Likhach, Mikhail Alexandrovich

Born in the family of the police . Graduate of the Vitebsk Gymnasium. He entered St. Petersburg, then studied at Moscow University, did not finish the course. He entered the Moscow Commercial Institute. In 1903 he became a member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party . In 1904 he was arrested, one year in prison, transferred to parental supervision. He organized a fighting squad in the Nevsky district of St. Petersburg. In 1907 he was exiled to the Vologda province with the right to travel abroad. He emigrated, studied at the University of Munich. Information about the completion of higher education is contradictory, according to some sources he graduated from the University of Munich ^[1] , according to others related to the arrest in 1921, he had only incomplete higher education ^[2] . In 1909 he was exiled to the Arkhangelsk province, in 1912 he returned to Petersburg. In 1916 he was mobilized into the army, the ensign of the 4th artillery regiment. In 1917, Chairman of the Committee of the XIIth Army . In the last days of October 1917, at the congress of the XII Army in Wenden, the Bolshevik S. M. Nakhimson was initially elected the chairman of the congress, and M. A. Likhach ^[3] after the vote. The delegate of the IV Congress of the Socialist Revolutionary Party , elected to the Central Committee of the AKP.

At the end of 1917 he was elected to the All-Russian Constituent Assembly from the Northern Front according to list No. 3 (Socialist-Revolutionaries and the Council of Peasant Deputies) ^[1] . Member of the Bureau of the Socialist Revolutionary fraction in the Constituent Assembly. Participated in its only meeting on January 5, 1918 in Petrograd. The political position at that moment was defined as a "center-left." Member of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of the 3rd and 4th convocations.

During the Civil War

After the anti-Bolshevik coup on August 2, 1918 in Arkhangelsk, he joined the Supreme Directorate of the Northern Region as manager of the departments of labor and education. The military leader of the coup in Arkhangelsk, captain of the 2nd rank, G. E. Chaplin, reacted negatively to the Supreme Directorate, composed mainly of representatives of socialist parties. And at 11 o’clock on the night of September 5-6, 1918, he and an officer company obeying him arrested members of the government: Tchaikovsky , Maslov , Likhach, Gukovsky and Zubov, right in the dormitory where they lived, and then loaded onto the ship, they sent to Solovetsky monastery. But the coup was not supported by representatives of the diplomatic corps under the auspices of the American ambassador Francis, and at their request the arrested were returned to Arkhangelsk ^{[4] [5] [6] [7]}

A more elegant way was found to get rid of the Socialist Revolutionaries, which annoyed the military so much. Likhach, together with Dedusenko and Maslov, as part of the delegation of the Northern Region, was sent by the head of government Tchaikovsky to Kolchak in Omsk to establish contacts with the government of the Ufa Directory .

Arrived in Omsk at the time of the Kolchak coup . On November 17, 1918, the entire delegation of the Northern Region was present at the arrest of Krasovsky , Avksenyev and Zenzinov , Krasilovsky officers, at Rogovsky’s apartment, but Likhach (like both Dedusenko and Maslov) was not arrested at that moment ^[8] . He was later arrested in Omsk by Kolchakites, but was soon released.

Arrest and Investigation

Arrested on January 26, 1921. In the investigation of the Socialist Revolutionary Party (1921-1922), he refused to testify. During the trial, Likhach made several protests, in particular, he stated that the accused were given only 24 hours to familiarize themselves with the multi-volume case ^[9] . He also protested against the treatment of the defendants: the sessions did not end before midnight, the defendants spent 12 hours in the courthouse, they were transported by a covered truck with barred windows (Likhach called it a “dog van”), in which 22 defendants could hardly fit ^[9] . In the last word, M. A. Likhach said:

You want to shoot the socialists in order to assign these socialists of a democratic nature all responsibility for your failures, for your internal bankruptcy, for the bankruptcy of all the policies you are pursuing. Well, we will not object to this. You want to shoot us, please, but we were socialists, there are socialists and we will be socialists. You will never succeed in breaking up the truth about us that is now in the West European proletariat, that you will never succeed in bourgeois conspirators. We lived socialists and die socialists. ^[ten]

On August 7, 1922, M. A. Likhach was sentenced to death with a suspended sentence until the SRs committed the first terrorist attack. In January 1924, the death penalty was changed to 5 years in prison with strict isolation. He served his sentence in Butyrka prison. From October 9 - November 1, 1925 he participated in the so-called "distributed" group hunger strike. The conflict leading to the hunger strike developed as follows. On July 11 and 12, 1925 the OGPU re-arrested the right-wing Social Revolutionaries convicted of the process and released into exile A.R. Gots and E.M. Timofeev in Ulyanovsk and Kokand, respectively. In response, they went on a hunger strike ^[11] . On October 9, Agapov, Rakov , Handelman, Gerstein , Likhach, Ivanov , Ivanova and Fedorovich joined the hunger strike of Gotz and Timofeev. At the direction of the head of the SB OGPU Deribas, the starving people were taken to various prisons, Likhach was sent to the Novo-Nikolaevsk prison. The starving people, taken to different prisons, put forward an additional demand - to return to Butyrskaya prison in Moscow. On October 25, after promising to return to Moscow, Likhach, like other participants, stopped the hunger strike ^{[12] [13]} . On January 25, 1926, he was sentenced to exile in Voronezh for 3 years, then the term of exile was twice extended by 1 year. He worked as an economist at a metal trust. In 1928, according to the OGPU, he led the Central Black Earth Organization of the Social Revolutionaries, gathered party members in his apartment, prepared an escape from the Voronezh exile. He fought for freedom of speech in the USSR, which was subsequently considered as anti-Soviet agitation ^[14] . Arrested on September 1, 1930 in the "case of the Labor Peasant Party." February 28, 1931 sentenced to 3 years in prison. He died in Chelyabinsk prison ^[15] from pneumonia ^[16] .

The political opponent of M.A. Likhach, captain G. E. Chaplin, believed that:

Lihach was at one time the commissar of the XII Army and put a lot of effort into its final collapse ^[17]

• The first wife is Lyudmila Aleksandrovna Likhach, nee?, Socialist-Revolutionary ^{[13] [18]} .
• The second wife - Daria Gavrilovna Solovyova-Likhach, a former Socialist-Revolutionary, on her initiative, on October 19, 1925, in the 17th branch of the People's Court of the city of Leningrad, a divorce process was held with M. A. Likhach, who at that time was holding an indefinite hunger strike in Novo-Nikolaevskaya prison ^{[16 ] [13]} .
• Sister - M. A. Likhach ^[13] .

• Mikhail Likhach (1887) - An open list.
• Protasov L.G. People of the Constituent Assembly: a portrait in the interior of the era. M., ROSPEN, 2008.
• Morozov KN Paradoxes of rehabilitation of the defendants of the process of socialists-revolutionaries of 1922 by the Prosecutor General of the Russian Federation in the context of the problem of legal “guilt” of participants in the civil war.