39 Facts About Pavel Dybenko

Pavel Efimovich Dybenko was a Bolshevik revolutionary and a leading Soviet officer and military commander.

Pavel Dybenko was arrested, tortured and executed during the Great Purge and subsequently rehabilitated during the Khrushchev Thaw.

Pavel Dybenko was born in Lyudkovo village, Novozybkov uyezd, Chernigov guberniya, Imperial Russia into a Ukrainian peasant family.

Pavel Dybenko was one of six children raised on an eight-acre farm.

From 1907 onward, Dybenko became active in a Bolshevik group, distributing revolutionary literature, such as the People's Gazette and the Proletariat, which spoke to anti-Tsar sympathies, throughout the Novozybkov region.

Pavel Dybenko moved to Riga and worked as a port labourer.

Pavel Dybenko tried to avoid enlisting, but was arrested and forcibly enlisted.

Pavel Dybenko was released after the February 1917 revolution and returned to the Baltic Fleet.

Pavel Dybenko was appointed the People's Commissar of naval affairs.

The Soviet government sent Pavel Dybenko to defend Petrograd with the Baltic Fleet.

Pavel Dybenko strongly opposed the Brest-Litovsk peace, and tried to organize mariners to act against it.

Pavel Dybenko soon headed the local opposition and from that remote town he published letters accusing Lenin of corruption, stealing 90 tons of gold, incompetence, terrorism, and of being a German agent.

However, one week prior to that date, Pavel Dybenko reappeared in Moscow.

Pavel Dybenko tried then to cooperate with non-Bolshevik leftist political forces, especially with the Left SR, but with Maximalists and Anarchists, all having some military forces.

The Pavel Dybenko troops supplied their own needs robbing both the local population, and the trains carrying coal and provisions to Russia.

Pavel Dybenko created what he called "The Crimean Soviet Army", with 9000 men, independent from the Ukrainian Front.

Pavel Dybenko created the Crimean Soviet Socialist Republic, and invited Lenin's brother Dmitry Ulianov, to be the prime minister there.

The regime which Pavel Dybenko established in Crimea was called "Dybenkism" by the leading Bolsheviks.

In September 1919 Pavel Dybenko appeared in Moscow and entered the Red Army Academy.

Pavel Dybenko was court-martialed for unjustified executions of soldiers of his, but was found not guilty.

In March 1921 Pavel Dybenko led, under the command of Mikhail Tukhachevsky, the suppression of the naval rebellion in Kronstadt.

Pavel Dybenko won there his first Order of the Combat Red Banner, then the USSR's supreme decoration.

Pavel Dybenko received two more, in peacetime, for his excellency in suppression of peasants uprisings.

Pavel Dybenko wrote several books, all memoirs from the pre-revolutionary and revolutionary eras.

In 1922 Pavel Dybenko finished the General Staff Military Academy.

Pavel Dybenko authored some army reform ideas, which Dybenko ascribed to himself.

Soon their marriage collapsed, Pavel Dybenko attempted suicide, and Kollontai arranged a diplomatic mission for herself, just to be as far as possible from him.

Pavel Dybenko served between 1925 and 1928 as a head of the Artillery Directorate and the Supply Directorate of the General Staff of the Red Army.

Pavel Dybenko created a Border Guard and fought against smugglers.

Pavel Dybenko suppressed the local nationalists and Muslim devotees with notable cruelty.

Pavel Dybenko did not hesitate to attack civilians in the peacetime, or to set fire to entire populated villages.

In 1930 Pavel Dybenko was sent, with a numerous group of other generals, to Germany.

In 1933 Pavel Dybenko was appointed the Volga military district commander.

Later in 1937, Pavel Dybenko assisted the NKVD in preparing Tukhachevsky's arrest.

Pavel Dybenko became a member of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, was promoted to Komandarm second class, and appointed the Leningrad military district commander after Iona Yakir's downfall.

Pavel Dybenko apparently welcomed the start of Stalin's assault on the high command of the Red Army during the Great Purge, because it began with the sudden arrests of Marshal Tukhachevsky and other senior officers in May 1937.

Edward Radzinsky citing an unknown NKVDist, claimed that NKVD tortured Pavel Dybenko by putting a box with nails over his head.

Pavel Dybenko confessed to the authorities about her husband being a traitor and a spy.

Pavel Dybenko was sentenced to five years in ALZhIR.