He was captured by the Bolsheviks on September 23 , 1921 , after being heavily wounded in battle at Znamenka . He was imprisoned in Kharkov prison , where he was sentenced to death . Whilst in prison , he was encouraged to write his memoirs by the Cheka , which he was able to do in great detail with the help of his military notes and campaign diary . He filled three large exercise books with these memoirs . Extracts from these appeared in Issue 3 of Letopsis Revoliutsii ( Annals of the Revolution ) No3 , May – June 1928 with many text changes by the Soviet censors . Released by the Soviet government under an amnesty in 1923 , he was banished to Krasnodar in the Kuban region . There he worked as a mechanic for the Hunters Union . On 13 December 1937 during the mass purges of Stalin , he was arrested and put in front of a firing squad on 24 January 1938 . He was posthumously rehabilitated on April 1976 for “ insufficient evidence ”
mass purges
Great Purge
Viktor Belash