Gints’s killing at Biriuchi is the violent culmination of a mutiny that strips his authority of force: the men reject his appeal to duty, the Cossacks abandon their role as enforcers, and Gints’s own insistence on addressing his pursuers leaves him exposed at the station. The event also returns later as remembered context for the danger surrounding Meliuzeievo, linking the station violence to Galiullin’s escape.

Mutiny and collapse of authority

The confrontation begins after the rebels of the 212th Infantry are surrounded in a clearing by Cossacks. With timber piled inside the ring of horses, Gints mounts it to address the soldiers. His appeal to soldierly duty and the fatherland finds no sympathy among men exhausted by war and wearied by political persuasion from both Left and Right. His foreign-sounding name and Baltic accent further distance him from his audience.

When Gints turns from lofty appeals to threats, warning that revolutionary courts-martial could impose the death penalty unless the men disarm and surrender their leaders, the soldiers answer with resentment. They compare his tone to that of the old authorities, challenge his status, and accuse him of being a German infiltrator. The Cossacks, who have drawn their swords, also resent the speech. They begin sheathing their weapons and dismounting; soon they mingle and fraternize with the rebels instead of restraining them. The attempt to restore order has dissolved into a shared rejection of Gints’s command.

Flight toward the station

Cossack officers warn Gints to disappear quietly and offer to have his car brought from the station to meet him. He goes toward the station openly, walking calmly despite his agitation, because slipping away seems beneath his dignity. At the edge of the woods, within sight of the tracks, he looks back and sees rifle-bearing soldiers following him. He quickens his pace; they do the same, keeping the distance between them unchanged.

Gints runs behind a double wall of derelict coaches, crosses the clear tracks, and leaps onto the steep station platform. Povarikhin and Kolia Frolenko call to him to enter the station building, where they could protect him. Instead, Gints stops near the entrance. He believes that a heartfelt appeal will make the pursuers recognize that he is not a spy, and turns toward them rather than taking the available shelter.

The appeal and killing

At the station doors, beneath the station bell, Gints climbs onto the tightly covered lid of a water butt kept for fires and addresses the approaching soldiers. His speech is incoherent, but the boldness of speaking from a raised position, so close to safety, surprises them. They stop and lower their rifles. For a moment, the movement of pursuit gives way to attention.

The pause does not hold. Gints pushes in the lid and loses his balance, ending up awkwardly astride the edge of the butt. The soldiers laugh; the man in front shoots him, and the others rush forward and attack his body with their bayonets. Gints is dead before they reach him. The scene turns on a sharp reversal: the gesture meant to reclaim authority through direct speech briefly checks the crowd, but the accident destroys that fragile opening and makes him vulnerable.

Recollection and consequences

The killing is not confined to the station scene. Later, Mademoiselle Fleury, half asleep during a storm, remembers that she and Zhivago hid Galiullin, disguised him as a civilian, and told him the roads and villages to take after the lynching at the station. Galiullin had been pursued from Biriuchi to Meliuzeievo, and the recollection places Gints’s death within the wider violence of the mutiny and its aftermath. An armored division passing through the town stopped the attackers; without its arrival, Fleury fears that the town might have been destroyed.

Another later account says that Kolia Frolenko, the Biriuchi telegrapher and a familiar figure in Meliuzeievo, was indirectly responsible for the trouble at the station. The narrative thus places the killing within a chain of local relationships and remembered danger, while leaving the precise nature of Frolenko’s responsibility unstated. Its central contrast remains the failure of formal authority against a crowd already shaped by exhaustion, suspicion, and revolt.