -

In this life, dying is not new,

But to live, of course, is not newer.

Many years later, information appeared that these lines were written much earlier than December 1925. The poem is dedicated not to Wolf Erlich, but to Yesenin's friend who was shot, the poet Alexei Ganin.

Yesenin in the coffin. The face is heavily made up, but traces of beatings are visible



The version of suicide is clearly drawn. The only options left are:

Yesenin was killed on the orders of the party leadership.

Yesenin died during a brutal interrogation from beatings - and the executioners had to hastily create the appearance of suicide.

This is what the Angleterre hotel (the building on the left) looked like during Yesenin's time.

The new Angleterre Hotel today (my photos). By the way, it looks like the original was built.

Opinion of contemporaries

They whispered and wondered about the death of Yesenin. I did not believe in the version of suicide.

Even the famous poet of the revolution Vladimir Mayakovsky wrote: "Why? What for? The misunderstanding was gone."

"Neither the noose nor the penknife will reveal to us the reasons for the loss."

Portrait of Yesenin. Rice. V. Skorobeev



The poet Vasily Nasedkin (husband of Yesenin's sister, Catherine) said: “It doesn’t look like suicide ... Brains leaked out on my forehead ...”

One of the poet's friends, V. Knyazev, noticed that there were no traces of the rope, which usually remains on the neck of the gallows, on Yesenin's neck: In a small dead room by the window -

Golden head on the chopping block:

The stripe on the neck is not visible -

Only blood turns black on the shirt ...

Yesenin's photo on the passport (1923)



The poet's friends, Nikolai Brown and Boris Lavrenev, refused to sign the protocol, which spoke of Yesenin's suicide.

The protocol was signed by the OGPU officer Wolf Ehrlich. Interestingly, those who saw Yesenin shortly before his death, and supposedly the poet's dying verses were dedicated to him.

Nikolai Brown reproached Vsevolod Rozhdestvensky, who also signed the protocol: “Seva, how could you subscribe to this! You didn’t see how Yesenin put a noose on himself!

He replied: “I was told that another signature is needed.”

Yesenin as Orpheus. Rice. ormona

Boris Lavrenev published an article "In memory of Yesenin" with the subtitle "Executed by degenerates" and epigraph "And you will not wash away the righteous blood with all your black blood of a poet."

The author spoke boldly: “And my moral duty requires me to tell the naked truth once in my life and call the executioners and murderers executioners and murderers, whose black blood will not wash away the blood stain on the shirt of the tortured poet.”

"He was tortured!"- recalled Nikolai Brown.

There was even an assumption that Yesenin was tortured in the dungeons of the OGPU, and an already dead body was brought to the hotel, after which they staged a suicide.

Former OGPU worker Pavel Luknitsky, who emigrated to Paris, wrote in his memoirs: “He was mutilated, there were traces of blood on his clothes, and his left eye was “missing.”

“Yesenin was a little like himself. During the autopsy, his face was corrected as best they could, but still ... in the upper corner of the right eye there is a nodule ... and the left eye is flat: it leaked out. There was no blueness in the face: it was pale, and only red spots and darkened abrasions stood out.

At first there was a cross on Yesenin's grave

The death of Sergei Yesenin is still one of the most mysterious tragedies of the early twentieth century. Then, on the cold night of December 28, 1925, the poet was found dead in the Angleterre Hotel in Leningrad. When the poet Vasily Nasedkin brought the coffin to Moscow, he came home and said: "Sergey was killed!" What actually happened at Angleterre on the night of December 27-28, 1925?

The room was trashed. Yesenin hung on vertical pipes of steam heating. Many injuries were recorded on his body. But the investigation insisted on suicide.

According to the official version, it was considered: Sergey Yesenin committed suicide, but it turned out that this version does not withstand a collision with facts.

Now, ninety years later, many researchers (for example, the St. Petersburg writer Nikolai Astafiev in the book “The Tragedy at Angleterre: Actors and Performers”) assert: Yesenin killed, and many of the documents attached to the case were falsified.

For example, notes supposedly Yesenin to Erlich, which were supposed to prove that the poet came to Angleterre voluntarily (according to supporters of the murder version), were not written by his hand.

Sergei Yesenin - in the lower left corner, Erlich - in the upper right

One note allegedly written Yesenin, sounds like this: “Vova, take things to my hotel. S. Yesenin.

Second note: “Vova, I went to Mikhailov’s restaurant, or what, or Fedorov? I'm waiting for you there. Sergei".

Nikolai Astafiev believes that this is a clear fake, that this is not a hand Yesenin.

Why was it necessary to falsify the documents of the case, if this is a banal suicide?

A little-known note attributed to S.A. Yesenin, mentioned in the protocol of the interview with V. Erlich (front side) RO IRLI, Fund 697, op. 1, unit 32

It is possible then that Yesenin taken to an empty hotel room by force, but it had to be hidden.

Petersburg writer Victor Kuznetsov, studying the documents of the Angleterre hotel, he discovered that Yesenin did not live in it at all! The poet's surname is not on the list of the residents of this hotel at the time when his corpse was allegedly found in it, hanging on a steam heating pipe.

Yesenin's memoir, mentioned in the memoirs of V. Erlich (front side), RO IRLI, Fund 817, op. 1, unit thirty

None of the hotel staff and guests living there Yesenin didn't see it these days. And all the "witnesses" who later testified about communicating with the poet in his Angleterre issue, including Erlich, were secret agents of the GPU.

In the 21st century, the poet's relatives, researchers and ordinary citizens have repeatedly applied to the Prosecutor General's Office of the Russian Federation with a request to reopen the criminal case on the alleged murder Sergei Yesenin.

The answers received, as a carbon copy: "The cause of the poet's death was confirmed as a result of compression of the neck organs by a noose during hanging."

So think what you want: either someone did it on purpose, or he really did it himself.

Meanwhile, there are dozens of circumstantial evidence on which to work.

The first question is: when, by whom and under what circumstances were all the documents of the investigation damaged? Moreover, in an identical way: they have a fragment torn out at the bottom of the sheet.

The second question: the power of attorney that is attached to the case is a power of attorney written by hand Erlich. And it has an absolutely monstrous signature on it. Sergei Alexandrovich Yesenin. At a time when in things Yesenin found a power of attorney written by him, but torn.

Power of attorney written by V.I. Erlich, with an inadequate signature by S.A. Yesenin

The third question: why was the so-called suicide note not attached to the documents of the investigation - the poem "Goodbye, my friend, goodbye ..."? If she is given such a status, then she must be in official business.

The fourth question is related to the district warden, namely, his signatures on the documents: for some reason they differ. In an act dated December 28, Gorbov one signature, in the protocols of interrogation of witnesses it is completely different.

Another round of circumstantial evidence comes from the post-mortem photographs themselves. First, we don't have a photo of the corpse in the noose. Secondly, we do not have a single posthumous photograph where Sergei Alexandrovich would be depicted in full growth.

Painter Vasily Svarog, who painted the dead Yesenin without makeup, said in 1927:

“At first there was a“ noose ”- Yesenin tried to loosen it with his right hand, so the hand stiffened in a cramp. The head was on the armrest of the sofa when Yesenin was hit above the bridge of the nose with the handle of a revolver. Then they rolled him up in a carpet and wanted to lower him off the balcony, a car was waiting around the corner. It was easier to steal. But the balcony door did not open wide enough, leaving the corpse by the balcony, in the cold. They drank, smoked, all this dirt remained ... They hung up in a hurry, already late at night, and it was not easy on a vertical riser. When they fled, Erlich stayed to check something and prepare for the version of suicide ... ".

However, not everyone trusts this evidence. Philologist Oleg Lekmanov, HSE professor, biography author Sergei Yesenin, believes that the poet hanged himself.

“There is Yesenin’s poem “Goodbye, my friend, goodbye ...”, which he, before committing suicide, and he certainly committed suicide, wrote it down with blood on a piece of paper and handed it over to Wolf Erlich. Let those who defend this so-called "version" of the murder, first prove to us how the killers could make him invent, compose this poem, then write it on a piece of paper with blood.

The poem, which is now interpreted by many as material evidence, was not drawn as such. Probably because there is no date.

Poem “Goodbye…” (original) (RO IRLI, Fund 817, op. 1, item 14)

This poem can hardly be called dying, since it was transmitted Erlich the day before death. And it is quite possible that these lines were written long before Angleterre and are dedicated to a close friend Alexey Ganin, who was shot at the Lubyanka in March 1925 on charges of belonging to the Order of Russian Fascists. No examination was carried out regarding the authenticity of the very sheet that was transferred Wolf Erlich.

This is the first.

The second is an unnaturally bent arm. A living poet could hold on to the trumpet, but after death the muscles weaken, and the hands of the suicide must fall along the body, which did not happen.

Third - scars from the lip to the chin. They are formed if the perpetrator strangles the victim from behind.

Sergei Yesenin with his sister

Doubt about suicide Sergei Yesenin and his contemporaries: Anna Akhmatova, Pavel Luknitsky, Osip Mandelstam. Doubted, because they knew and impudent Yesenin, and even better - the time in which they lived.

Fourth - a pierced forehead, that is, the official version explains the dent with a burn that received Yesenin already after hanging from the hot heating pipe on which he hung, and not from an intravital blow.

But the Voronezh director Evgeny Parshchikov, author of the film "Yesenin. 1925 - 2010", I am sure that this is not so. He attracted the poet's relatives and independent experts, who found out that the photograph of the room taken after the tragedy was a fake. It was unfolded in order to somehow explain the facts that were inconvenient for the investigation.

Yesenin's room at the Angleterre Hotel after the tragedy

This picture was shown to a forensic photography expert, and he said that the picture is a mirror image of the real situation in the room, that is, the pipes are not in the right corner, but in the left. But these are not just pipes and not just corners - the direction of the wound on the forehead of Sergei Alexandrovich is such that it could only be received in the right corner. That is, we get the complete failure of the official version.

“I knew the poetess Ida Nappelbaum… So. Her brother Leo helped his father - a photographer during the filming. He told his sister how he helped a policeman standing on a stepladder remove the poet's body from the heating pipe. He witnessed the fact that Yesenin did not hang in a noose, as happens with suicides, but the rope was wound several times around his neck. That is why his body had to be removed before the arrival of the writers - he was hanged very implausibly.(Nicholas Brown, poet, translator, former political prisoner, public figure).

As possible ideologists for the elimination of the poet, there were also Blumkin, and Trotsky, and Agranov, who was called the executioner of the Russian intelligentsia.

Sergei Yesenin with his mother

In suicide Yesenin the clergy also doubted, so much so that the priests considered it possible to bury the poet at the funeral, which is unacceptable for suicides.

Church memorial services at the poet's grave are still served today. Priest Andrey Dudarev comes every year.

“Who can say that he committed suicide? A scar from the rope on which Yesenin allegedly hanged himself. If a person hangs himself, then this strip stretches from the chin to the back of the head, without fail from the bottom up, but here it is perpendicular to the spine. This is a noose tied around the neck of the poet and crushed not only a great man, but also Russian culture.

On Sunday, December 27, according to the testimony Erlich, they With Yesenin broke up. Erlich left the hotel home, but when he reached Nevsky Prospekt, he remembered that he had forgotten his briefcase in the room. Erlich returned to the hotel. Yesenin was alone. He sat at his desk and looked through the manuscript. Was calm. In the morning he was found hanged.

Sergei Yesenin at work

What exactly happened in those few December night hours is still not known for certain.

Viktor Kolmogorov

The Angleterre Hotel at the end of the first decade of the 20th century (bright building on the left in the foreground)

The remarkable Russian poet Sergei Yesenin died at the age of 30, on December 28, 1925 in St. Petersburg. He was found hanging from a heating pipe in room 5 of the Angleterre Hotel. Around the death of the poet, many legends and rumors arose the very next day.

Until now, there are disputes - he himself hanged himself, or he was killed. The same facts are interpreted in exactly the opposite way, adjusted to a previously accepted version. Some facts are not mentioned at all.

How Sergei Yesenin actually died

Petersburg writer Nikolai Astafiev published a book where, based on research that lasted more than 20 years, he convincingly proved that many documents related to the tragic death of the great Russian poet Sergei Yesenin in Leningrad were falsified in order to hide the fact of his villainous murder.

Until now, encyclopedias set out the official version of Yesenin's death, according to which he hanged himself in the Angleterre Hotel. However, in a book published this year in St. Petersburg by Nikolai Astafiev "The Tragedy at Angleterre: Actors and Performers" it is convincingly proved that many documents relating to the circumstances of the Yesenin case are fakes. This allows us to draw an unambiguous conclusion: the great Russian poet was killed.

Where did I start? From the very beginning,” Nikolai Astafiev told Petersburg Diary. - From the study of the telegram that Yesenin allegedly sent to Leningrad on December 7, 1925, notifying his friend Wolf Erlich of his arrival. For many months I sat in the Central Museum of Communications in St. Petersburg, studying the telegrams of that time. And the conclusion turns out to be this: the telegram with which Yesenin allegedly informed Erlich of his arrival and asked him to find housing for him is a gross fake. Firstly, the form does not correspond to the forms of that time; neither its number nor the number of the post office from which it was sent is indicated on it.

Having studied more than a hundred telegrams of that year, I found that the average time for their passage from Moscow to Leningrad was at least 2 hours. And according to the numbers on the telegram, supposedly sent to Erlich, it was sent from Moscow at 15:20 and received in Leningrad at 15:31. Record speed! This could not be. Those who made the fake did not seem to know what time to put down.

Moreover, it was possible to establish that in fact this telegram could have been sent from a post office not in Moscow, but in Leningrad to another post office in the same city.

Yesenin's "note" to Erlich is also a fake: " Vova, take things to my hotel..."Comparing it with Yesenin's handwriting, even a layman can see that it was written by a different person. This was done in order to prove that Yesenin, having arrived in Leningrad to "his friend" Erlich, himself, on his own initiative, settled in Angleterre.

Wolf Ehrlich's interview protocol indirectly mentions a single note about things in the hotel, allegedly created by Yesenin's hand, and a completely different Yesenin's note appears in the memoirs, which refers to a restaurant and there is not a word about the hotel where Yesenin allegedly went. Both powers of attorney for receiving money, allegedly issued by Yesenin in the name of Wolf Erlich, were also falsified.

Were they fake?

For a long time, the fact that Yesenin's room was locked from the inside was portrayed as "convincing" evidence of suicide. However, convincing evidence was found of the destruction of a niche with a door to an adjacent room with a balcony, where the criminals could have gone, staging the poet's suicide.

For a long time, cuts on his arm were explained by the fact that Yesenin allegedly wrote poetry with blood. But in the protocols of the survey there is not a word that Yesenin cut his hands and wrote a "dying" poem. This myth was created by newspapermen.

In fact, the incision on the right arm was made the next day, December 28, in order to straighten the arm that was frozen at the neck.

It's time to investigate objectively

Nikolai Astafiev mentions that in the archive of Yuri Prokushev, who is considered almost the main Yesenin scholar of the country, many valuable documents are stored, including the poet's diary, but no one has ever seen him. No other specialists had and do not have access to it. There is no doubt that this is a murder, the writer concludes in his book.

“The time has come,” he calls, “to reconsider case No. 89 on the death of the poet, to achieve the annulment of the decision of the people’s investigator D.I. Brodsky dated 01.23. evidence of the suicide of Sergei Yesenin is sufficient, and to initiate a criminal case in connection with the newly discovered circumstances, which will allow investigating the circumstances of the tragic death of the poet objectively, within the legal framework ... "

He was doomed

Yesenin was killed, and it was not an "accidental" murder. The great Russian poet simply could not help but be "liquidated", as they said in those days. And not at all for his “bold” conversations, numerous scandals ... but for the poems that he wrote, speaking with hatred and contempt not only about the communist regime, but also about its leaders.

Many facts indicate that Yesenin was not at all, as they say, in a state of manic depression during his arrival in Leningrad.

According to contemporaries, the poet was determined to work, read poetry to friends, talked about a new magazine. In 1925, he published eight books, he prepared a complete collection of works. There was an agreement with the State Publishing House for the payment of royalties for the complete collection of works.

Supporters of the version of suicide invariably cite the fact of his stay in a psychiatric clinic in Moscow as evidence of Yesenin's inclination to suicide. In fact, Yesenin ended up in the clinic not for health reasons at all. He was placed there, saving him from a trial that they wanted to arrange against him after the scandal on the Baku-Moscow train, where he sharply quarreled with the diplomatic courier Alfred Roga and Yuri Levit, a close acquaintance of the all-powerful Lev Kamenev. Roga and Levit, through the office of the People's Commissariat for Foreign Affairs, filed a lawsuit against the poet, demanding retribution. The way out of the difficult situation was suggested by the sisters of the poet Katya and Shura - to "hide" in the clinic of Moscow University.

Indications Svarog

Encyclopedias claim that after the death of Yesenin, no one talked about the murder for "several decades". On the contrary, they started talking about it right away.

The artist Vasily Svarog, who made a drawing of the dead Yesenin without makeup, said in 1927: “It seems to me that this Erlich slipped something into him at night, well ... maybe not poison, but a strong sleeping pill. No wonder he "forgot" his briefcase in Yesenin's room. And he didn't go home to "sleep" - with Yesenin's note in his pocket. It was not in vain that he was spinning nearby all the time, probably, their whole company was sitting and biding their time in neighboring rooms ... First there was a "noose "- with his right hand, Yesenin tried to loosen it, so the hand stiffened in a cramp. The head was on the arm of the sofa when Yesenin was hit above the bridge of the nose with the handle of the revolver. Then they rolled him into a carpet and wanted to lower him from the balcony, a car was waiting around the corner. It was easier to kidnap. But the balcony door did not open wide enough, they left the corpse by the balcony, in the cold. They drank, smoked, all this dirt remained ... They hung up in a hurry, already late at night, and it was not easy on a vertical riser. When they fled, Erlich stayed behind to do something check and prepare for the version of suicide ... "

Didn't live in Angleterre

However, the most sensational discovery was made by the St. Petersburg writer V. Kuznetsov. Studying the documents of the Angleterre Hotel, he discovered that Yesenin did not live in it at all! The poet's surname is not on the list of residents of this hotel at the time when his corpse was allegedly found hanging on a steam heating pipe. Those who remember Soviet times know well what it meant then to get a hotel room. Each settled was registered, the administrator wrote down the data of his passport. The authorities followed this very strictly.

None of the hotel staff and Yesenin's guests who lived there saw these days. And all the "witnesses" who later testified about the communication with the poet in his issue of Angleterre, including Erlich, were secret agents of the GPU.

According to Kuznetsov, as soon as Yesenin appeared in Leningrad, he was immediately arrested and brought to the GPU investigation house on the street. Mayorova, 8/23. There he was interrogated with prejudice. The operation was led by Chekist Yakov Blyumkin (the same Blyumkin who killed the German ambassador Mirbach in July 1918, and in 1929 he himself was shot by order of the OGPU collegium. Note ed.).

It is unlikely that Trotsky personally gave the order to kill the poet, but it just happened. Apparently, Yesenin, accustomed to fights, resisted and pushed Blumkin with force, he fell. Then a shot rang out. The photograph shows a trace of a bullet wound, and after that Blumkin hit Yesenin with a revolver handle in the forehead. After that, they decided to stage a suicide - fortunately, the sinister house 8/23 was directly opposite the Angleterre. The corpse was transferred to a room in which no one lived ...

Sergei Yesenin was born 120 years ago. In the USSR, he was called the great Russian poet. In market Russia, he acquired the status of a personified national idea. But here's the weird thing. In the current Year of Literature, programs on various TV channels are dedicated not to his poems, but to the 90th anniversary of the poet's tragic death on the night of December 28, 1925.

Under the dashing and lyrical songs to the verses of the people's favorite, the Russians are inspired: such a person could not hang himself, he was killed. Mean. Brutal. TV channels make ratings for themselves, spreading, apparently, another myth.

How do you not like Yesenin? - one of the heroes of The Master and Margarita is amazed.
In the 1930s, when the novel was being written, the idea of ​​rejecting the golden-haired poet seemed blasphemous even to the messengers of hell. But now they can be happy. The name of the Ryazan nugget, singer of the Russian village and peasant life, merry fellow, rake, womanizer, internationalist suddenly turned out to be raised to the banners of anti-Semites, homosexuals, banner-bearers, democrats, communists, brothers and various marginal groups.

In a word, people of the most extreme and opposite views. But his poems, especially those that are filled with the spiritual power of the broad Russian soul, few people will quote by heart. After the series "Yesenin" with Sergei Bezrukov (October 4, Channel One will show this film all day), conversations revolve only around the death of the poet. Where did it start?

English trace

According to Alla Marchenko, the author of the recently published book Yesenin. Way and no way”, the rumor about the murder of Sergei Yesenin first appeared in the USSR in the spring of 1977. The English Slavist Jessie Davis conceived the novel The Russian Husband of Isadora Duncan about the love between a Soviet poet and an American dancer. And she began to ask our literary critics and editors if there are specialists in the country who believe that Yesenin was killed. Moreover, they were brutally killed, and it was in that room of the Leningrad Angleterre Hotel, where the couple in love stopped at the beginning of their legendary love story. This is exactly the kind of ending that the plot she had conceived demanded.

Arguments that the poet's mother Tatyana Fedorovna and his widow Sofya Tolstaya, who washed and dressed her dead husband, could not help but notice the traces of brutal reprisal, were swept aside. Say, the bloody Bolsheviks, who unleashed the Civil War, were capable of anything. Yesenin's relatives could remain silent, fearing for their lives.
The rumor thrown into literary circles “the British are looking for the killers of Yesenin” began to acquire versions. But during the life of contemporaries, you can’t lie much.

Who needs to "kill" the poet

In 1987, the writer Vasily Belov, a venerable representative of "village prose", openly announced the murder of Yesenin. But rumors spilled into the press only in the summer of 1989, when Boris Yeltsin had already become Moscow's idol, and under the slogan how much the republics could be fed, the separation of the RSFSR from the center began for the subsequent collapse of the Union.

Global processes need bright poets who can sing them. Powerful, like the "proletarian" poet Mayakovsky and the "village" Yesenin. But there were none. Therefore, it was these two names that political technologists made the main weapon against the "dying" socialism and the USSR. Yesenin was more suitable, since he never joined the Bolshevik Party, and songs based on his poems are still popular. A blow with his name to the psyche of the Russians should have sounded biting.

It was inflicted by the former police colonel Eduard Khlystalov, who since 1983 served as an inspector
Political Directorate of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the USSR. He briefly, without explaining, spread a sensational version - the poet became a "victim of the GPU", whose employees staged a suicide.

The democratic public did not pay attention to a small puncture - the State Political Administration under the NKVD of the RSFSR existed only until November 2, 1923, which means that the whistleblower did not see any serious documents of the last years of Yesenin's life. And demanded an independent investigation by experts.

Out of personal interest, aces of forensic medicine and forensic science worked on a voluntary basis. Among them is Alexander Maslov. His book “The Mysterious Loop. The secret of the last days of Sergei Yesenin ”the professor wrote as the final work and did not live to see its publication.
The verdict of scientists is unequivocal - suicide. It is not within the competence of forensic experts to investigate his motives. Their task is to prove whether the death was violent or not.

The results of the three-year study were already known in 1996. But the creators of myths continue to cook them for the sake of TV ratings. And therefore, the Zionists in the person of Trotsky (Bronstein) are blamed for the murder of Yesenin, who allegedly was jealous of his unnamed mistress for Yesenin and ordered him to teach him a lesson. That of Stalin, who allegedly disliked the poet.

Answers on questions

The fables of novelists and cinematographers were smashed by representatives of a dozen sciences, and not just historians, psychologists, and Yesenin scholars.
- But, how so? readers will ask. - But what about the photo, which shows traces of beatings and a bullet hole? And the fact that Yesenin simply could not tie a knot of rope at such a height, because his legs were almost one and a half meters from the floor, and only a stool lay nearby, and how can you hang yourself on a smooth pipe?
In documentaries, we are shown repeatedly retouched copies of the first shots. The original negative, examined with the help of modern technologies, does not show bruises from beatings during torture, but there are natural changes in the dying tissues of the face, caused, like bedsores in seriously ill patients, by prolonged pressure on the skin of foreign material. In this case, hot steam heating pipes.
The version of concealment of the brutal murder also crumbled (they broke the skull with a revolver and shot in the forehead, hung it up, and then tore out and destroyed a piece from the “Autopsy Act”, where the truth was recorded). It turned out that the half-decayed act was damaged after many decades, but the fragments of its missing part were not destroyed, but folded into an envelope. In the All-Russian Research Institute of Forensic Examinations, the “lost” text was restored. It reads: "the eyes and bones of the skull are intact, the brain is intact and weighs 1920 grams."
The height of the ceilings in Angleterre is 3.5 meters. The smooth pipe was attached to the wall in two places. One of them is almost under the ceiling. At the junction with it, and not on the “bare” pipe, the rope was tightened. With a height of 168 cm, the poet from a stool really could not do this himself. But in the protocol of the district police officer, it was not a stool, but some kind of overturned "pedestal". The poet's luggage contained a travel chest for costumes. In an upright position, it turned into a wardrobe - hangers on the left, drawers on the right. The height of the chest is one and a half meters, and he could easily withstand a light poet.
Unusual traces on the neck, which the novelists attributed to a noose allegedly thrown from the back, turned out to be left by more than one rope. Part of the loop was from a chest strap.

forgotten version

She appeared in the diary of Novy Mir deputy editor Alexei Kondratovich on December 1, 1967. Its essence is this. When Yesenin was in the hospital before the tragedy at Angleterre, and the doctor left the office for a minute without locking the door, the patients snatched up their case histories and began to read. At that time, the school of psychiatrists was in vogue, which considered many ailments to be irreversible. Yesenin read one of these diagnoses in his hospital history. A week before his death, the essayist Ivan Zykov saw the poet studying the book of the founder of the school of this very irreversibility. Firmly convinced that soon he would turn into an idiot, into a vegetable and it was impossible to recover, Yesenin, apparently, decided on a fatal step.

IN LOVE WITH COMMUNISM

In his autobiography, Yesenin deliberately created for himself the image of a “hooligan poet”.
* “On Sundays they always sent me to mass and, in order to check that I was at mass, they gave 4 kopecks: two kopecks for the prosphora and two for the removal of parts to the priest. I bought prosphora, and instead of the priest, I made three marks on it with a penknife, and for the other two kopecks I went to the cemetery to play pigs with the guys.
* “In Russia, when there was no paper, I printed my poems together with Kusikov and Mariengof on the walls of the Strastnoy Monastery or simply read it somewhere on the boulevard.”
* “The best admirers of our poetry are prostitutes and bandits. We are all in great friendship with them. The Communists do not like us because of a misunderstanding. It was only abroad that I realized quite clearly how great the merit of the Russian revolution was in saving the world from hopeless philistinism. I fell even more in love with communist construction.”

PHILOLOGICAL JOKE

Poet Blok leaves the tavern with two girls under his arm. A bottomless night, a man wallowing in the mud blocks their way. Blok thought, the girls vying:
- Ah, Sasha, we ask impromptu!
- A lifeless body lies on our life path ... - the poet began.
Then the body grunted and croaked:
- Well, what do you care? You go with the frogs and go!
“Come on, girls, this is Yesenin,” Blok was frightened.