The red terror in Russia

By Sergey Petrovich Melgounov

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Title: The red terror in Russia

Author: Sergey Petrovich Melgounov

Translator: C. J. Hogarth

Release date: October 21, 2025 [eBook #77104]

Language: English

Original publication: London: J.M. Dent & sons, 1925

Credits: Peter Becker, Karin Spence and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE RED TERROR IN RUSSIA ***


  [Illustration: A few of a party of nineteen ecclesiastics
  shot at Yuriev on January 1, 1918--amongst them Bishop Platon
  (1)--before their removal to the anatomical theatre at Yuriev
  University.

    [_See p. 118._]




                            THE RED TERROR
                               IN RUSSIA

                                  BY

                      SERGEY PETROVICH MELGOUNOV


                            [Illustration]


                       WITH FIFTEEN PHOTOGRAPHS


                                 1925
                           LONDON & TORONTO
                        J. M. DENT & SONS LTD.


   The original edition of _The Red Terror in Russia_ from
   which this book has been translated was published by Messrs.
   Vataga of Berlin in 1924.


                         _All rights reserved_

                       PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN




                             TO THE READER


Although, for good and sufficient reasons, the translator who has
carefully and conscientiously rendered the bulk of this work into
English desires to remain anonymous, certain passages in the work have
been translated by myself, and the sheets of the manuscript as a whole
entrusted to my hands for revision. Hence, if any shortcomings in the
rendering should be discerned (as doubtless they will be), they may be
ascribed to my fault alone.

For the rest, I would ask the reader to remember, when passages in the
present tense are met with, that most of this work was written during
the years 1923 and 1924.

                                                       C. J. HOGARTH.




                                PREFACE


Sergey Petrovich Melgounov, author of this work, was born on December
25, 1879. The son of the well-known historian of the name, he is also
a direct descendant of the Freemason who became prominent during the
reign of Catherine the Great.

Mr. Melgounov graduated in the Historical and Philological Faculty of
the University of Moscow, and then proceeded to devote his principal
study to the Sectarian movements of Russia, and to write many articles
on the subject which, collated into book form, appeared under the title
of _The Social and Religious Movements of Russia during the Nineteenth
Century_, and constitute a sequel to two earlier volumes on Sectarian
movements during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As a young
man he took to contributing to the well-known journal the _Posledniya
Vedomosty_ (“The Latest News”), and in its columns passionately opposed
religious persecution, and subsequently published the articles as a
volume entitled _Church and State in Russia_. The same researches into
Sectarianism brought him into contact and association with Tolstoy
(whose views, however, he did not share) and Tolstoy’s daughter, the
Countess Alexandra Lvovna, with whom, at the time of the Bolshevists’
seizure of power, he was engaged in preparing for publication a new
edition of her father’s works designed to include certain compositions
not yet published.

Another of Mr. Melgounov’s works is a volume entitled _Men and Deeds
during the Alexandrian Period_, an attempt both to summarise what has
been accomplished in the study of that epoch and to consider certain
new points in connection with it. Also, it was under Mr. Melgounov’s
editorship that a group of specialists produced, collectively,
_The Great Reform of February 19th, 1861_; _The Patriotic War of,
and Russian Society in, 1812_; _The Past and Present Outlook of
Freemasonry_, and _A History Reader of Modern Times_--the last a
seven-volumed work designed to follow the _Reader_ on similar lines,
but dealing with the Middle Ages, which Sir Paul Vinogradov has edited.

In 1913 Mr. Melgounov joined Mr. V. I. Semevsky, the noted historian
of the Russian peasantry as a class, in launching the historical
journal _Golos Minouvshago_ (“Voice of the Past”), as a journal for,
primarily, study of the history of social movements; and this journal,
with certain unavoidable breaks, Mr. Melgounov carried on, after Mr.
Semevsky’s death in 1916, up to the year 1923. Earlier, in 1911, Mr.
Melgounov had suggested, and taken a leading part in, organising a
publishing house under the style of “Zadrouga,” as a progressive
and democratic enterprise intended to act rather as a co-operative
society of writers than as a purely commercial venture. And, needless
to say, the Bolshevists suppressed it almost at once. Amongst its
members were included the writer Korolenko and over six hundred
others, whilst its output amounted to several hundreds of works,
and it owned, in addition, two printing presses, all the employees
of which were members of the society concerned. When the Revolution
had come about “Zadrouga” also issued pamphlets by the million, for
the enlightenment of the peasantry and the industrial workers. These
pamphlets set forth, principally, the views of the _Narodnicheskoyé
Dvizheniyé_, or “People’s Movement,” as views consonant with those
held by Mr. Melgounov himself, since from the first he had been a chief
organiser of the party known as “People’s Socialists,” a party founded
by Messrs. Miakotin and Peshekhonov, and basing its ideology upon the
common interests of individuals as individual personalities rather than
upon class warfare, upon attainment of realities, as occasion should
serve, rather than upon Utopian ideas, upon evolution rather than
upon political upheavals. And though, during the hectic revolutionary
period, when demagogy alone was listened to, the party could attract
few fresh adherents to its standard, it had previously, through its
untiring defence of the interests of State and People, added to its
truly democratic outlook, drawn to itself all that was best in the
Russian _intelligentsia_. As vice-president of the party’s central
committee, Mr. Melgounov was put forward as the party candidate for
the Constituent Assembly, and continued to edit the party’s organs,
_The People’s Word_ and _The Popular Socialist_, and the organ of
the co-operative societies, _The Rule of the People_, even after the
Bolshevists had illegally dispersed that Assembly.

The Revolution of October 1917 failed to deter Mr. Melgounov from
remaining on in Russia, as he desired to combat the Bolshevist
tyranny, and stood prepared to suffer for his outspokenness under
the new régime even as he had suffered under the old. Eight times he
was arrested; twenty-three times did he have his house and documents
searched. More than once, however, he was released--thanks to the
mediation of such old-established non-Bolshevist revolutionaries as
Madame Vera Figner and Prince Kropotkin. In 1920 he and many other
_literati_ and public men of Moscow were arrested and tried on a charge
of having participated in the activities of the association known as
_Vozrozhdeniyé_ or “Regeneration,” a political group which, drawn from
all democratic parties without distinction, had for its ideal a united
National front against the Bolshevists; and, though sentenced to death,
he afterwards had his sentence commuted to ten years imprisonment,
and, after serving a year of that sentence (mostly under the system
termed “solitary confinement”), was released on the intercession of the
Academy of Sciences, but re-arrested in the autumn of 1922, to serve
as a witness in the trial of Social Revolutionaries of the Right, and
then sentenced to be deported to Perm Province. Lastly, after being
allowed to leave Russia on condition that he never returned to his
native country, he was, a year later, deprived, in his absence, of
civil rights, and had his archives and library confiscated and handed
over to the Socialist Academy--this last move on the Bolshevists’ part
being due to his articles denunciatory of the Red Terror, which he
strenuously opposed from the standpoint of ethical rectitude, and as a
lifelong protagonist of the deathless principles of justice and
freedom.
                                                      THE TRANSLATOR.

       *       *       *       *       *

To save space and labour, the translator has everywhere used the
shortened expression “_Che-Ka_” in place of the full English
title “_Extraordinary Commission_.” The expression Che-Ka is
formed of the names of the two initial letters of the Russian title,
_Chrezvychainaya Komissia_. Originally there was only one Che-Ka,
the “All-Russian Extraordinary Commission,” or _Vserossiis-Kaya
Chrezvychainaya Komissia_; but subsequently local and occupational
branches came into existence.




                               CONTENTS


                                                                   PAGE

          TO THE READER                                               v

          PREFACE                                                   vii

          INTRODUCTION                                                1

    CHAPTER

       I. HOSTAGES                                                    3

      II. “THE TERROR WAS FORCED UPON US”                            22

     III. BLOOD STATISTICS                                           39

      IV. THE CIVIL WAR                                             112

       V. “CLASS TERRORISM”                                         126

      VI. CHE-KA TYRANNY                                            145

     VII. EXILE AND IMPRISONMENT                                    227

    VIII. “THE PRIDE AND THE JOY OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY”            245

          BIBLIOGRAPHY      267




                         LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS


    A FEW OF A PARTY OF NINETEEN ECCLESIASTICS SHOT
    AT YURIEV ON JANUARY 1, 1918--AMONGST THEM
    BISHOP PLATON--BEFORE THEIR REMOVAL TO THE
    ANATOMICAL THEATRE AT YURIEV UNIVERSITY              _Frontispiece_

                                                          _Facing Page_

    MALE AND FEMALE EXECUTIONERS AND TORTURERS ACTIVE
      IN EUPATORIA DURING 1918                                       73

    VARIOUS EXECUTIONERS AND TORTURERS ACTIVE IN EUPATORIA
      DURING THE CRIMEAN TERROR                                      76

    MALE AND FEMALE TORTURERS OF EUPATORIA                           89

    EXHUMING BOLSHEVISTS’ VICTIMS FROM CLAY PITS AT KOURSK           92

    EXHUMING BOLSHEVISTS’ VICTIMS AT ODESSA                         163

    AN INSCRIPTION WRITTEN BY A PRISONER ON A CELL WALL IN KIEV     165

    SAENKO, COMMANDANT OF THE CHE-KA OF KHARKOV, A NOTORIOUS
      TORTURER AND EXECUTIONER                                      167

    INSCRIPTIONS WRITTEN BY PRISONERS ON A CELL WALL IN KIEV        174

    A TORTURE CHAMBER AT KIEV, WITH “DEATH TO THE BOURGEOISIE”
       SCRAWLED ACROSS A WALL                                       176

    A CORNER OF A COACH-HOUSE ON THE PREMISES OF ONE OF THE
      KIEVAN CHE-KAS WHERE PRISONERS WERE SHOT. THE FLOOR IS
      LITTERED WITH CHIPS OF SKULL BONE, CLOTS OF BRAIN, ETC.       178

    KHARKOV VICTIMS                                                 185

    HUMAN “GLOVES,” FLAYINGS OF HUMAN HANDS, FOUND IN A
      TORTURE CHAMBER AT KHARKOV AFTER THE BOLSHEVISTS’
      DEPARTURE                                                     188

    FUCHS, A “PUBLIC PROSECUTOR” FOR THE CHE-KA OF KHARKOV          228

    CORPSES. CHE-KA OF ZHITOMIR, 1919                               241




                       THE RED TERROR IN RUSSIA




                             INTRODUCTION

   In countries where personal freedom renders honest, sincere
   political controversy possible ... the use of political murder
   as a weapon in the fight is a manifestation of despotism.--The
   Executive of the _Narodnaya Volya_, or Party of Popular
   Freedom.


I was in Russia during the first five years of the Bolshevist
_régime_, but contrived to leave that country during the October
of 1922. Scarcely had I broken my journey at Warsaw before I found
myself confronted with a question involving one of the most complex
psychological and socio-ethical problems of our day.

For, as I was sitting in a co-operative café run by some Polish ladies,
the lady who was serving me with coffee suddenly put to me the question:

“Are you a Russian straight from Russia?”

“Yes--I am a Russian.”

“Then pray tell me how it is that no one there seems willing to
assassinate Lenin and Trotsky?”

The unexpected, the point-blank question took me aback, and the more so
because during the past five years I had lost the habit of expressing
an opinion openly. But at length I contrived to reply that I myself
stood opposed to all terrorist acts, and considered them always to fail
in attaining their purpose.

“Yet to think that one man’s death might save the lives of thousands
who are destined to perish in those ruffians’ torture-chambers! How is
it that, though, during Tsarist days, ever so many people were ready to
sacrifice their lives for others, even to assassinate, that wrong might
be punished, not a soul now will avenge his outraged honour? Yet every
victim has a brother, or a son, or a daughter, or a sister, or a wife.
How is it that these will not avenge him? Oh, I cannot understand it!”

Leaving out of the question the ethical point of the wrong or the right
of physical force,[1] I replied that, even though things in Russia had
reached the point that human life had ceased to be of value, it should
be remembered by anyone contemplating a terrorist act that revenge,
even revenge wreaked out of patriotic motives, would entail thousands
of innocent deaths--that though in former days only the political
criminal himself, or, at most, he and his associates, had suffered
execution, matters now were different, as the past five years had
shown.




                               CHAPTER I

                               HOSTAGES

   Terrorism is needless cruelty practised by terrified men.
                                                         --ENGELS.


Uritsky, People’s Commissary of the Northern Commune, and a leading
spirit of the Che-Ka of Petrograd, was assassinated on August 17, 1918,
by a Socialist ex-student named Kannegiesser, who during the war had
been a military cadet. In the official report of the assassination it
was said:

   Leonid Kannegiesser asserts that he killed Uritsky solely of
   his own free will, in revenge for the arrest of certain army
   officers, and for the execution of his friend Peretzweig, but
   in no case in obedience to orders from any political party or
   association.

On August 28 another Socialist--in this instance a Madame
Kaplan--attempted similarly to assassinate Lenin. And how did the
Soviet Government respond to these terrorist acts? A semi-official
_communiqué_ published in the issue of the Che-Ka’s _Weekly_
of October 20 reported that, by a decree of the Che-Ka, 500 hostages
had been shot! Nor yet is the true number of these victims known.
And probably it never will be known. And the same with regard to the
victims’ names. Nevertheless, it can at least be asserted that the
real figure greatly exceeded the figure given in the semi-official
_communiqué_, and that the original of the report was never
published at all.

On the following March 23 the Rev. B. S. Lombard, a British military
chaplain, wrote to Lord Curzon[2]:

   In August last two barge-loads of Russian officers were scuttled
   in the Gulf of Finland, and some of the officers’ bodies
   washed up on the shores of a property belonging to a friend of
   mine--lashed together with barbed wire in twos and threes.

Will this be deemed an exaggeration? Yet Moscow and Petrograd still
contain numbers of persons who could confirm the facts, whilst another
source tells us that as late as the year 1921 the Bolshevists were
disposing of their political opponents in the same barbarous manner.

From another eye-witness of events in Petrograd of the period we have
the following details:

   As regards Petrograd, it is usual to place the number of
   executions for the year 1918 at 1300. True, the Bolshevists
   admit to 500 only, but that is because they take care not to
   include in the estimate the hundreds of officers and ex-civil
   servants and private individuals who were shot in Kronstadt and
   the Fortress of SS. Peter and Paul--shot not by actual order
   of the central authorities, but by order of local soviets.
   Kronstadt alone saw 400 shot in a night after being posted
   before three huge graves dug in the courtyard of the fortress.[3]

Interviewed by a newspaper correspondent at this period, Peters, one of
the chiefs of the All-Russian Che-Ka, described the Terror as “a terror
simply of hysteria.” Then he went on:

   “In spite of popular rumour, I am not as bloodthirsty as I
   am represented to be. All that has happened is that a few
   over-excitable revolutionaries lost their heads, and showed too
   much zeal. As regards Petrograd, no shootings at all took place
   before Uritsky’s murder, though there have been many since,
   and sometimes the shooting was indiscriminate; and as regards
   Moscow, its only response to the attempt upon Lenin has been
   the execution of a few ex-monarchical Ministers.” “But,“ added
   the “merciful” Peters meaningly, “I should like to say that
   every endeavour on the part of the Russian _bourgeoisie_
   to raise its head again will be met with such a rebuff, with
   such a chastisement, as will throw even the Red Terror into the
   shade.”[4]

For the moment let us pass over the mendacious statement that no
cases of capital punishment occurred in Petrograd before Uritsky’s
assassination, and not comment upon the fact that Moscow shot a whole
batch of ex-monarchical Ministers because one solitary Socialist--and a
woman at that!--had made an attempt upon Lenin. Not at all did it deter
Peters that scarcely a week had elapsed since there had been published,
in No. 6 of the _Weekly_, an abridged list of the persons shot in
reprisal for the act. Ten months later a further list (of ninety names)
was published,[5] and included ex-Crown Ministers, military officers,
co-operative society employees, lawyers, students, and clergy. And even
so, we do not really know how many were shot, since nothing further was
published. All that we know is that during the same period Moscow, for
its part, shot over three hundred persons.[6]

Those of us who were lying in the Butyrka Prison at that terrible time,
in the prison into which persons were thrown by the thousand without
distinction of social status, will never forget the soul-racking
experience. Life there at that period has been aptly described by
an eye-witness as “a bacchanalia of Red madness and terrorism.”[7]
Especially horrible, especially heart-rending, was the necessity
nightly of hearing, and sometimes of seeing, prisoners removed for
execution. Every moment motor-cars would arrive to fetch them away. Not
a prisoner in the building could sleep. He could only lie and tremble
at every blast of a motor-horn. Every now and then some warders would
enter a cell, and shout to one or another of its inmates to follow
them and “bring your belongings with you.” And so they would go to the
“Chamber of Souls,” to the place where the condemned were to be lashed
together with barbed wire before actual execution.[8] The horror of it
all! For I myself was a prisoner in the Butyrka, and had to go through
that appalling succession of nightmares.

From another eye-witness we have the following:

   For the most part I have forgotten the names of those who shared
   my captivity at the time of the Lenin attempt, and went forth to
   be shot; but at least are those harrowing pictures still before
   me--never will they fade from my memory. See that group of
   five officers, arrested during one of the round-ups which were
   carried out after the shot at Lenin. Hitherto they have supposed
   that they would not be put to death, but given merely a term of
   imprisonment: yet now _their_ summons to the “Chamber of
   Souls” has arrived, and there is being shouted at them: “Across
   the yard to the Chamber of Souls--you and your belongings.”
   The officers turn as pale as sheets. Mechanically they fall to
   collecting their few possessions. Then stay! One of the five
   cannot be found--he fails to reply when his name is called! A
   warder leaves the room, and returns with the wing superintendent
   and some Che-Ka officials, and the roll is called again, and
   the fifth officer is found hiding under a bunk. Dragged thence
   by the heels, his frenzied cries fill the cell as he struggles
   to break free, and shouts again and again: “Why should I go? I
   do not want to die!” But he is overpowered; he is hustled from
   the ward, and all disappear. When we see them again in the yard
   outside no sound is coming from the fifth officer, for by this
   time he has been gagged.[9]

A sub-lieutenant named Semenov was thrown into the Butyrka merely
because, whilst watching the flames consume some trucks at the Koursk
railway station, he had been heard to remark that, as likely as not,
the Bolshevists had fired the trucks themselves in order to cover up
their lootings thence. And his father and brother were arrested with
him. Three months later he was examined by a “people’s prosecutor,”
and informed that he was going to be set at liberty again. Yet to him,
as to so many others, came the summons, “Across the yard, you and your
belongings!” And a few days later, again, his name was figuring on a
list of shot. Only when another month had gone by, and the deceased’s
father was being examined, did the “people’s prosecutor” tardily admit
that, “owing to the great mass of condemned, your son has been shot in
error!”

Again, once it happened that a lad of about eighteen, who had been
arrested during mass seizures carried out near the church of Christ
the Saviour in July 1918, was removed from our corridor unexpectedly,
and as unexpectedly restored to us again. On his return he told us
that, awakened from sleep a few nights after his examination before the
Che-Ka, he had been thrust into a motor-car, as though for removal to
execution (at that period prisoners still were being shot outside the
city--it was only later that they were put to death in the basement of
the Butyrka), and driven away. _En route_, however, the official
in charge had happened to remark that his orders for the night were to
shoot, not the lad, but a middle-aged man of the same name; whereupon,
on enquiries being made, it had been found that there were two
prisoners possessed of the same Christian name and surname, though of
different patronymics, and that the man appointed to be shot was aged
forty-two, whereas the lad was only eighteen. To what a small accident,
therefore, did that lad owe his life!

Also there were thousands of captives over whose heads the Red Terror
kept the Damocles’ sword so long and so constantly suspended that at
last they would even refuse to leave their cells if told that they were
going to be released, since the announcement seemed to them merely a
trap to induce them to go quietly to execution; whilst in other cases
prisoners who had left their cells in the belief that they were going
to be set free, and had smilingly received the congratulations of
their fellow prisoners, would, a few days later, be figuring amongst
the shot, or have been shot without having had their names published
at all. Nor were Petrograd and Moscow the only towns where revenge for
the Lenin affair was taken by shooting hundreds of victims: the wave of
slaughter swept right across Soviet Russia, and submerged cities large
and small, villages and hamlets. None the less, the Bolshevist press
issued very little information about the provincial executions. The
_Weekly_ alone occasionally mentioned shootings under the heading
of “The following persons have been shot in reprisal for the Lenin
attempt,” whilst the organ of the Che-Ka of Nizhny Novgorod, for its
part, said:

   The criminal assault upon Comrade Lenin, our spiritual leader,
   forces us, renouncing sentiment, to strengthen our hands in
   furthering the proletarian dictatorship.... Enough of words!...
   The Commission has shot forty-one persons from the enemy’s camp.

And to this statement the journal appended a list including officers,
priests, civil servants, a forester, an editor, a watchman, and so
forth. And the same day 700 more were seized in Nizhny Novgorod, and
held as hostages on the plea (thus stated the _Rabochy-Krestiansky
Nizhgorodsky Liest_, or “Workmen’s and Peasants’ Journal of
Nizhny Novgorod”) that “every murder, and every attempted murder, of
a Communist must be replied to with shootings of hostages selected
from amongst the _bourgeoisie_, now that already we have the
blood of killed and wounded crying out for vengeance.” And the Che-Ka
of the canton of Soumy (Kharkov Province), for its part, ordered
“the assassination of Comrade Uritsky, and the attempt upon Comrade
Lenin, to be avenged with an application of Red Terror” to 3 airmen;
the Che-Ka of Smolensk to 38 landowners from the Western Area; the
Che-Ka of Novorzhev to a family consisting of Alexandra, Natalia,
Eudoxia, Paul, and Michael Rosliakov; the Che-Ka of Poshekon to 31
persons, including 5 belonging to a family named Shalaev, and 4 to a
family named Volkov; the Che-Ka of Pskov to 31 persons; the Che-Ka of
Yaroslavl to 38; the Che-Ka of Archangel to 9; the Che-Ka of Seboshsk
to 17; the Che-Ka of Vologda to 14; and the Che-Ka of Briansk to 9
(who, however, are described as “burglars”). And with these reprisals
ordered by the All-Russian Che-Ka for the attempt upon “the leader of
the world’s proletariat” went executions of a Bolshevist commissary
for purloining 400,000 roubles; of 2 sailors for a like offence; of a
commissary for “attempting to sell a revolver to a militiaman”; of 2
counterfeiters; and of others, with the names published in the third
issue of the Che-Ka’s _Weekly_. In fact, dozens of similar lists
could be cited, as well as lists which never saw the light, for there
was not a single locality where shootings “because of Lenin” failed to
be carried out.

A good example of a “Lenin attempt” press utterance is that of
a sheet which, issued by the Che-Ka of Morshansk “to combat
counter-revolutionary activity,” said, amongst other comments on
current events:

   Comrades, one of our cheeks has received a blow. To that blow
   let us respond with a hundred blows delivered upon the enemy’s
   face in its every feature. The Che-Ka already has ordained
   that preventive inoculation with Red Terror be applied. Let
   that inoculation be administered to the country in general,
   but especially to our town of Morshansk, so that the murder of
   Comrade Uritsky, and the attempted murder of Comrade Lenin, may
   be avenged with shootings of ... [and four names follow]. And
   if any further attempt be made upon the life of a revolutionary
   leader or a responsible worker, let _cruelty_ be resorted
   to, and continued, so that each blow from the enemy may be
   countered with a blow ten times as forcible.

This, so far as I know, is the first _official_ allusion to
hostages, to the system of local settings aside of citizens “to be shot
in case of further manifestations of counter revolutionary activity.”
In like manner did the Che-Ka of Torzhok announce to “the inhabitants
of our town and district” that “for the head and life of any leader
of ours hundreds of heads of the _bourgeois_, both of principals
and of dependants, must fall.” And then the Che-Ka appended a list
of proposed hostages which included engineers, merchants, a priest,
and a batch of Social Revolutionaries of the Right--in all, twenty
persons. And at Ivanovo-Vosnessensk 184 persons were seized to be held
as hostages, whilst Perm’s vengeance for Uritsky and Lenin was the
shooting of 50 hostages.[10]

These facts at least refute the official statements which I have
quoted, for they prove that the Uritsky and Lenin affairs brought to
their deaths several thousands of people who could not possibly have
had any connection with those two tragedies, but nevertheless had been
seized as hostages. And as regards what happened to other hostages,
a typical example is seen in the case of General Roussky after that,
with Radko and Dmitriev and others to the number of 32, he had been
thrown into confinement at Essentouky, and, to quote the official
_communiqué_, “informed, by order of Comrade Petrovsky, People’s
Commissary of the Interior, that he and his companions will be executed
out of hand if the slightest attempt at a counter-revolutionary
rising, or the slightest attempt upon the life of a proletarian
leader, be made.”[11] Hostages were seized also in Kislovodsk (33)
and elsewhere, whilst at one time the number of hostages lying in the
Piatigorsk concentration camp amounted to 160. And at Piatigorsk the
following took place. On October 13, 1918, the chief commissary of the
Che-Ka, one Sorokin, conceived the idea of bringing about a rising
“to emancipate the Soviet Power from the Jews”; wherefore he arrested
and executed members even of his own Che-Ka, and then, to vindicate
his action, produced documents purporting to prove that the executed
officials had been “holding communication with the White Army.”
Unfortunately, evidence subsequently furnished to Denikin’s Commission
showed that Sorokin’s real intention had been previously to safeguard
himself by obtaining from a local “extraordinary congress of deputies
of the soviet of Piatigorsk, and of revolutionary representatives,
and of Red soldiers,” which he convened to meet him at Nevinomiskaya
Stanitza an acknowledgment that he had acted rightly, and with proper
authority, but that before he had been able to present himself to his
congress his enemies had branded him with “outlawry” and “treason to
the Revolution,” arrested him, and executed him out of hand.[12] But
one result of Sorokin’s fate was to seal the fate also of the majority
of the hostages who had been thrown into the local concentration camp,
and in No. 157 of the local _Izvestia_ we find published a decree
(signed by Artabekov, chief of the local Che-Ka) saying:

   Inasmuch as on October 21 the lives of certain proletariat
   leaders in this town of Piatigorsk were taken, we do comply both
   with Order No. 3, of date of October 8 of this year, and with
   our decree already passed, by commanding that the following
   hostages and members of counter-revolutionary organisations
   be shot in retaliation for those diabolical assassinations of
   esteemed members of our Central Executive Committee.

And to the decree there was attached a list of 59 names, including
those of General Roussky, an ex-Senator, a financier, a priest, and
others. And the statement that later these men were “shot” is a lie,
for the truth is that they were hacked to pieces with swords,[13] and
their goods converted into “communal property.”

Everywhere the same system of hostages flourished. A trustworthy
witness has stated that when a certain P., a student, killed a
commissary in Chernigov Province, P.’s father, mother, and two brothers
(the younger one a boy of fifteen) were executed at once, with the
family’s German governess and her niece of eighteen, though it was only
later that P. himself was found and arrested.

Indeed, that year the Terror assumed such ghastly dimensions as to
throw into the shade any similar phenomenon known to history. During
the year, also, a group of Anarchists and Left Social Revolutionaries
who at first had supported the Bolshevists, and helped them to organise
Che-Kas, revenged the deaths of certain comrades of theirs whom
the Bolshevists had executed as hostages by committing a terrorist
act on their own account. The affair began by Latzis, head of the
All-Ukrainian Che-Ka, issuing, on June 15, 1919, the following
statement:

   Inasmuch as certain members of the Left Social Revolutionary
   (Internationalist or Activist) Group have been sending
   threatening letters to leading soviet workers, and menacing
   them with a White Terror, we, the All-Ukrainian Che-Ka, do
   herewith declare that if, in the future, even the slightest
   molestation of soviet workers should be attempted, every
   Social Revolutionary Activist who may now be in prison, both
   here and in Great Russia, will be shot, and the chastening
   hand of the proletariat made to fall as heavily upon the
   White Guard with his commission from Denikin as upon the
   Activist Social Revolutionary who chooses to call himself an
   “Internationalist.”[14]

The Anarchists’ retort to this statement was a pre-arranged explosion
in the Central Che-Ka’s very building--the building (which stood in
the Leontievsky Pereoulok) being partially demolished, and more than
one leading Communist who happened to be within it at the time either
killed or wounded. In turn, the Muscovite official press published, on
the following day, a notice signed by Kamenev. Said the notice:

   Truly shall the White Guards who perpetrated this outrage be
   subjected to the most terrible of penalties!

And a further notice in the _Izvestia_ added:

   The Government will fittingly avenge the deaths of our murdered
   ones.

Whence another wave of bloody terrorism swept over Russia as the
Government “fittingly” avenged itself upon people who could not by
any possible means have had anything to do with the explosion, and
accomplished that end through the simple course of shooting anyone and
everyone who happened then to be in prison, even though Anarchists
alone (as their party subsequently acknowledged in the pamphlet
published in Berlin in 1922) had committed the terrible act. And in
Saratov also the same Muscovite throwing of a bomb was avenged by
shootings of twenty-eight persons, from members of the Constitutional
Democratic Party and ex-candidates for the Constituent Assembly to
an ex-member of the _Narodnaya Volya_ Group and a number of
agriculturists and priests.[15] Or such, at all events, was the
official figure given. As a matter of fact, the number of persons shot
was the number needed to bring Saratov’s quota of the contribution
to the “All-Russian blood-tax” up to the total of sixty specified by
Moscow’s previously despatched telegram. And from an ex-inmate of the
Butyrka Prison we receive still further light upon Moscow’s methods
(for by now that city had become the centre of government, in place of
Petrograd) of compiling its death lists. Says this ex-inmate[16]:

   Zacharov, Commandant of the Che-Ka of Moscow, has deposed that
   when Dzherzhinsky returned from the scene of the explosion
   he was extremely pale and excited, and ordered forthwith
   that all cadets and gendarmes and representatives of the old
   _régime_ and counts and princes in custody at the time,
   both in Moscow and in the local concentration camps, should
   be shot in the order in which they stood on the registers of
   detention.

Whence, merely the verbal command of an individual gave the signal for
innocent deaths by the thousand! The exact number of victims hurriedly
shot that night, and on the morrow, is not yet known. All that can be
said is that even the most moderate official estimate placed the number
at hundreds, and that not until the following evening was the order
rescinded.

When another year had passed the central authorities _officially_
instituted the system of seizure of hostages, for on November 30, 1920,
it proclaimed that “inasmuch as certain White Guard organisations have
decided to perpetuate terrorist acts against leaders of our Workers
and Peasants’ Revolution,” every representative of the non-Communist
parties then in custody was to be seized and segregated. And such
was the tenour of this decree that the aged Anarchist, Prince Peter
Kropotkin, felt bound to protest against it, and write[17]:

   Have you not a single member sufficiently honest to remind his
   comrades that such measures constitute a return to the worst
   periods of the Middle Ages and the religious wars, and demean a
   people undertaking to construct a new order of society, and to
   conduct that order on Communist principles? For we have come
   to the pass that a man may be imprisoned, not in punishment for
   any definite crime, but merely that you may be able to hold over
   your political opponents the threat of his death. “Kill one of
   our side, and we will kill so many of yours.” Is not that as
   though each morning you were to take a man to the scaffold, and
   then to take him back to prison again and say “Wait.... Not
   to-day”? Do you not realise that such things are a throw-back to
   the system of torture, and to a system which tortures not only
   the prisoner but also his relatives?

Kropotkin, however, was already old, infirm, remote from life. He
did not live to behold the full enormity of the Bolshevists’ manner
of expression of physical force. Hostages? Why, they were seized and
held from the Terror’s very earliest days, and especially during the
civil war period--north, south, and east. Particularly with regard to
the large number of them held in Kharkov did Kovy, head of the local
provincial Che-Ka, write: “The _bourgeois_ viper will need but
to raise its head for hostages’ heads to fall.”[18] And fall those
hostages’ heads did. In Elizabetgrad, in 1921, thirty-six were executed
because of the assassination of a single official of the local Che-Ka.
We have confirmation of the fact (which was first made known through
the instrumentality of Bourtsev’s journal, _Obstchoyé Dielo_,
“The Common Cause”[19]) from analogous items cited later in this
work. In short, the saying “Blood for blood” received wide practical
application, and as early as on November 10, 1918, we find Mr. H. B.
Lockhart, British Consul in Moscow, writing to Sir George Clarke[20]:

   The Bolshevists have established the odious practice of
   hostage-seizure. Nay, worse: they have taken to striking at
   their political opponents through those opponents’ womenkind.
   Recently a long list of hostages-designate was published in
   Petrograd, and when the Bolshevists could not find them all they
   seized the wives of those missing, and kept them in prison until
   their husbands gave themselves up.

Yes, women and even children were arrested. Sometimes, also, they
were shot. For example, Red Cross workers in Kiev have told us that
a group of ladies seized in place of some officers who had been
forcibly impressed into the Red Army, and escaped thence and joined
the White forces, were put to death in their husbands’ stead, whilst
in addition we know that in March, 1919, the relatives of all the
officers of the 86th Infantry Regiment were shot when that corps went
over to the Whites,[21] and that in a memorandum addressed to the
All-Russian Executive Committee by Madame U. Zoubevich, a well-known
Social Revolutionary of the Left, that lady said of certain executions
of hostages in Kronstadt during 1919, that the officers in whose stead
those hostages had been shot had merely been _suspected_ of
designing to transfer their allegiance to the Whites.[22]

Another plan, and an easy one enough, was to transfer hostages from
their category as such to the category of “counter-revolutionaries.”
Witness this extract from _The Communist_[23]:

   On August 13 the military-revolutionary tribunal of the 14th
   Army considered the case of the ten citizens of Alexandria who
   had been made hostages, and declared them to be hostages no
   longer, but, instead, counter-revolutionaries, and decreed their
   execution.

And the sentence was carried out on the following day.

During the peasant risings in the Tambov area peasant women and
children were made hostages by the hundred at a time, and sometimes
forced to spend upwards of two years in prison in Moscow, Petrograd,
and elsewhere; whilst on September 1, 1920, “acting headquarters”
prescribed that rebel peasant families should “have applied to them
ruthless Red terrorism, and all persons over the age of eighteen,
regardless of sex, be arrested, so that if the bandits continue their
activities the same may be executed.”

Likewise, from villages “special contributions” were exacted, with
confiscation of lands and other property to follow in case of
non-compliance with the demand.[24] The precise manner of official
fulfilment of these instructions we learn from one and another official
_communiqué_ published in the _Izvestia_ of Tambov, where
that journal says “On September 5 five villages were burnt to the
ground,” “On September 7 over two hundred and fifty peasants were
shot,” and so forth, and so forth. We learn, too, that during the
years 1921 and 1922 the Kozhoukov concentration camp near Moscow had
thrown into it as many as 313 peasant hostages, and that, though these
hostages included children between the ages of sixteen and a month,
and typhus raged throughout the autumn of 1921, the half-starved,
half-naked captives were allowed no winter clothing. Lastly, in an
issue of the _Krasny Voïn_ (“The Red Soldier”) of November 12,
1919, we find long lists of hostages seized for deserters from the
Red Army. They constitute the first instance of the category known as
“_conditionally_ condemned.”

Parents were shot with their children--the facts stand officially
certified, registered. Children were shot in their parents’ presence.
Parents were shot in the presence of their children. And the Special
Branch of the All-Russian Che-Ka, under a maniac named Kedrov,[25] did
especially bloodthirsty work in this way as from his station “at the
front” he either sent to the Butyrka Prison or shot on the spot batches
of “young spies”--in other words, children between the ages of eight
and fourteen. I myself had many such cases come to my knowledge whilst
I was still in Moscow.

As for the spiritual tortures which Peter Kropotkin vainly denounced,
they were practised both by provincial and metropolitan Che-Kas in
addition to the usual physical cruelty. For Peter Kropotkin’s voice
had been but “the voice of one crying in the wilderness,” and in any
locality where executions of hostages failed to occur for a while, the
failure meant merely that that particular district had not recently
witnessed a political assassination.

So another year passed, until the Kronstadt rising saw fresh hostages
seized by the thousand, and detained in the new category, even as were
the Social Revolutionaries condemned to death at the famous trial of
that party--all of these were kept (and were being kept until at all
events quite recently) under a permanent and indefinite threat of
_conditional_ execution.

The only possible explanation of why the assassination of Vorovsky was
not followed by mass shootings (or, more correctly, by publications
of official information of mass shootings) is that the assassination
occurred on Swiss soil, and attained wide publicity. As a matter of
fact, what happens in the secret places of the executive organ with
which the All-Russian Che-Ka has now become replaced, is never really
known. Yet we do know that as soon as ever Vorovsky’s assassins
had been acquitted all Russia became threatened with renewals of
terrorism towards hostages, and the German journals _Dni_ and
_Vorwaerts_ of the day stated that Stalin had informed his Che-Ka
of Moscow that

   The labouring masses of the country are calling unanimously for
   punishment of those who prompted the monstrous Vorovsky crime,
   [whilst adding that] Vorovsky’s real murderers were not Polunin
   and Konradi, despicable though those hirelings were, but the
   Socialist traitors who since have fled the people’s wrath to
   spots where it cannot reach them, but where they may prepare
   fresh aggressive acts against the leaders of our proletariat, in
   complete forgetfulness of the magnanimity shown them in 1922,
   when we thwarted the popular desire, and suspended the decree
   which the Supreme Tribunal had pronounced against traitors. Yet
   let those persons bear in mind that the decree still remains in
   force, and that, if necessary, we can fix the responsibility for
   Comrade Vorovsky’s death upon friends of those persons still at
   our disposal.[26]

“Hostages are capital of exchange,” once remarked the notorious Latzis.
But the meaning of the term “hostage,” as applied to foreign subjects
captured during a military campaign abroad, bears no relation to
Russian subjects seized in Russia; the latter resource was purely a
form of mental intimidation which summed up in itself the whole basis
of the Bolshevists’ internal policy and governmental system.

And how remarkable that we should see the Bolshevists vainly attempting
to carry out a policy which reactionary circles found to be impossible
as long ago as the year 1881! _A propos_ of that policy, V. N.
Chaikovsky once wrote:

   There could be no more forcible expression of brutality--to be
   more exact, no more wanton destruction of the foundations upon
   which human society stands reared--than seizure of civilian
   hostages. To be able to accept the legalisation of such an
   institution one needs first to slough every one of the social
   values which have been developed through the centuries, to
   agree to bow the knee to the demons of war and wickedness and
   destruction, and to disregard all the painful struggles towards
   a sure foundation of social right in which humanity has for ages
   past been engaged.

Similarly, the appeal issued by the “Union of Russian Publicists and
Journalists Resident in Paris” in 1921 stated:

   There should be no punishment where there has been no crime;
   and whatsoever the passions involved in the political struggle
   now proceeding between Russian parties, there is enshrined in
   these words the first and foremost verity of civilisation.
   Always should that be borne in mind.... We protest against
   the slaughtering of innocent persons. We protest against the
   torturing of them through the agency of fear. We know what
   heartbreaking days and nights are being spent by Russian fathers
   and mothers deprived of their children. We know what men and
   women hostages are feeling as perforce they lie awaiting death
   for acts which they have never committed. We say that for such
   cruelty as this no justification exists. We say that the mere
   fact that such barbarism could find a lodging in a civilised
   community constitutes an outrage.

But who heeds it? An outrage--yes.




                              CHAPTER II

                    “THE TERROR WAS FORCED UPON US”

   Usage of force in all its forms, from executions downwards,
   is the only method which can enable the proletariat to evolve
   Communistic Man from the human material of the present
   Capitalistic epoch.--BUKHARIN.


Bolshevist spokesmen frequently declare that the Terror was the outcome
of “popular indignation against counter-revolution,” and that only
because of pressure exercised upon it by the working-classes did the
Bolshevist Party resort to terrorist measures. Still more frequently do
they assert that at least did terrorism, when assumed as a weapon by
the State, “legalise and normalise” popular activities which otherwise
were taking the law into their own hands.

A more pharisaical attitude it is not easy to conceive. But at least it
is easy to bring forward facts illustrative of the gulf between it and
the truth.

On February 17, 1922, Dzherzhinsky, “People’s Commissary of the
Interior,” and the real creator and director of the Red Terror, said in
a memorandum addressed to the Council of People’s Commissaries:

   Throughout, my object has been to systematise a Revolutionary
   Government poorly equipped with punitive apparatus. From the
   first I saw that the centuries-old hatred of the proletariat for
   its oppressors might express itself in senseless, sanguinary
   episodes which would arouse such elements of popular fury as
   would sweep away friends as well as foes, useful and vital
   sections of society as well as sections hostile and noxious
   to us. Hence, from the first the Che-Ka has been seeking
   but to impart wise direction to the chastening hand of the
   revolutionary proletariat.

Well, let me demonstrate the true character of Dzherzhinsky’s “wise
direction” or “systematisation” of a State poorly provided with
punitive apparatus. As early as by December 7, 1917, his organisation
of an All-Russian Che-Ka based upon “historical research into
past epochs” stood worked out, and had been made to agree with
Bolshevist-deduced theories. And during the previous spring Lenin had
remarked that it would be quite easy to carry out a social revolution
in Russia, since all that would be necessary would be to exterminate
two or three hundred of the _bourgeoisie_. And we know Trotsky’s
reply to Kautsky’s _Terrorism and Communism_ wherein he, Trotsky,
proffered a metaphysical justification of terrorism which can be
reduced to the formula: “The enemy needs to be rendered harmless. And
in time of war that means that the enemy needs to be destroyed. To
which end the most potent weapon is terrorism. To deny its power is to
be a dissimulating hypocrite.” Naturally, Kautsky was at least entitled
to retort that Trotsky’s book had better have been entitled “A Hymn of
Praise to Inhumanity.” “For,” added Kautsky, “bloodthirsty appeals are
worthy only of the worst and lowest phases of revolution.”

Also, the Bolshevists so far flout facts as to maintain that they
resorted to terrorism only because early attempts had been made
upon the lives of “proletarian leaders,” and in 1918, when brazenly
extolling the Soviet Government’s “exceptional humanity,” Latzis, a
Lett, and a particularly ruthless member of the Che-Ka, declared that
“though thousands of our people have been murdered, we have never gone
beyond making arrests”; whilst Peters impudently asserted, as we have
seen, that up to the time of Uritsky’s assassination not a single case
of capital punishment had occurred in Petrograd.

Well, even if we grant that the Bolshevists did begin their rule by
abolishing (for propaganda purposes, of course) the capital penalty, it
was not long before that penalty came into its own again.[27] For as
early as January 8, 1918, we find the Soviet of People’s Commissaries
issuing an Order that battalions “for trench digging” should be formed,
and be composed of men and women members of the _bourgeoisie_, and
officered by Red Guards. And,” added the Soviet, “Any man or woman of
the _bourgeois_ class who shall resist this Order shall be shot,
even as ... all counter-revolutionary agitators are to be shot.”

Hence, for all intents and purposes, summary capital punishment,
execution without trial or inquiry, became reinstated.

A month later (for the Che-Ka needed to win its spurs) a second Order
notified that “all counter-revolutionary agitators, persons fleeing to
the Don country, and persons joining the Counter-Revolutionary Army
shall be shot without mercy by detachments empowered by the Che-Ka.”
And in time so broadcast did these threats come to be that they flowed
like water from the cornucopia of a fountain. “Sackmen (?) resisting
shall be shot”; “Persons posting up unauthorised proclamations shall be
shot.” There was no end to them.[28]

Once the Council of People’s Commissaries sent the following urgent
telegram along a line of railway--a telegram relating to a special
train which at the moment was _en route_ from Stavka to Petrograd:
“If the train which is now proceeding towards Petersburg shall
experience the smallest delay, the person or persons responsible for
that delay shall be executed out of hand.” And another notice said:

   Any person found attempting to evade the heretofore laws of the
   country concerning sales or purchases or acts of barter, or the
   laws promulgated to the same end by the Soviet Power, shall be
   punished with sequestration of property and shooting.

Hence Bolshevist threats of capital punishment were as many as they
were varied. Nor, be it remarked, was the right of pronouncing death
sentences confined to the central authorities alone, for local
revolutionary committees also could--or at all events did--pronounce
them, and in Kalouga Province we encounter a notice of the coming
execution of a well-to-do citizen for having failed to furnish his
contribution to a monetary levy; in Viatka, a case of a man being
executed for “leaving his home after eight o’clock at night”; and,
in Rybinsk, a case of a man being executed for “having, with others,
assembled in a public street”--not even a warning seeming to have been
thought necessary. Nor did threats of death involve shooting alone, for
we read that the Bolshevist committee of the town of Loniev intimated,
after fixing the rate of contribution to be paid by its local citizens,
that anyone who should refuse to pay it “will be drowned in the
Dniester with a stone about his neck.”

And still more brutally did Krylenko, the Bolshevists’
Commander-in-Chief, and subsequently Chief Government Advocate before
the Supreme Revolutionary Tribunal (and therefore the man who of all
others should have upheld law and order in Soviet Russia)--still more
brutally did this Krylenko announce on January 22: “I would suggest
that the peasantry of Mohilev Province be left to deal with their
oppressors as they may think fit.” Lastly, we find the Chief Commissary
of the Northern Region and Western Siberia proclaiming in a certain
instance that, “unless the offenders be handed over, every tenth
person, regardless of guilt or of innocence, shall be shot.”

Such were some of the orders, decrees, and announcements issued by
the Soviet Government on the subject of the capital penalty! They
mean that as early as 1918 capital punishment became re-established
on a scale which even the Tsarist _régime_ had never beheld, as
a first result of Dzherzhinsky’s “wise direction” of “a Revolutionary
Government’s punitive apparatus,” and of the Government’s showing
the way in disregarding human rights and morality by issuing a
manifesto which proclaimed, on February 21, 1918, when the German
forces were advancing, that “the (Soviet) Fatherland is in danger,
and therefore from now onwards the death penalty shall be applied
to all enemy agents, spies, looters, profiteers, hooligans, and
counter-revolutionary agents.”

But the most revolting incident of all was the trial of Captain
Stchasny before the Supreme Revolutionary Tribunal in May, 1918.
Earlier he had been the means of saving the remnant of the Russian
Baltic Fleet from surrender to the German Squadron, and bringing it
safely back to Kronstadt; yet no sooner had he done so than he was
arraigned for “treason”: the indictment against him said: “Although
he has accomplished what would seem to have been a heroic deed, his
object was none other than that he might thereby earn popularity for
subsequent use against the Soviet Government!” Trotsky acted as chief,
in fact, sole, witness for the prosecution, and the end was that on
May 22 Stchasny was shot for having saved his country’s warships in
the Baltic! At a stroke, also, the verdict created for the Bolshevists
the precedent for award of the death sentence by a legal tribunal
which they were needing. And thenceforth it was not in isolated cases
that capital punishment began to occur, whether in pursuance of a
legal verdict, or in execution of an “administrative order” (the
Che-Ka’s _ad hoc_ judicial weapon up to the September of 1918,
the date of the Red Terror’s official proclamation), for we can now
begin to count cases of capital punishment awarded by formal sentence
by the score and by the hundred. To which there should be added both
the executions consequent upon quellings of peasant risings, and the
results of military firings upon street demonstrations, and those many
governmental irregularities of which the slaughter of officers in
Finland and the Crimea during the October of 1917, and the shootings of
thousands of persons in localities where civil war broke out, and the
Che-Ka’s orders and decrees could be implemented in full, are examples.

In 1919, however, Latzis, statistician to the Government, did furnish
some official totals of executions, and they appeared in a series of
articles in the Kievan and Muscovite editions of the _Izvestia_
before being re-issued in book form under the title of _Two Years’
Fighting on the Home Front_. The articles stated that during the
first half of 1918 (which constituted the first six months of the
Che-Ka’s existence) the number of persons shot in Soviet Russia
(which as yet included only the old twenty provinces of the centre)
amounted to “22,” and that similar moderation would have continued
to be observed if the country had not “become swept with a wave of
conspiracies,” and if “the counter-revolutionary _bourgeoisie_
had not resorted to a White Terror.”[29] A statement of the kind could
have been made only in a land whence all normal sources of social
information for the statement’s contradiction had been swept away.
But it happened that at that period (1918) I too was making shift to
keep a record of executions: and though usually I could avail myself
of figures published by the Bolshevists themselves, this applied,
for the most part, to the centre of the country alone, and only in
a slighter degree to the provinces, where my sole resource was (1)
returns published at irregular and uncertain intervals in one or
another local journal, and (2) such information from other sources as
stood subject to subsequent verification. Yet even these casual data
provided me with a card-index library of 884 items. Hence I am as well
aware as was Latzis himself that, though the All-Russian Che-Ka was
not _officially_ established until December 7, Che-Ka activity
began long before that date, since at the taking of the Winter Palace
the Bolshevists had thrown Prince Toumanov, ex-Assistant Minister
of War, into the Neva, and on the day after the fall of Gatchina
Mouraviev had issued an official order for the lynching of recalcitrant
Tsarist officers, and the Bolshevists had brought about Doukhonin’s
and Shingarev’s and Kokoshkin’s deaths, and Lenin had caused two
student brothers named Ganglez (?) to be shot for the crime of being
found to be wearing epaulets on their shoulders, and frequently the
Military-Revolutionary Tribunal (the forerunner of the All-Russian
Che-Ka) had made use of “extraordinary decrees” for the extermination
of its opponents.

So who shall credit Latzis’ statement that “those executed up to the
middle of 1918 belonged mostly to the criminal underworld,” or his
further statement that they numbered only “22”?

Besides, the Latzian statistics overlooked statements made by the
Che-Ka itself: they overlooked the fact that already the Che-Ka’s own
organ, the _Weekly_, had admitted that the Che-Ka of the Urals
alone had shot 35 persons during the period above specified. Besides,
were his statements meant to convey the impression that no executions
at all had taken place during the _second_ half of the year named?
For, if so, how are we to reconcile such forbearance of slaughter with
an interview which, on June 8, 1918, the two chiefs of the All-Russian
Che-Ka, Dzherzhinsky and Zachs, accorded to a representative of Gorky’s
journal _Novaya Zhizn_?[30] For during that interview the two
chiefs informed the journalist that “mercy towards our enemies does not
come within our purview,” and spoke of executions as “carried out by
unanimous decree of our Che-Ka Committee.”

At all events we know that on August 28, 1918, the Muscovite
_Izvestia_ issued official intimation that 43 persons had been
shot in six provincial towns, and that inasmuch as, in October of the
same year, Bokia, Uritsky’s successor on the Che-Ka of Petrograd,
reported at a conference of Che-Kas of the Northern Commune that up to
the previous March 12, when the seat of the All-Russian Che-Ka had been
transferred from Petrograd to Moscow, 800 persons had been arrested,
and the number of hostages estimated to be alive during September had
amounted only to 500, at least 300 must have been shot between March
and September.[31]

Moreover, are we to discredit an entry in Margoulies’ diary which says:
“I have just been told by Peters (Secretary to the Danish Legation)
that Uritsky goes about boasting of having signed twenty-three death
warrants in a day”?[32] And Uritsky, be it remembered, was one of those
who affected to be “regularising” the Terror!

At least it may be said with safety that the only difference between
the first half and the second half of 1918 lay in the fact that
during the second half propaganda on behalf of a Red Terror became
open and universal propaganda, and that immediately upon the attempt
upon Lenin’s life the Terror was announced _urbi et orbi_. Yet
at a meeting of “workers’ soviets” held as late as December 7, 1918,
Lounacharsky had the hypocrisy to say: “We do not wish for a Red
Terror, but are as opposed as ever to capital punishment, to the
scaffold.” To public capital punishment, to the public scaffold, yes:
but not to slaughter in hidden torture-chambers. Radek alone seems to
have thought that there was no sense in concealing his predilection for
public, rather than for secret, executions, for he wrote in an article
entitled “The Red Terror”[33]:

   When we shot five _bourgeois_ hostages in accordance with a
   plenary decree of the local soviet, the execution of these men
   in the presence of, and with the approval of, several thousands
   of workers instilled mass intimidation more effectively than
   could have been accomplished even by _five hundred_
   executions carried out apart from working-class participation.

Nor could the Commissary of Justice’s[34] one-time insistence upon the
“magnanimity” which he declared to be inspiring Bolshevist tribunals
save him from having later to admit that “the period between March,
1918 and the end of August was a veritable (though unofficial) reign of
terror.”

So sanguinary, such an orgy of slaughter, did that reign become as at
first even to disgust more than one convinced Communist. And the first
protestant of the kind was the sailor Dybenko who later achieved “fame”
in connection with the Stchasny affair. On July 31 he sent to the
journal _Anarchism_ a letter as follows:

   Does there not exist a Communist honest enough vocally to
   protest against this re-establishment of capital punishment? Or
   are all of you cowards, and afraid to lift your voices? However,
   if even a single honest Communist does exist, let him now do
   his duty by denouncing the extreme punitive measure before the
   world’s proletariat. More. Seeing that _we_ are not to
   blame for this scandalous restoration of the death penalty,
   let us express our disgust by leaving the ruling party, and
   raising such an outcry as shall force our Communist authorities
   themselves to lead us, and all other opponents of the death
   penalty, to the scaffold, and there themselves act as our
   executioners.

However, it is only fair to state that eventually Dybenko got over
what Lounacharsky called his “sentimentality”; for three years later,
after the failure of the Kronstadt rising, he is seen taking an
active part in the slaughter of his comrades there. “There must be no
shilly-shallying with the villains.” During the first day alone of the
shootings 300 “villains” were executed.

Other voices too were raised in protest, but soon fell as silent as
Dybenko’s, and left the perpetrators of the Terror free to continue
their course of action unchecked--a course as impossible of moral as of
metaphysical justification.

The only Bolshevist hardy enough really to oppose inclusion of capital
punishment in the criminal code which the Bolshevists evolved in 1922
was Riazanov. Incidentally, he had, at the time of the Lenin attempt,
visited the Butyrka Prison, and told the Socialists confined there
that “I and the other leaders of the proletariat are experiencing
great difficulty in controlling our followers, since the recent assault
upon Lenin has rendered them eager to break into the Prison, and wreak
popular vengeance upon you Socialist traitors.” And Dzherzhinsky told
me the same thing when I was brought before him in September. And so
did other Communists. As for the string pullers in Petrograd, they
worked for the desired impression by causing the local press to publish
references to certain “demands for terrorism which are reaching us
from political groups.” But the end was that excessive use of the one
stage effect deceived nobody: rather, it came to be looked upon as a
stereotyped propagandist detail of the demagogy by which Bolshevism had
been created and was being upheld.

However, as though to the swing of a conductor’s baton, identical sets
of spurious and belated resolutions (“belated” because the Red Terror
had long been openly proclaimed) continued to be passed at meetings,
and suitable battle cries to be given out at the meetings, and on wall
posters, and in the press.[35] All that was necessary was that the
original resolutions should be passed, and caused everywhere to be
locally repeated, and then have suitable catch phrases for slaughter
evolved for them--such catch phrases as “Death to the capitalists!”
and “Death to the _bourgeoisie_!” But at Uritsky’s funeral the catch
phrases increased in pungency. “A thousand lives for the life of each
leader!” was largely used there, and so were “A bullet for every
workers’ foe!” and “Death to all hirelings of Anglo-French capital!”
Moreover, from every page of every Bolshevist journal there began to
arise the reek of blood-thirst. Cried the Petrograd _Krasnaya Gazeta_,
the “Red Gazette,” of August 31, _à propos_ of Uritsky’s assassination:

   Our enemies must pay in thousands for the hero’s death, and
   namby-pambyism come to an end, and the _bourgeoisie_ be
   taught a bloody lesson by having its surviving members treated
   with terrorism until “Death to the _bourgeoisie_!” becomes
   our regular pass-word.

And on the Lenin attempt being made, the journal fairly shrieked. Its
words were:

   Let our enemies be killed by the hundred! Nay, those hundreds
   must be made thousands! Let the rascals be drowned in their own
   blood! Only rivers of their blood can atone for the blood of
   Lenin and of Uritsky! Blood! Blood! As much blood as possible!

And the _Izvestia_, for its part, screamed: “The proletariat
must respond to Lenin’s wound in a way that shall make the
_bourgeoisie_ shrink and tremble!” And in an article which Radek,
the Bolshevists’ star press-man, contributed to the _Izvestia_,
_à propos_ of a current symposium on Red terrorism, he cried:

   If a Red Terror ensues, its primary cause will have been the
   White terrorism exercised by our foes. For whereas punishment
   of individual _bourgeois_ who have never really taken an
   active part in the White Guard movement is valuable enough in so
   far as it may intimidate the rest, the sequel to the death of a
   Communist worker (let alone of a revolutionary leader) ought to
   be a taking of _bourgeois_ lives _by the dozen_.

Whence, adding to it Lenin’s winged words, “Even if ninety per cent. of
the people perish, what matter if the other ten per cent. live to see
revolution become universal?” we gain a fairly clear idea of what Red
terrorism may mean to the Communist mentality. The _Pravda_, for
its part, wrote: “Henceforth the hymn of the working-classes should be
solely a pæan of hatred and revenge”; whilst a proclamation issued by
the “Muscovite Provincial Military Commissariat” on September 3 stated
that

   The working-classes of Soviet Russia have risen, and will draw
   for every drop of proletarian blood a riverful of the blood of
   opponents of the Revolution, and for every drop of blood of our
   leaders of the Soviet and the proletariat again a riverful, and
   for the loss of every proletarian life the blood of hundreds of
   White Guards and sons of the _bourgeoisie_. Wherefore, as
   representing the working-classes, we, the Provincial Military
   Commissariat, do inform all foes of those classes that every
   case of White terrorism will have opposed to it merciless
   proletarian terrorism.

And, finally, the All-Russian Central Executive Committee led the way
by convening a meeting for September 2 whereat it was resolved

   That the Central Executive Committee do solemnly warn all
   hirelings of the Russian and foreign _bourgeoisie_ that
   responsibility for any attempt upon the life of a leader of the
   Soviet Power, or of a person in any way engaged in furthering
   the ideals of the Social Revolution, will be laid solely
   upon the counter-revolutionary parties and those engaged in
   encouraging those parties’ doings, and that any act of White
   Terrorism directed against the Peasants’ and Workers’ Power
   will be responded to by the peasants and workers with a Red
   Terror directed primarily against the _bourgeoisie_ and the
   _bourgeoisie’s_ agents.

In harmony with this decree was a resolution which the Soviet of
People’s Commissaries adopted in support of the Che-Ka’s policy. It
ended with the words: “Be it resolved also that any person found to be
connected with a White Guard organisation, or conspiracy, or rebellion,
be shot.” And at about the same period Petrovsky, People’s Commissary
of the Interior, issued a telegram which, for its bizarre terminology,
even as for its sweeping sanction of illegality, deserves to become
historic. Later the telegram was published in No. 1 of the Central
Che-Ka’s _Weekly_. Entitled “An Order relating to Hostages,” it
ran:

   The murders of Volodarsky and Uritsky; the wounding of
   Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, Director of the Soviet of People’s
   Commissaries; the execution of tens of thousands of our comrades
   in Finland, the Ukraine, the Don region, and Checho-Slovakia;
   the ceaseless discoveries of conspiracies behind our armies;
   the detection of the participation of Social Revolutionaries
   of the Right and other counter-revolutionary rabble in those
   conspiracies,--all these things, added to the strikingly small
   number of serious repressions and mass shootings of White
   Guards and _bourgeois_ by the Soviet Power, show us that,
   despite the endless speeches about employment of wholesale
   terrorism against the Social Revolutionaries and White Guards
   and _bourgeoisie_, no Terror at all has come into being.
   Well, that indecision, those methods of vacillation, must be
   ended at once, and all Social Revolutionaries of the Right
   whose names may happen to be known to the local soviets
   arrested, and adequate numbers of hostages taken from amongst
   the _bourgeoisie_ and the ex-officers, and, should White
   Guard circles make the least attempt to resist, or the smallest
   White Guard activity show itself, mass shootings carried out
   unhesitatingly--the local and provincial executive committees
   to display all possible initiative in the matter. Also must
   the Government Departments use the militia and the Che-Kas
   wherever required, and see to the detention and the arrest of
   persons adopting false names and surnames, and unconditionally
   shoot anyone found to have a direct connection with White
   Guard activity. Likewise, all these measures must be fulfilled
   immediately. Let those charged with them advise the Department
   of the Interior whenever local soviets are seen to be acting
   weakly. For thus alone will it become possible to clear the
   rear of our armies of White Guards and other such infamous
   conspirators against the rule of the working-classes and poorer
   peasants. Let there be no hesitation. Everywhere must mass
   terrorism be employed. Acknowledge receipt of this telegram, and
   forward it to all soviets within your district.

In the same issue of the _Weekly_ (for the _Weekly_ was a
journal specially designed to inculcate and popularise the Che-Ka’s
ideas and policy) there appeared an article entitled “The Question of
Capital Punishment.” The article said:

   Let an end be put to these long and fruitless and useless
   discussions about Red Terrorism. Deeds, not words, are required.
   It is high time that a ruthless, absolutely efficient Mass
   Terror were organised.

This, with the notorious Order issued by Petrovsky, obviates any
stressing of the moral of the idea that the working-classes should
be their leaders’ avengers, or any enlarging upon Dzherzhinsky’s
“humane principles” in his work of Che-Ka organisation. Lack of
journalistic conscience alone could have enabled Radek to assert in
the _Izvestia_ of September 6 that, “but for the faith of the
working-classes that their Government can adequately retaliate for the
blow, we should now be finding ourselves confronted with massacres of
the _bourgeoisie_ on a wholesale scale.”

And what are we to think of a resolution passed by Communists in the
province of Vitebsk which called for a thousand victims whenever a
soviet worker should be assassinated, or of a request from a Communist
nucleus of employees of a small tramway company that any assassination
of a Communist should be followed with shootings of a hundred hostages,
and any assassination of a Red soldier with slaughterings of a thousand
Whites, or of a resolution of September 13, passed by a Communist
nucleus of the Che-Ka of the Western District, that “infamous murderers
[of soviet officials] should be wiped from the face of the earth,”
or of a resolution of Red Guard employees of the Ostrogorod Che-Ka
that “for the death of each Communist our foes must be slain by the
hundred, and, for each attempt upon the life of a leader, by the
thousand, and by the ten thousand, as though we were exterminating
parasites”? In passing, be it observed how, the further we go from the
centre, the more bloodthirsty becomes the local unit, until “by the
hundred” has swelled to “by the ten thousand.” The cause of this is
that catch phrases uttered by, in the first instance (to judge from
official reports), employees of the Central Che-Ka underwent repetition
until they became stereotyped arguments, and, thus robed in hackneyed,
_outré_ terms, spread to one locality after another in proportion
as the Bolshevists wrested further territory from their opponents,
and Latzis, head of the All-Russian Che-Ka, further extended his
jurisdiction.

In Kiev the local Che-Ka’s sheet, the _Krasny Mech_ (“Red Sword”),
served a purpose identical with the purpose served in Moscow by the
_Weekly_. Its opening issue contained an interesting article from
the pen of the editor himself--Lev Krasny, who said, amongst other
things:

   Let the fangs of the _bourgeois_ snake be extracted by the
   roots, its greedy jaws rent asunder, its fat belly gutted. Let
   the mask also be torn both from the face of sabotage-working,
   treacherous, mendacious, hypocritically complacent profiteering
   _intelligentsia_ and from the face of our cunning,
   non-socially classified speculators. For the tenets of
   “humanity” and “morality” invented by the _bourgeois_ for
   the better oppression and exploitation of the lower classes have
   no existence for us, nor ever have had.

This a writer named Schwartz capped with:

   Let the recently proclaimed Red Terror be carried out in true
   proletarian fashion, even if, for the better reinforcement of
   the proletarian dictatorship, it becomes necessary to destroy
   the last slave of Tsarism and Capitalism. Indeed, let nothing
   deter us, but rather spur us on to more and more scrupulous
   fulfilment of the task which the Revolution has laid upon our
   shoulders.

On December 31 Kamenev stated: “The Terror has been forced upon
us. The working-classes created it, and not the Che-Ka.” Lenin,
for his part, said to the Seventh Congress of Soviets, earlier in
the year: “The Entente rendered the Terror necessary.” And as he
spoke he lied, for the Terror was created by the Che-Ka, and by the
Che-Ka alone, through the method of covering Russia with a network
of subordinate Che-Kas and “extraordinary commissions for combating
counter-revolution and sabotage and speculation,” until not a town or
a village lacked its branch of the omnipotent Che-Ka of the centre,
and the latter could act as the Government’s all-connecting nerve
until the last remnant of social right had become absorbed. And on
October 18 even the _Pravda_, the official organ of the Central
Committee, admitted[36] that by that time the catch phrase “All power
to the Soviet!” had given place to the catch phrase “All power to
the Che-Ka!” For by degrees, district, provincial, urban, cantonal,
village, and factory Che-Kas; railway, transport, and “battle front”
Che-Kas; “special branches of the Central Che-Ka for military affairs”;
“headquarters courts-martial”; “military-revolutionary headquarters”;
“extraordinary headquarters”; and punitive expeditions all became
combined into a single main instrument for carrying on the Red Terror,
so that Nilostonsky, author of _Der Blutrausch des Bolschewismus_
(“The Blood Lust of Bolshevism”), estimated that Kiev possessed sixteen
Che-Kas to its own cheek, and that all of them could pass death
sentences, and all perpetrate mass executions in slaughter-houses
identifiable only by ciphers.




                              CHAPTER III

                           BLOOD STATISTICS

            Let us build the new upon the ruins of the old.


The Che-Kas were not instruments of justice: the terminology of the
Central Committee, of the organ of “prosecution without mercy,” did not
understand them as such. Nor was a Che-Ka a court of inquiry; it was
not a tribunal at all. In defining the purpose of the institution, the
head of the model Che-Ka laid it down that

   We, the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission, are a military
   organ, with, for our field of battle, the home front in a civil
   contest. It is not ours to sit in judgment upon the enemy. It is
   ours utterly to destroy him. Hence, never must a Che-Ka pardon,
   for its exclusive business is to exterminate all who may be
   standing on the other side of the barrier.

And the meaning of such “ruthless prosecution” is not difficult to
understand when we recall how to “the dead letter of the law” there
succeeded “revolutionary experience” and “the revolutionary sense.”
For a sense of any kind is a thing subjective; whilst “experience”
in such a connection never fails to lead to tyranny as a matter of
fact--in the hands of a certain class of _personnel_, to the most
appalling forms of tyranny. “We are not warring against individual
_bourgeois_,” said Latzis’ article entitled “The Red Terror,”
published on Nov. 1, 1918,

   We are out to destroy the _bourgeoisie_ as a class. Hence,
   whenever a _bourgeois_ is under examination the first step
   should be, not to endeavour to discover material of proof that
   the accused has opposed the Soviet Government, whether verbally
   or actually, but to put to the witness the three questions: “To
   what class does the accused belong?” “What is his origin?” and
   “Describe his upbringing, education, and profession.” Solely in
   accordance with the answers to these three questions should his
   fate be decided. For this is what “Red Terror” means, and what
   it implies.

Nevertheless Latzis’ _formula_ manufacture lacked originality,
for he was but imitating Robespierre in the latter’s address to
the Convention of France on the legality of mass terrorism. Said
Robespierre: “To execute the enemies of one’s country, one needs but to
establish the fact that they are themselves. Not their annihilation,
but their chastisement, is what is called for.” As an instruction to
the judges of a legal tribunal, the dictum needs no comment.

But, fully to grasp the meaning of the Red Terror, we must first
determine the number of its victims.

And in this connection the vast, the unprecedented, area of slaughter
covered by the Soviet itself will help us to elucidate the Red Terror’s
system of application. Not that it is easy to determine the exact death
statistics, and perhaps they never will be determined, seeing that
the facts (1) that the names of the executed were published to the
extent only of one per cent., (2) that most of the death sentences were
carried out in secret dungeons, and (3) that many of the carryings-out
were so contrived as to leave no trace behind them combine to render
precision of fixation by an historian practically impossible.


                            _The Year 1918_

In writing his statistical articles, Latzis said:

   The man in the street knows as well as do my colleagues of the
   Che-Ka that by this time the latter has brought about tens, and
   even hundreds, of thousands of executions.

This is true. Not for nothing do the three capital letters which stand
for the title of the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission, of the
Che-Ka, stand also for the three Russian words which denote “Death
to every man.”[37] And though at first Latzis put forward only the
fantastically insignificant figure of “22” as the number of victims
slaughtered during the first half of the year 1918, he had later
to estimate that the number of persons shot in the twenty central
provinces during the second half amounted to 4500.

   The only thing of which the Che-Ka can be accused is of
   excessive leniency of application of capital punishment. It
   cannot be accused of excessive severity in the enforcement of
   executions, for our strong iron hand has never ceased to seek to
   lessen its victims. True, local Che-Kas have not always borne
   this maxim in mind: yet it would be fairer to accuse the Che-Ka
   in this respect than the provincial institutions. As a matter of
   fact, we have been too easy-going, too magnanimous, towards our
   vanquished foe.

Whence it would seem that Latzis conceived even a total of 4500 victims
to be too few, although it can easily be shown that, even at that, the
Latzian statistics covered but a very limited field. The first volume
of _The Che-Ka Red Book_ (which still exists as a publication,
and is distributed to responsible Bolshevist officials) furnishes us
with an historical document without a parallel. For in that volume is
“Order No. 4,” an Order which, dated July 21, 1918, and signed by one
Lieutenant Balke, head of the German Commission which the Brest-Litovsk
Treaty established, announced to the citizens of Yaroslavl that, the
local detachment of the Northern Volunteer Army having surrendered
to the Germans, it had therefore been handed over to the Bolshevist
authorities, and 428 of its members shot. True, my card index gives the
number of persons then executed as 5004!--but then my data concerning
provincial localities reached me only casually, and in driblets, or
whenever I could succeed in getting hold of a provincial journal.[38]

Also, it must be borne in mind that formation of correct ideas as to
numbers of victims was rendered the more difficult through the fact
that officials so greatly cultivated brevity of diction. Examples are
that once the Che-Ka of the district of Klin (Province of Moscow)
announced that “several” counter-revolutionaries had been shot, and
the Che-Ka of Voronezh that “many” had been shot, and the Che-Ka of
Sestiorelsk (Petrograd) that, “after careful inquiry, some shootings
have been carried out,” whilst at all times the Bolshevist press made
it its practice to publish reports with such obviously minimised
coefficients as “one,” “three,” and the like.

Moreover, never was any statistical information whatsoever given
concerning the mass executions with which it was the rule to accompany
repressions of peasant and other risings. And the fact wholly puts out
of the question exact fixation of numbers of victims sacrificed during
the civil war phase. Therefore, my figures are valuable merely in so
far as they make clearer than ever how absolutely incomplete are the
Latzian returns.

In proportion as Soviet Russia expanded, in like proportion did the
“humane activities” of Che-Kas expand, until by the year 1920, Latzis
could come out with some fuller data, and state that from the year
1918 onwards as many as 6185 persons had been executed.[39] Yet still
there remains the question whether this figure included the thousands
of persons whom British returns reported to have been slaughtered in
North-Eastern Russia (at Perm and elsewhere) during the period stated,
for to the British returns in question there are added the words:
“Constantly are persons of all classes, but more especially peasants,
to be found resorting to this Consulate with stories of relatives
murdered, and of Bolshevist mob fury wreaked.”[40] Moreover, what of
the 2000 military officers massacred in Kiev in 1918, of the victims
who were either shot or hacked to death in the theatre whither they
had been summoned for “verification of their papers”? And what of the
naval officers slaughtered in Odessa before the arrival of the Austrian
troops (an English clergyman wrote at the time: “I have been told by a
member of the Austrian Staff that the Bolshevists have supplied him and
his colleagues with a list of over 400 officers murdered in Odessa and
the district”[41]), or of the officers slaughtered at Sebastopol, or of
the 1342 persons whom General Denikin’s Commission proved to have been
shot in Armavir during the January and the February of 1918,[42] or of
the Sebastopol hecatomb which V. M. Krasnov’s memoirs have described as
carried out in batches of 67, 97, and over?[43]

The truth is that wherever the Bolshevists made their appearance some
tens, or even hundreds, of executions followed; executions which no
trial whatsoever had preceded; executions which were carried out
merely on the strength of sentences passed by a local Che-Ka or some
other temporary tribunal. True, these massacres in no way exceeded the
other excesses of the civil war, but, for all that, they deserve to
have devoted to them a separate chapter.


                            _The Year 1919_

Further on in his blood statistics Latzis states that during the year
above-named the Che-Kas ordered 3456 persons to be shot. This makes a
total of 9641 for the two years, with 7068 of the victims described
as counter-revolutionaries, and the rest (this should be carefully
noted) as persons shot, not for “_bourgeois_ leanings” or
“counter-revolution,” but for such offences against the ordinary law
as “lapses in fulfilment of official duty” (632), profiteering (217),
and purely criminal acts (204).[44] All of which constitutes proof that
during the period in question the Bolshevists used capital punishment
not only for coercion of the _bourgeoisie_, but also (and to
a degree never previously attained by a presumably civilised State
similarly placed) for service as a general punitive measure.

But, to proceed. Latzis’ figures purport to show that during the
September of 1919 the Che-Kas shot only 140 persons, although for the
same month--which, be it remembered, coincided with the “liquidation”
of the famous counter-revolutionary plot with which the Socialist N. N.
Shepkin was connected--the general press of the day gave 66 persons
as shot in Moscow alone, and even the Bolshevist press admitted to a
figure exceeding 150. Also, we have reliable evidence that, during July
of that year, from 100 to 150 persons were shot in Kronstadt, even
though 19 names only were made public, and that the Ukraine (where
Latzis was raging in person) saw victims shot by the thousand, so that
a Red Cross sister sent to England (for subsequent presentation to the
International Red Cross Society at Geneva) an estimate of 3000 victims
for the city of Kiev alone.[45] And an equally staggering total of
Kievan shootings has been given by Nilostonsky, whom I have quoted
already as the author of _Der Blutrausch des Bolschewismus_, and a
writer who somehow contrived to acquire a particularly good knowledge
of the doings of Kiev’s sixteen operative Che-Kas, and has proved that
knowledge by the accuracy of his topographical description, and by the
fact that he did not confine himself to personal observations alone,
but also utilised the materials published by the Röhrberg Commission,
whose members included lawyers and doctors, and by whom exhumed corpses
were photographed. Well, Nilostonsky has declared that the subsequently
identifiable persons then shot in Kiev amounted to 4800, and that the
general total probably amounted to 12,000. For the Terror assumed such
unprecedented forms in that city, and in the Ukraine at large, that
at last the central authorities themselves felt forced to despatch a
commission to inquire into the doings of the provincial Che-Ka. And, in
passing, it is only fair to say that ex-prisoners subsequently examined
by Denikin’s organisation were unanimous in their commendation of this
Bolshevist-appointed mission.

And for a while the development of the Terror in the Ukraine halted;
but as soon as ever Denikin evacuated Kiev mass executions became
the rule again, and were continued throughout the July and the
August of 1919 on such a scale that on a single day (August 16) the
_Izvestia_ published the names of 127 persons shot. And these
victims, incidentally, were the last to have their names made known by
official command.

On the outskirts of Saratov there lies a grisly ravine. It is the scene
of a host of local executions. Let me quote the words of an eye-witness
as given in that amazing book or compilation which, issued under the
title of _The Che-Ka_, deals exclusively with Che-Ka activity, and
was given to the world by the Social Revolutionary Party in Berlin. The
exceptional value of the book lies in the fact that its materials were
obtained at first hand from prisoners actually confined within prison
walls, or from actual eye-witnesses of events, and that the text of
it was drawn up by men who had learnt through bitter experience what
they were writing about. For impressions from real life are worth all
the dead and dry paper in the world, and I knew those men personally,
and know, therefore, with what care they sifted their materials until
they had made of _The Che-Ka_ an historical document equally
graphic and reliable in its description of the Russian phase of to-day.
It was for this book’s benefit that a resident of Saratov has drawn
the following picture of the Saratov ravine. The ravine lies on the
Monastyrsky Slobodka side of the town; and in future years there will
be erected there, I hope, a memorial to Saratov’s victims of the
Revolution.

   As soon as the snow melted in the ravine relatives and friends
   of the dead began to make their way thither, singly or in
   groups, but in every case with eyes glancing from side to
   side. And though at first such pilgrims were turned back by the
   authorities, in time the number of them became so great that no
   one could prevent their coming. In places the spring floods had
   washed away the sand, and left many of the victims of Bolshevist
   tyranny uncovered, so that knots of them strewed the bed of the
   ravine from the bridge to the far end, a distance of from 45
   to 50 _sazheni_.[46] And how many were they? Probably no
   one could say. Even the local Che-Ka does not know. All that is
   known is that during the last two years (1918 and 1919) at least
   1500 victims have been shot in the locality--some in accordance
   with sentence passed, and some in accordance with no sentence
   passed. Moreover, it was only during the summer and the autumn
   seasons that the condemned were brought to this ravine to be
   shot. In winter-time they were shot elsewhere.... The topmost
   layer consists of bodies shot as late only as last autumn:
   wherefore it is still fairly well preserved. The bodies lie clad
   in shirts alone, with their arms twisted behind them, and tied
   with cords. Some are thrust into sacks, and some are just as
   they fell. Truly the hollow is a terrible, a ghastly scene! But
   visitors do not hesitate to scan it closely. They are looking
   for some distinctive marking likely to help them in identifying
   a beloved one’s body. Daily the ravine grows more terrible as
   daily it engulfs victims. And each fresh batch of executions
   causes portions of the sides of the ravine to fall in, and to
   re-bury recently uncovered bodies. Hence the hollow ever grows
   wider, and ever fresh sacrifices to the Revolution are exhumed
   by the spring floods.

Is this all a tissue of lies?

In 1920 an equally gruesome utterance by Averbuch was published in
Kishinev under the title of _The Che-Ka of Odessa_. It estimates
that during the three months July-September 1919--that is to say,
during the time between the official proclamation of the Terror and the
Volunteer Army’s occupation of Kharkov--the Terror took a local toll
of 2200 lives. But as a matter of fact executions began at Odessa long
before the official proclamation of the Red Terror. They began there
within a week or a fortnight of the Bolshevists’ capture of the town.
Indeed, witnesses who gave evidence before the Denikin Commission were
unanimous in saying that local mass shootings began to be carried out
as early as the April of 1919, with public announcements of twelve,
sixteen, or twenty-six executions at a time. At all events, during
that April the local _Izvestia_ wrote with the usual Bolshevist
brutality:

   The carp enjoys being seethed in cream, and the _bourgeois_
   being slain by a Power which is stern, and ready to kill
   him.... Even though our souls may revolt from the task, let
   us use strong measures, and bring the _bourgeoisie_ to
   their senses, seeing that we need but shoot a few dozen of the
   fools, of the wastrels, and make the rest clean the streets,
   and set their womenfolk to scour out Red Guard barracks
   (though even this is too great an honour for them!), for
   the _bourgeoisie_ to realise that our Government is a
   Government come to stay, and that it is useless to look for help
   from Englishmen or Hottentots.

And, on the Volunteer Army approaching the town in June, executions
became more frequent still, and the local _Izvestia_ wrote (the
Terror had by then become “official”):

   The Red Terror has been set in motion, and henceforth let
   all _bourgeois_ strongholds be scoured out, and the
   _bourgeois_ made to hiss, and the counter-revolutionary to
   crackle, under our sanguinary blows.... Let us dislodge such
   persons from their fastnesses with red-hot irons, and wreak upon
   them merciless vengeance.

And wreaked that “merciless vengeance” was. And with it went long lists
of names which frequently omitted all mention of the “crime” committed,
and adduced only a statement that the individual had been shot in the
ordinary course of an officially ordained Terror. Margoulies’ book,
_Years of Fire_,[47] instances many such cases.

Almost invariably, too, our information goes to show that these lists
of twenty or thirty names represented, in reality, lists curtailed.
For example, a woman whose position enabled her to keep a particularly
close eye upon events in Odessa has stated that, on one occasion when
only eighteen names were published in the local _Izvestia_, she
herself reckoned the shot to have amounted to fifty, and that on
another occasion when only twenty-seven names were published, the list
comprised, in reality, seventy, inclusive of seven females, although
the official _communiqué_ had made no mention of women at all.
Also, an “examining member”[48] who had the misfortune to be arrested
by his colleagues afterwards deposed that during the local reign of
terror as many as sixty-eight persons were shot in a night, whilst
official statistics issued by the Denikin Commission tell us that the
number of shot in Odessa between April 1 and August 1 amounted to
1300. Lastly, from Niemann’s memoirs we learn that, taking the South
of Russia as a whole, the total of victims at that period cannot have
reached less than 13,000 or 14,000.[49]

Again, a strike which occurred in Astrakhan during March simply
drenched the district with working-people’s blood.[50] An eye-witness
has related:

   As a meeting of about 10,000 labourers was peaceably discussing
   the question of wages, suddenly a cordon of sailors and
   machine-gunners and bombers surrounded the crowd, and, on its
   not at once dispersing, poured into it a rifle volley, and
   followed that up with a rattle of machine-guns and a deafening
   roar of hand grenades. Through the assemblage there ran a
   sort of shudder: the people seemed to fall forward upon their
   faces in a short of horrible silence, for the rattling of the
   machine-guns was such as to drown both the moans of the wounded
   and the cries of the dying.... Next day all the town seemed
   empty. Utter stillness reigned. Many had succeeded in escaping
   elsewhere, and many gone into hiding; but, for all that, the
   workers lost 2000 through casualties, and the first act of the
   Astrakhan tragedy came to an end.

Still more tragic was the workers’ affair which began in Astrakhan
on March 12. On this occasion the Bolshevists, after winning
the “victory,” lodged a portion of their prisoners in six
_kommandaturs_, and the rest upon barges and steamers, one
of which, the _Gogol_, became particularly notorious for the
atrocities which she witnessed. Then telegrams concerning the
“rebellion” were dispatched to the centre, and Trotsky, head of the
Revolutionary War Council, wired back: “Destroy without mercy,” and by
the words sealed the fate of the imprisoned workmen. In fact, there
then ensued, afloat and ashore, a raging orgy of bloodshed. Some of
the prisoners were shot in the cellars and court-yards of the six
_kommandaturs_, and others were hurled into the Volga from the
barges and steamers, with stones tied about their necks, or with their
hands and feet shackled. One solitary worker saved himself by hiding
in an engine-room, and afterwards stated that during the first night
alone 180 persons were thrown into the water. And multitudes also were
shot in and about the _kommandaturs_: indeed, so many that it was
only with great difficulty that their corpses could be conveyed to the
cemetery, and dumped into heaps as “typhus cases.” And the local Che-Ka
likewise had to order that if any bearer should “lose” a corpse _en
route_, he himself should be executed. For days every morning dawned
upon streets strewn with half-naked, blood-soaked bodies of workmen,
and upon relatives wandering in the half light in search of their lost
ones.

Those shot on March 12 and 13, the first two days of the
repression, were exclusively members of the working classes; but
later the authorities realised that they had been foolish enough
to put themselves into the position of being unable to blame the
_bourgeoisie_ for the disturbance, and hastened to follow the
principle of “Better late than never” (and to divert the public’s
attention from their cruelty to the proletariat) by seizing any and
every _bourgeois_, and executing those of them who happened to
own any sort of immovable property, whether a house, or a shop, or
a fishery, or anything else. “At dawn on March 15 not a dwelling in
the town was not mourning a father, or a husband, or a brother. Some
families, indeed, had lost every male member of their household.” A
house-to-house visitation alone could have established the actual
number of persons shot. At first the figure 2000 was mentioned, but
this grew to 3000 as the authorities published lists of hundreds at a
time. And by the end of the month it had grown to 4000. Yet even this
did not cause the authorities to abate their punitive measures. They
seemed to have made up their minds that the workers of Astrakhan should
be compelled to pay also for the many other strikes that were taking
place as far away from Astrakhan as Toula, Briansk, and Petrograd.
For the March of 1919 saw refusals to work sweep over Russia like a
tidal wave. Only towards the close of April did the shootings begin
in any way to diminish; and by that time Astrakhan had become a truly
deplorable spectacle with its empty streets, its mourning homes, and
its “Orders” plastered on fences, shop fronts, and private windows.

Next let us consider that remote Turkhestan where, in January 1919, the
Russian section of the population rose in revolt against the Bolshevist
tyranny. The rising was quelled.

   The affair began with a house-to-house visitation until the
   barracks and the railway workshops all were overflowing with
   prisoners. And during the single night of January 20–21 there
   were so many executions that the authorities had to throw the
   corpses in heaps upon the railway line. For over 2500 were
   slaughtered. On the 23rd the task of repressing the rising was
   transferred to a local court-martial; and to the end of the year
   this court-martial continued to arrest and shoot victims.

Were _these_ victims, then, included in Latzis’ statistics? Or,
if not, why not, seeing that during the early days of the rising the
local Che-Ka was still operating in Turkhestan, and that its successor,
the court-martial, was but a repetition of that Che-Ka to its very
_personnel_?

The truth is that the question propounded by the Anarchist organisation
_Troud i Volya_ (“Labour and Freedom”) on May 20 has never
been answered, either by the _Pravda_ or by any other official
publication. For the question was based upon information published by
the Social Revolutionaries of the Left in No. 4 of their prohibited
journal,[51] and ran: “Is it true that daily during the past few months
the All-Russian Che-Ka has been executing batches of from twelve to
twenty-six victims?” Never will the question be answered, for its
very wording enshrined the truth. And it is manifest that that truth
came to strike the Bolshevists as a disconcerting verity, for shortly
afterwards an official decree transferred the right of passing death
sentences exclusively to the permanent revolutionary tribunals. None
the less, to the very eve of the promulgation of the decree we see
the All-Russian Che-Ka and the Petrograd Che-Ka publishing lists of
executed--yes, though the Che-Kas were just about to cease to be
competent to execute except in cases of overt rebellion, and not a
single such case had occurred in Moscow or Petrograd!

The data which enabled the Social Revolutionary organisation
_Narodnaya Volya_ to estimate that the number of persons executed
by the Che-Kas during the first three months of the year 1919
amounted to 13,850 are not known to me. But does that estimate seem
improbable--does its discrepancy with Latzis’ figure (3456) render it
impossible of belief? For my own part, I believe the former, or larger,
figure to be the more probable of the two.

And though an estimate of 138,000 as the number of persons shot up
to March 20 of 1919 caused the _Pravda_ to say “If this figure
were indeed correct it would be a figure truly appalling!” the figure,
“appalling” though it may have seemed to Bolshevist journalists,
understated the truth.


                            _The Year 1920_

For this year Latzis never published any statistics at all, and I
myself, during the same year, was unable to continue my card-index
library, for I had been flung into a Bolshevist gaol, and the Damocles’
sword of Bolshevist “justice” was hanging over my head.

On February 20 there took place another official “abolition” of capital
punishment, and Zinoviev impudently informed a meeting at Halle that
“now that the victory over Denikin is won, no more death sentences will
be pronounced in Russia!” But, as Martov pointed out, this statement
overlooked the fact that always such “abolitions” proved to be
temporary in their validity. And this happened on the present occasion,
and before long the death penalty again became so “appallingly” (the
_Pravda’s_ word) rampant that I do not hesitate to doubt whether
any cessation of executions _did_ take place. I feel the less
hesitation about it because I know so well the usual Che-Ka procedure
on such occasions. Take their manner of applying “amnesties.” I will
explain the idea of their _modus operandi_.

Amongst the terrible inscriptions which condemned prisoners have left
upon the walls of the building of the Special Branch of the All-Russian
Che-Ka in Moscow there can be seen the lines: “This night, which is
the eve of another abolition [of capital punishment], is being turned
into a night of blood.” And in the same way the eve of an “amnesty”
always meant a fresh holocaust of executions, so that the Che-Kas
might previously get rid of as many victims as possible. Yes, the
very night hours which saw the printers setting up the type for the
morrow’s proclamation would see the prisons converted into scenes
of massacre! Not an ex-prisoner but could testify to the horrors of
these “pre-amnesty” nights, and I myself shall never forget the night
during the October of 1920 when a fresh “amnesty” in honour of the
Revolution’s third anniversary was pending, and I was lying in the
Butyrka gaol. For during that night so many victims were shot that it
was only with difficulty that they could be conveyed to the Kalomikov
burial ground. In every case they were shot with a revolver through
the back of the head. And whilst all this was happening in Moscow,
similar things were happening in the provinces, and we find _The
Che-Ka_ relating that at Ekaterinodar the local Che-Ka imitated the
Che-Ka of Moscow in causing its special branch to “shoot as usual” even
after that the “amnesty” in celebration of the third anniversary had
been declared. The Bolshevist press, too, regarded the proclamation
only in so far as that it made it an excuse for publication of
impudently mendacious and fulsomely eulogistic articles concerning the
“mercifulness” and the “generosity” of a power which could grant so
many amnesties, and make them embrace its every enemy.[52]

Similarly, in 1921, when a congress of the Communist International was
about to be held, seventy persons were executed. True, the story was
that they were being executed for such ordinary criminal offences as
bribery and abuse of ration cards and theft of stores, but political
prisoners who were previously confined with the executed have since
expressed the opinion that the true object of the executions was to
make blood-sacrifice to the coming congress. Usually, at such times,
criminals of the ordinary type could rejoice, for the fact that
political prisoners who were on the list for execution began hastily
to be removed told its own tale--the tale that another “amnesty” was
toward, and the politicals must be slaughtered before the “amnesty”
would fall due and entail their release with the “ordinaries.”[53]

“This night, which is the eve of another abolition of capital
punishment, is being turned into a night of blood.” Ample proof exists:
ample proof that it was usual for the days before any “abolition”
or “mitigation” of capital punishment to be converted into days of
intensified bloodshed, until the custom practically became a law. Many
of these massacres are explainable by no other method.

On January 15, 1920, the _Izvestia_ published a notice signed
by Dzherzhinsky, head of the All-Russian Che-Ka. Addressed to the
provincial Che-Kas, it ran:

   Owing to the recent annihilation of the forces of Judemich,
   Kolchak, and Denikin, and to the fall of Rostov, Novocherkassk,
   and Krasnoyarsk, and to the overthrow of the Supreme
   Autocrat,[54] new conditions have arisen in the struggle with
   counter-revolutionaries, and cumulative destruction of those
   counter-revolutionaries’ organised forces has caused a radical
   blow to be struck at our enemies’ hopes and calculations based
   upon a possible thwarting of our Peasants’ and Workers’ Rule
   by means of conspiracies, rebellions, and terrorist outbreaks.
   Yet there are counter-revolutionaries in Russia who still
   cherish hopes of the kind, and the State must be defended
   from such persons, and from the counter-revolutionary efforts
   which the Entente also is launching against the Peasants’ and
   Workers’ Government, and from the espionage and disruptive and
   subversive activities which, in company with the agents of
   the Entente, ex-Tsarist generals in the service of the same
   are carrying on in support of our enemies. At the same time,
   though counter-revolution, within and without the country, lies
   practically crushed, and has had its extensive organisations
   for effecting overt counter-strokes and delivering guerilla
   attacks exterminated, whilst in proportion soviet power has
   increased, and we find ourselves able at last to dispense
   with the supreme punitive measure, with the penalty hitherto
   applicable to opposers of our authority, and though also it is
   satisfactory for us to be able to report that the taking of
   Rostov and the capture of Kolchak have enabled the proletariat
   and its Government conditionally to lay aside the weapon of
   terrorism, the proletariat and its Government desire it to be
   remembered that, should the Entente again attempt to employ
   armed intervention with or without the assistance of mutinous
   ex-Tsarist generals, and so to disturb the established position
   of our soviet power, and the peaceful labours of our peasants
   and workers towards the construction of a new Socialist State,
   it will be necessary for us to restore terrorist methods, and
   to lay the responsibility for the soviet power being forced to
   resume those methods upon the Governments and the governing
   classes of the Entente, and upon those Russian capitalists
   who sympathise with them. Meanwhile, let our extraordinary
   commissions turn their attention to the task of combating the
   foes represented by economic disorganisation, by speculation,
   and by negligence in official duty, so that when those foes
   have been overcome the extraordinary commissions aforesaid may
   devote their whole efforts to reconstructing our industrial
   life, and surmounting the obstacles born of sabotage, lack
   of discipline, and ill-will. In sum, we, the All-Russian
   Extraordinary Commission, now decree (1) that from the date
   of the publication of this decree there be discontinued all
   applications of the supreme punitive measure, whether in
   accordance with sentence passed by ourselves, by the All-Russian
   Extraordinary Commission, or in accordance with sentence
   passed by a local branch of Ourselves, and (2) that Comrade
   Dzherzhinsky be authorised to lay before both the Council of
   People’s Commissaries and the All-Russian Executive Committee
   proposals pertinent to the due abolition of capital punishment,
   whether by sentence passed by an extraordinary commission,
   or by sentence passed by an urban or a district tribunal, or
   by sentence passed by Ourselves, the Supreme Tribunal of the
   All-Russian Central Executive Committee. Let this decree at once
   be circulated by telegraph.

Those of us, however, who were still prisoners in Moscow, indulged
in no rejoicing, for we remembered a decree of a year ago, a decree
announcing in an exactly similar manner an end to Red terrorism. The
following is taken from an article by Norov in the _Vecherniya
Izvestia_ (“Evening News”) of Moscow,[55] as written _à propos_
of the fact that the seventeen Che-Kas of the writer’s locality had
just been deprived of their right to make independent pronouncement of
death sentences:

   At length the Russian proletariat has won the victory, and there
   is no longer need for terrorism, for the sharp, but perilous,
   weapon which ever tends to harm its wielder by alienating and
   intimidating elements otherwise inclined to join in the work of
   a revolution. Let the proletariat renounce further use of that
   weapon and, instead, take unto itself legality and right.

Already I have mentioned that in January, 1919, the Soviet of Kiev
solemnly pronounced that “capital punishment is herewith abolished
within the limits of our jurisdiction.” And though the observer of the
day might have been led by this to suppose that the Che-Ka in question
had derived its inspiration for “abolition of capital punishment” from
the Central Che-Ka itself, we know that the case was otherwise--that
the Central Che-Ka in no way favoured the new measure, the “abolition,”
but, on the contrary, empowered Dzherzhinsky to assume the initiative
only when the “abolition” had irrevocably been decided upon. And so
in January the Che-Ka made its usual anticipatory haste to destroy
its victims, and to shoot (according to my information) over 300
persons in Moscow alone. Madame Ismailovich, a well-known Left Social
Revolutionary who was a prisoner at the time, has stated:

   During the night before the promulgation of the decree of
   abolition of capital punishment, the Che-Ka took from this
   one gaol (not to speak of others) 120 souls.... And though
   previously, on the condemned hearing that the decree was going
   to be issued, they had assembled in the ward and, on the
   strength of the impending measure, implored a reprieve, both
   those offering resistance and those who were too weak to do so
   were butchered like cattle. One day, however, their obituaries
   will be written on the scroll of history.[56]

And in _The Che-Ka_ another ex-inmate of a Muscovite prison has
written:

   Although the Soviet Council duly passed the decree and published
   it on January I (O.S.), the 160 persons who still remained in
   the Che-Ka building, and in the local cellars and dungeons
   and concentration camps, were all taken out and shot. They
   were exclusively persons whom the Che-Ka feared might prove
   troublesome if left alone, and amongst them were some who had
   already half completed terms of confinement in one or another
   concentration camp--an instance being a man named Khvalyusky
   who, involved in the Lockhart affair (the affair which became so
   notorious because of the severity of the consequent sentences),
   had been given five years’ imprisonment. All throughout the 13th
   and the 14th (N.S.) people were shot. And in the course of the
   morning of the 13th the Che-Ka forwarded to our prison hospital
   a man so badly wounded in the jaw and tongue that it was only
   by signs that he could explain to us that he had duly been
   “executed,” but not killed outright, and then remitted to the
   surgical ward. And whilst making the signs his face was radiant,
   and his glance beaming. Clearly he was finding it difficult to
   credit his good fortune. And though to this day I do not know
   his name, nor what the affair in which he had become involved, I
   do know that on the next night he was taken away (his bandages
   still upon him), and shot a second time.

Similarly in Petrograd the eve of the “abolition of capital punishment”
was celebrated with shootings--with 400 of them, so that the slaughter
lasted all night. And in Saratov too (according to a private letter)
were fifty-two persons shot. And the same, as a matter of fact,
everywhere else.

Hence the doing away with the death penalty meant no more than that
the Che-Kas continued, unchanged, their high-handed proceedings.
Yet one difference there was, and it lay in a certain cunning
mental reservation. I will explain. On February 5 of that year the
_Izvestia_ reported that the provincial Che-Ka of Kiev had
received a telegram from the head of the All-Russian Che-Ka, and
that the telegram had explained that the decree concerning capital
punishment had never been meant _to apply to places at the front_,
and that the revolutionary tribunals at “places at the front” still
might pass death sentences. “That front,” the telegraphic explanation
had added, “includes both Kiev and its province.” And this piece of
unexampled, unblushing effrontery the Special Branch of the Central
Che-Ka clinched with a circular that:

   In view of the abolition of the death penalty, it is suggested
   that persons whose crimes would otherwise have rendered them
   liable to the supreme punitive measure _do now be dispatched
   to the zone of military operations, where the decree concerning
   capital punishment has no force_!

I myself remember an “examining justice” telling one of my comrades (a
man who had been arrested for “counter-revolution” during the February
of 1920) that, “although we cannot shoot you here, we _can_ send
you to the front for the purpose.” And that “front” (it needs hardly to
be added) was by no means limited to the regions where civil war was in
actual progress.[57] But in time this subterfuge, “the front,” came to
be thought unnecessary. And possibly some of the Che-Kas never resorted
to it, seeing that at all times Che-Ka work could be done in secret.
Or, if they resorted to it, they did so only in exceptional cases. At
times even the _Izvestia_ forgot the “abolition,” and once had
the inadvertence to come out with a list of 521 persons shot actually
between the “abolition” and the following May--176 of them put to death
by one or another provincial tribunal, and the rest by the Muscovite
Che-Ka itself! However, on May 24 capital punishment became officially
re-established, on the plea that that course had been rendered
necessary by the events of the Russo-Polish War. Which re-establishment
has never since been repealed.

Peculiarly interesting is an Order issued by Trotsky on June 16; and
the more so if it be compared with the appeal of 1917. The Order said:

   (1) Scoundrels advocating retreat must be looked upon as
   defaulters, as having refused to carry out a military command,
   and be shot. (2) Soldiers voluntarily leaving the front shall
   be shot. (3) Soldiers throwing away rifles, or selling their
   equipment, shall be shot.

This after that the All-Russian Congress of Soviets had said: “The
capital penalty which Kerensky established at the front is herewith
abolished”![58]

Hence both at the front and everywhere else the re-establishment of
capital punishment brought in a new orgy of executions. To begin with,
in September 1919, a mutiny of the garrison in Smolensk was ruthlessly
suppressed with the shooting not only of 1200 soldiers, but also of
a large number of civilian participators in the _émeute_.[59]
And though the Central Che-Ka ordered metropolitan journals to cease
reporting shootings when they were ordered by the Che-Ka itself,
those journals still published information concerning executions
when they were ordered by the military-revolutionary tribunals of
the provinces.[60] In which connection the official figures given
were truly terrible, for, according to them, 600 persons had been
shot between May 22 and June 22, and 898 during the following month,
and 1183 during the next, and 1206 during the next. But invariably
information of the kind was held up until at least a month after
the event--the fate of the 1206 victims shot during September, for
example, being reported by the _Izvestia_ only on _October
17_, with names and “crimes” appended. The “crimes” in question
read all the more curiously when we recall how Red terrorism usually
is justified. For the return says that shot for espionage were 3
persons, for treason 185, for refusal to carry out military orders 14,
for mutiny 65, for counter-revolutionary activity 59, for desertion
467, for looting and brigandage 160, for concealment of arms 23, for
drunkenness and insubordination 20, and for lapses in official duty
181. Whence it is no wonder that we can only with difficulty trace
method in the dispensation of Bolshevist “justice”! Next, on November
12, 1920, the _Izvestia_ reported, as shot between February and
September, 283 persons sentenced merely by order of the revolutionary
tribunals attached to the _Vokhra_ or “Home Service Army” (the
Che-Ka’s real instrument of operation): and as I myself possess a copy
of such a sentence, I can see that it was published in the Muscovite
_Izvestia_ of November 18, and relates to Trounov, an engineer,
to one S. S. Mikhno, ex-head of a minor administrative department, and
to one N. S. Mikhno, ex-head of the artillery supply branch of the
T.A.O.N.A.--all sentenced to death for “abuse of official functions” by
the _Vokhra’s_ head military-revolutionary tribunal. And, adds the
document: “This award is final, and cannot be appealed from to a higher
court.”

In short, in the maze of blood statistics one could easily lose one’s
way. For blood flowed wherever Soviet Russia encountered the smallest
check in life. Thus, during the summer of 1920 twenty doctors of Moscow
were arraigned on a charge of having connived at exemptions from
military service, and shot; whilst later 500 others of the provinces
were arraigned and shot in the same manner, and to the official press
publication of their names there was appended an intimation that
probably their patients would experience a similar fate. “Up to the
very last moment,” says a prisoner who lived with these doctors for
a time in the Butyrka gaol, “they did not, could not, believe that
they were going to be put to death.” Moreover, unofficial sources
have given their number as larger even than was given by the official
return. And when, during the autumn of 1920, disturbances broke out
amongst the Moscow garrison, and the inhabitants heard no more than
vague rumours that soldiers were being shot in the Che-Ka building,
the foreign-published Russian journal _Volya Rossii_ (“The Will
of Russia,” a Social Revolutionary organ) published (under date of
November 21) a definite list of those shot, which showed them to have
amounted to between 200 and 300, whilst to this the _Posledniya
Novosty_[61] appended 900 for October, and 118 for December. Again,
a correspondent of the _Volya Rossii_ estimated the number of
persons shot in Petrograd during that autumn to have reached 5000,
largely because, at the time, the various “risings” and “conspiracies”
in connection with General Judenich’s advance were being “liquidated.”
And we read in the _Posledniya Novosty_[62] of the summer an
_émigré’s_ story of the rounding up, medical inspection, and
shooting of a number of syphilitic subjects--“with a view to combating
prostitution”! And I, too, heard of such an occurrence, though I could
not verify it, nor yet some persistent rumours concerning a shooting of
Muscovite sufferers from glanders.[63] Yet there can be no doubt that
things just as monstrous, just as incredible, did come to be facts,
and were not evolved from the imagination, under this unprecedented
_régime_.


                              _The North_

Many sources are to hand shedding light upon the conduct of the civil
war in Northern Russia. Even in Moscow we used to hear terrible
stories concerning the punitive expeditions which the Special Branch
of the All-Russian Che-Ka periodically dispatched to Vologda and other
northern localities under a man called Kedrov. These expeditions
were a sort of circuit assize, a new tribunal of the Che-Ka’s own
invention.[64] Kedrov has since, I believe, been certified to be
a lunatic, and confined as such; but at the time of which I am
speaking he had become renowned for his cruelty, and we gain but a
very faint idea of his punitive expeditions from the fragmentary
reports published in the local press. True, occasionally that press
did state that some hundreds of persons had been imprisoned, and
dozens of other persons shot, after an “administrative-operative” (or
a “revolutionary-military”) tour of inspection; but more often it
gave vaguer news altogether--an example being that it scarcely made
any mention at all of an expedition when Kedrov “re-examined” 1000
officers, and despatched to the centre of Russia a veritable multitude
of hostages.[65]

Kedrov’s conduct when leading an expedition to the extreme North never
failed to be consistent: so that, compared with him, the Eydouk who
shot officers with his own hand was a man sheerly humane. Periodically
would the _Izvestia_ of Archangel publish lists of persons to
whom the Kedrov Commission had applied “the supreme punitive measure,”
and such a list lies before me now--a list of thirty-six names which
is dated November 2, and includes peasants, co-operative employees,
and a citizen who, an ex-member of the _Duma_, was a well-known
inhabitant of Vyborg. And in another such list I find thirty-four
names of persons shot for “active counter-revolution” during the
Chaikovsky-Miller _régime_, and, in a third, twenty-two names,
inclusive of the mayor of Archangel, of the editor of the _Severnoyé
Slovo_ or “Northern Word,” of the local postmaster, of a theatrical
manager, of a shop assistant, and of several others. And elsewhere
has a correspondent of the _Posledniya Novosty_ testified to
“shootings of boys and girls of twelve, sixteen, and so forth,”[66]
so that Archangel came to be known as “The City of the Dead.” And we
have it from a correspondent of the _Golos Rossii_ (“The Voice of
Russia”),[67] from a correspondent able to provide first-hand evidence
through having been resident in the town throughout the April of 1920,
that:

   Before the British troops had long been gone there was held
   a mock procession of empty red coffins, and then reprisals
   began.... All through that summer the town fairly groaned under
   the terrorist scourge; and though I lack figures to check the
   exact number of persons slaughtered there, at least I know that
   800 ex-officers were put to death--officers whom the late Miller
   administration had authorised to proceed to London by way of
   the Mourmansk railway whilst the members of the administration
   crossed to Mourmansk on icebreakers. All of them were seized by
   the Bolshevists _en route_, and shot.

But it was in the Kholmogory district that the greatest number
of executions of all took place. Said a correspondent in the
_Revolutsionnaya Rossia_:

   Last September, when a “day of Red vengeance” was held,
   over 2000 people were shot. Mostly they were peasants and
   other Cossacks from the South. For it is not often now that
   intellectuals are executed. Probably this is because very few of
   them remain to be executed.

But what is the meaning of that phrase “peasants and other Cossacks
from the South”? The meaning of it is that a host of persons had been
brought to Northern Russia from the South, for internment in the
northern concentration camps, since that was the Southern Che-Kas’
favourite resource with their victims; they sent them to the northern
camps, especially to the camp at Archangel, as one would send a person
to certain death. And when we come to consider those “abodes of terror”
(whence the condemned wretches seldom or never departed alive--they
departed thence only after that they had been executed) we shall
see that to be sent to such places practically _was_ capital
punishment.[68]

And similar methods were the rule in the Don and the Kuban regions,
in Turkhestan, and in the Crimea, where the procedure was that
suddenly there would be issued orders for a “registration” or a
“re-registration” of ex-White officers and men, and that as soon as
the loyalists concerned had reached the place indicated (they never
seemed to think that anything untoward could be pending) they would be
seized, bundled into railway trucks, and, just in the clothes in which
they happened to be standing up, dispatched to Archangel, where the
fact that they were wearing garments suitable enough for the climate
of Kuban and of the Crimea, but not for the atmospheric conditions of
the remoter north, would join with the circumstance that the lack of
washing facilities inevitably converted their bodies into masses of
vermin to bring about, surely and speedily, the desired end--and the
more so because the chance of obtaining warmer clothing from their
relatives at home was as negligible as was the chance of being able to
let those relatives know where the sufferers were.

The same procedure, too, was adopted in Petrograd towards that section
of the Baltic Fleet’s officers and men who had failed either to
emigrate, or to go into hiding, or to join the forces of Judenich or
Kolchak or Denikin. Presumably these men had served the Soviet Power
loyally, for but few arrests amongst them had taken place during the
four years of the Bolshevists’ administration: wherefore when, on
August 22, 1921, a “re-registration” was ordained, the men thought
nothing of it as they left their ships, and went ashore, to go through
a process to which they had become so well accustomed. But, arrived
ashore, they were conducted, one by one, into a room, and there told
to wait. And they waited for two days. And then, under a strong
escort, they were marched to the railway station, bundled into luggage
vans, and forwarded (with no explanation given) to prisons at Orel
and Vologda and Yaroslavl and elsewhere. No one ever discovered the
subsequent whereabouts of those men. All that official lists said of
them was that they had been “sent northward,” though from private
conversations with Che-Ka employees it was gathered, in addition, that
their chance of long remaining alive was a slender one.

Of Kedrov’s northern exploits we obtain a glimpse when we read in
the _Volya Rossii_[69]: “In Archangel, once, he mustered 1200
officers, took them over to Kholmogory, loaded them on to barges, and
riddled them with machine-gun fire. Fully half of them were killed.”

Perhaps such a senseless, vile proceeding seems incredible. Yet it is
but a typical example of the fate which befell the vast majority of
those who were sent to the Kholmogory camp. First pitched, in May 1921,
in a spot some ten versts from Kholmogory, this settlement never ceased
thenceforth to witness shootings in batches of from 10 to 100. Indeed,
when matters reached the pass that an official investigator had to be
sent northward he was told by the local inhabitants that the number of
persons who had been disposed of to date could not have reached less
than 8000. Not but that in the long run even such cruelty as this may
not have proved to be kindness, seeing that in any case the Kholmogory
camp, the “camp of death,” saw to it that prisoners perished, slowly
and surely, of ill-treatment and neglect.

And though it may be difficult for the moral sense to realise that
drownings of people by barge-loads could ever have existed as a Russian
official institution, seeing that such a system in the twentieth
century recalls the worst doings of the eighteenth-century French
Revolution, the barges in question are no fiction; and I can add to
the two recent cases already cited a third one, more recent still, to
show that the practice, once started, went on unchanged. The case is
to be found related in Vladimir Voitinsky’s preface to his work _The
Twelve Condemned_, a work which turns upon the great trial of Social
Revolutionaries in Moscow. We read:

   In 1921 the Bolshevists took 600 persons from different prisons
   of Petrograd, dispatched them to Kronstadt, loaded them on to a
   barge, and scuttled the vessel at a particularly deep spot. All
   but one were drowned. And he only escaped because he was able to
   swim to the Finnish shore.[70]


                     _After Denikin’s Departure._

Nevertheless, all these horrors pale, numerically at least, before
the happenings in the South after the close of the civil war and the
collapse of the Denikin Government. For it is then that we see coming
into being a new Government, and that Government entering upon its
functions amid a sea of blood, and wreaking both private and official
vengeance through terrorism, and replacing civil war with a policy
of complete annihilation of the surviving enemy, and of preventive
intimidation of the civilian population. As soon as ever, in 1920, the
Bolshevists had made their third entry into Odessa, daily executions of
100 or more persons became the rule, and motor-lorries had to cart away
the dead in heaps.[71]

   “Life here is like living upon a volcano,” said a private letter
   to the editor of the _Posledniya Novosty_.[72] “Daily mass
   arrests of counter-revolutionaries take place in every quarter
   of the town, and individual arrests and domiciliary searches.
   It is sufficient for anyone to inform the authorities that such
   and such a family has a relative serving in the Volunteer army
   for a plundering of that family’s house to be carried through
   forthwith, and the family itself to be made prisoners. Unlike
   last year, however, the Bolshevists now execute their victims
   very quickly, and publish no slaughter lists.”

Again, we find a Constantinople correspondent of the _Obstchoyé
Delo_,[73] a man who knew well what was happening in Odessa, sending
his journal a heart-rending series of accounts of life in that city,
and saying that official information showed the number of persons who
had been shot to date to amount to 7000, since at least 30 or 40 had
been executed nightly, and sometimes as many as 200--even as 300.

   Machine-guns did the work: the victims were too numerous for
   individual execution. Nor was any publication made of the names
   of the shot; the prisoners were just taken from the gaol by a
   wardful at a time, and exterminated.

An exaggeration? Possibly. But at least an exaggeration resembling
known facts, seeing that there stands on record the massacre of the
ex-officers captured on the Roumanian frontier when attempting to
escape to the forces of General Bredov. The attempt failed because
the Roumanian Government refused to accord the fugitives licence of
passage across the river Dnieper, and subsequently the 1200 officers
were dispatched to concentration camps, and executed there. And as
regards their execution on May 5, I agree that one can scarcely
believe the story that, owing to the _Izvestia_ having published
an announcement of the hecatomb, certain persons tolled the local
church bells overnight, and the local ecclesiastics were subsequently
arraigned and allotted sentences of from five to ten years.

To about the same period there may be assigned the execution of
a number of Galicians who had played the Bolshevists false. The
ex-Galician garrison of Tiraspol was shot to the last man, and,
by orders from Odessa, the rest were sentenced to be punished for
their “treason” with deportation. But no sooner had these Galicians,
with their wives and children, assembled at the goods station than
machine-gun fire was poured into them _en masse_, and such of
the “traitors to the proletariat” (to quote the _Izvestia_) as
were not killed thereby were done to death by a goaded-on Bolshevist
mob.[74]

Like shootings took place when the Crimea had been seized. “All
persons of the region to whom I spoke,” says a correspondent, “were
unanimous in declaring that they had seen a list of 119 persons as
shot on December 24.” And, of course, the real number was, quite
justifiably, rumoured to have amounted to 300. The shot on this
occasion had been persons accused of participation in the so-called
“Polish counter-revolutionary organisation.” As a matter of fact
that organisation had been engineered by _agents-provocateurs_
in the employ of the local Che-Ka, and the _agents_ had been
given the job for the same reason as was the case when the “Wrangel
conspiracy” caused sixty employees of the Shipping and Trading Company,
and thirty-one other persons, to be shot for “espionage”: namely,
that the _agents_ might at least have their energies devoted to
_something_.[75]

And the same informant tells us that “when the Bolshevists were in
Ekaterinodar every prison there was overcrowded with inmates, most of
whom were destined to be shot.” To which a local citizen has added that
between the August of 1920 and the February of 1921 the prisons of the
town saw 300 victims slaughtered.[76]

Most of the shootings of that year, however, took place in August,
when, on Wrangel’s forces reaching the Kuban region, the head of the
Kuban Che-Ka ordered that “all persons now lying in the cells of
the Che-Ka building be shot,” and answered a Che-Ka employee named
Kossolapov, who had protested against the order on the ground of many
of the prisoners not having been so much as examined, and others having
been arrested merely for an infringement of the regulation prohibiting
departure from a dwelling-house after eight o’clock at night, with the
instruction: “Then separate those eight o’clock prisoners from their
companions, and shoot the rest.” This was duly carried out, and a local
citizen named Rakitzansky, who was one of the seized, has described how
it was done. His account says:

   We were led forth from the cells in batches of ten, but were
   quite calm, for, on the first batch being removed elsewhere, we
   were told that the reason for their removal was that they might
   be questioned only. But when the second batch was removed we
   realised that the purpose of the removal was _execution_,
   and sure enough, those who were taken away were butchered like
   cattle.

With which the informant relates how he himself escaped death. He did
so only through the fact that, as the Bolshevists happened at the time
to be preparing to evacuate the town, the Che-Ka’s documents lay ready
packed up, and therefore the executions were taking place without the
usual preliminary formalities--merely with a putting to each prisoner,
when summoned to slaughter, of the question, “Of what crime do you
stand accused?” And since Rakitzansky noticed that any prisoner who
stood accused only of having infringed the curfew order was set aside
from the rest, he too said, when his turn came, that he had been
arrested for having been found out of doors after nightfall, though in
reality he had been arrested as an ex-officer--and so saved his life.

  [Illustration: Male and female executioners and torturers
  active in Eupatoria during 1918.

    [_See page 72._]

   These executions were carried out by the Che-Ka’s entire staff,
   and on the prison premises. Artabekov, the chief, himself gave
   the word to fire on each occasion, and the firings went on for
   twenty-four hours, during which time the neighbouring dwellers
   must have sat benumbed with terror. Two thousand persons were
   shot, but their names and their “crimes” still remain unknown,
   and probably always will remain unknown. Not even the
   Che-Ka’s employees could throw light upon the point, for such
   men have come to look upon shootings as a trade, as an outlet
   for their sadistic tendencies, as a resource which calls neither
   for ceremony nor for any established procedure.

Again, in Ekaterinodar, on October 30, 84 persons were shot; during
November, 100; on December 22, 184; on January 24, 210; and on February
5, 94. And there can be no doubt about these items, for, although the
local Che-Ka believed itself to have destroyed all its documents, we
have it from an eye-witness that subsequently “whole bundles of papers,
inscribed ‘To be shot,’ were discovered in some earth closets.”

Take another picture of life in Ekaterinodar at this period:

   Between August 17 and August 20 the tenour of our existence
   was disturbed by troops of Wrangel’s landing near
   Primorsko-Aktarskaya Stanitza, and proceeding to attack
   the town. A panic ensued, and Artabekov, our “Special
   Representative,” ordered all persons who had been arrested
   by the local Che-Ka, or by its special branch, to be shot
   forthwith. At the time the provincial Che-Ka and the special
   branch had on their premises 1600 persons, and these were
   taken across the Kuban in batches of 100, and slaughtered with
   machine-gun fire. And a like course was pursued in the prison
   itself; save that there the inmates were shot against a wall.
   Lastly, public announcement of the affair was made, and lists
   of the executed published in columns headed “Retribution.” Yet
   the number of names published was a good deal smaller than the
   reality. Also, when the Bolshevists were setting about their
   disorderly flight, they told the workers that if they (the
   workers) did not come with them they (the Bolshevists) would,
   on their return, hang every worker who had remained behind to a
   telegraph pole.[77]

Similar events befell when Wrangel came to menace Ekaterinoslav,
and the town was evacuated.[78] Indeed, everywhere such events
befell, and when the Bolshevist forces were retreating from Vinitza
and Kamenetz-Podolsk the Kharkov _Izvestia_ (the organ of the
All-Ukrainian Che-Ka) published lists of hostages shot to the number
of 217, with names of peasants, thirteen teachers, several doctors
and engineers, a rabbi, and a number of landowners and ex-officers
included. The same, again, whenever the Bolshevist forces were on the
_advance_. For example, no sooner was Kamenetz-Podolsk retaken
than eighty Ukrainians were shot, and 164 seized and dispatched to the
central provinces.[79] Also, a correspondent of the _Revolutsionnaya
Rossia_[80] gives us the following description of Rostov-on-Don
doings during the first few months of the new Government’s rule:

   Merciless, shameless looting is going on, with the Bolshevists
   robbing the shops and houses of the _bourgeoisie_, but,
   still more, the co-operative stores. And they keep shooting
   officers, or else hacking them to pieces with swords--sometimes
   in the street as soon as caught, and sometimes in the officers’
   homes.... Recently, too, they set fire to the military hospital
   on the corner of the Taganrog Prospekt and Temeritskaya Street,
   although the building was crowded with sick and wounded officers
   at the time, and many of the latter were too weak to move. In
   fact, forty were burnt to death.... The exact number of shot and
   hacked is not yet known. All that is known is that the number
   must have been very large. And with each addition to the local
   soviet’s power its methods are growing bolder. First it placed
   the whole of the Cossack population under surveillance. Then
   it brought into operation a Che-Ka under Peters, and kept the
   engines of two motor lorries in constant running, that the sound
   of the shots might not be heard outside the building.... Peters
   frequently attends the executions in person. They take place in
   batches, with perhaps as many as ninety persons shot in a single
   night.

   Also, Red Guards have told us that Peters’ little son of eight
   or nine will run after him and cry: “Daddy, daddy, let _me_
   do it too!”

Associated with the local Che-Kas were local revolutionary tribunals
and soviets. Nor, frequently, were captured persons looked upon as
prisoners of war, but dubbed, rather, for the purpose of being shot,
_agents-provocateurs_, or else “bandits.” This is how the “trial”
of Colonel Sukharevsky at Rostov was engineered; and the same with a
“trial” of a Cossack named Sniegirev at Ekaterinodar, and with the
“trial” of a student named Stepnaov and others at Touapse.

In and around Stavropol wives were shot for having failed to notify
that their husbands had fled. And even children of fifteen and sixteen
were shot, and persons of sixty--yes, shot with machine-guns, or
else hacked to pieces with swords. Nightly shootings took place in
Piatigorsk and Essentouky and Kislovodsk, whilst the lists of the
slaughtered (amounting to some 240 names apiece) would be headed “Blood
for blood,” and conclude with the words “To be continued.” And as
regards a pretext for the orgy, it was found in the assassination of
one Lenitzov, head of the Che-Ka of Piatigorsk, and of a certain Lapin,
a military commissary--both of these fellows having been stopped in a
motor car by a _posse_ of horsemen.[81]


                _The Crimea after Wrangel’s Departure._

For months after the “liquidation” of the Denikin _régime_
exploits like the foregoing were continued. Next, Wrangel came and
went, with the numbers of victims growing to tens of thousands, and the
Crimea coming to be known as “The All-Russian Cemetery,” and refugees
thence reaching Moscow with terrible tales of what had happened.
Indeed, at this period the journal _Za Narod_ (“For the People”)
estimated the total of those shot in the Crimea to have reached 50,000,
whilst other computers have placed it variously at 100,000, at 120,000,
and at 150,000. But it is impossible to say which of these figures
approaches most nearly to the truth. All that can really be said is
that, even if the total was smaller, far smaller, than any of the
figures given above, that does not lessen the cruelty, the abomination,
of slaughtering persons after Frunze, the then Commander-in-Chief, had
guaranteed them an “amnesty.”[82] And another functionary active in the
Crimea was Bela Kun, the notorious Hungarian journalist, who was not
ashamed to say publicly:

   Comrade Trotsky has declined to visit the Crimea so long as a
   single counter-revolutionary remains alive there. But as the
   Crimea is a bottle-neck whence no counter-revolutionary can
   possibly escape, it will not be long before we have raised it
   from its revolutionary level of three years behind the times to
   the general revolutionary level of Russia.

  [Illustration: Various executioners and torturers active in
  Eupatoria during the Crimean Terror.

    [_See page 76._]

And so the Crimea was “raised” to that level. And the method employed
for raising it was the method of perpetrating such a series of mass
executions as stands without parallel in history. Not only were
people shot by scores at a time; they were also hacked to pieces,
and, as often as not, before the very eyes of their relatives. Said
an insistent telegram from Skliansky (Trotsky’s temporary substitute
on the Central Revolutionary-Military Council): “Let the struggle
continue until not a single White officer remains alive on Crimean
soil.” Later the All-Russian Executive Committee held an enquiry
into the massacres of 1920 and 1921, and, on questioning commandants
of towns, found all of them (according to the _Roul_[83]) to
cite in their defence a second telegram sent them either by Bela Kun
or by Bela’s “secretary” (a woman known as ”Zemliachka,” or “the
Country Woman,” though her real name was Samoilova, with her “special
services rendered” rewarded, in March, 1921, with “the Order of the
Red Flag”[84]) for the purpose of bidding all such town commandants
summon for “registration” (and execution) all ex-officers, and all
ex-officials of the late War Ministry (under Wrangel’s Government)
who might be resident in their districts. At all events, it was upon
such a “registration” basis that the executions were carried out. And
subsequently, A. V. Ossokin stated to the Lausanne Tribunal that “the
queues waiting to register ran to thousands in length, as though each
man had been seeking to win the race to the grave.”[85]

And for months the slaughter continued, and a nightly rattle of
machine-guns was heard. The first night alone saw thousands of victims
fall[86]--1800 in Simferopol, 420 in Theodosia, 1300 in Kertch, and so
forth. But at last, in dealing with such large numbers, difficulties
were encountered, for though the majority of the victims were stupefied
with terror, some did retain sufficient presence of mind to attempt
escape, and it became necessary to shoot smaller parties at a time, and
to divide the nightly quotas into two shifts each--Theodosia, for
example, making the two half-quotas each include 60, or a total of 120
to a night. And during the shootings the occupants of the neighbouring
dwellings were forbidden to leave their homes on pain of death--they
had to sit and bear the torturing horror of the sounds as best they
could. And a special danger beset them in the fact that, perhaps, a
half-shot victim would come crawling to their door and moan for help,
and so involve the occupants of the dwelling in the risk of losing
their own lives if mercifully they should take him in.

At first the corpses were disposed of by dumping them into the ancient
Genoese wells; but in time even these wells became filled up, and the
condemned had to be marched out into the country during the daytime
(ostensibly, “to work in the mines”) and there made to dig huge graves
before daylight should fail, and then be locked into sheds for an hour
or two, and, with the fall of dusk, stripped except for the little
crosses around their necks, and shot. And as they were shot they
fell forward in layers. And as they fell forward their own layer of
quivering bodies speedily became covered with the following layer; and
so on until the graves lay filled to the margin. Only when morning came
did any victim who seemed to be still breathing have his brains dashed
out with a piece of rock. And, for that matter, many were buried alive.

At Kertch the Bolshevists organised what they called “trips to Kuban,”
when the victims were taken out to sea, and drowned, and their
terror-stricken wives and mothers flogged with _nagaiki_[87]
or, in a few cases, shot along with their sons or husbands. And
for a long time bodies of such women, with babes still clasped to
their breasts, could be seen lying outside the Jewish cemetery at
Simferopol. At Yalta and Sevastopol stretcher patients were carried
from the hospitals, and shot. And these victims were not exclusively
ex-officers. On the contrary, they included common soldiers, doctors,
nurses, teachers, railwaymen, priests, and peasants.

And when the towns’ quotas of victims had become exhausted the
Bolshevists began to draw also upon the villages, where, as a rule,
the slaughter was carried out on the spot. And meanwhile mass arrests
of hostages began in the towns, and in Simferopol alone 12,000 were
seized on December 19 and 20. Next, this phase of the delirium having
passed, the Bolshevists took to imprisoning people on the strength of
certain “inquiry forms.” The procedure in this case was as follows.
All ex-officials and persons over the age of sixteen had to fill in
several dozen documents requiring answers to forty or fifty questions;
and these questions went carefully into every detail of the examinee’s
life during the examinee’s every year of existence. Most of all
was attention paid to the examinee’s origin and social position,
and position _vis-à-vis_ a father’s or a grandfather’s or an
uncle’s or an aunt’s property--also to the examinee’s sympathy with,
or antipathy to, the Red Terror, the Allies, and Poland, and to the
question whether or not the examinee had sided with Wrangel, and, if
so, why he or she had not fled to join that General’s forces. Each such
query had, willy nilly, to be answered. And after a fortnight or so the
“registered” had to attend before the local Che-Ka, and be questioned
further, and subjected to a bombardment with unexpected and wholly
irrelevant inquiries. Only if an examinee finally passed this test did
he or she receive a certified “enquiry form,” coupled with a reminder
that thenceforth the examinee’s life stood in fee to the correctitude
of the information contained in the form.

Of those who contrived, after all this, to remain in the present world,
a large number were sent to the concentration camps of the North, where
usually they found their last resting-place. Even if a prisoner did
escape from such a camp he brought down summary vengeance upon his
non-escaped comrades--an instance being that, once when a party of six
officers got clear of the concentration camp at Vladislavlevo railway
station, thirty-eight of their fellows were executed forthwith.[88]

For its part, the Che-Ka of Kertch adopted the plan of registering
the population simultaneously, _en masse_, and, for the purpose,
surrounded the town with a cordon of patrols, and then ordered the
local inhabitants to lay in three days’ stores, and forbear to leave
their dwellings on pain of death. The subsequent inquiry conducted
resulted in a dividing of the population into three categories,
with the 800 members of the first category notified in the Kertch
_Izvestia_ as “persons who have taken an active part in the
late campaign” [against General Wrangel]. When they were shot their
surviving fellow townsmen reckoned that their real number had amounted
to at least double the official figure given.[89]

But it was at Balaklava and Sebastopol that the greatest number of
executions took place, for, if we are to credit certain statements made
by eye-witnesses, the Che-Kas of the two townships shot a joint total
of 29,000 souls,[90] with, amongst them, at Sebastopol, 500 stevedores
for having helped to embark General Wrangel’s army.[91] Also, when the
_Izvestia_ published (on November 28) the first general list for
the region, that list of 634 names was seen to comprise 278 names of
_women_; whilst when, on November 30, a second general list was
published, 88 of its 1202 names, again, were feminine names.[92] Hence
it has been estimated that during the first week of the Bolshevists’
rule of the Crimea Sebastopol alone saw over 8,000 souls put to
death. And it was not only _shootings_ that were carried out in
Sebastopol. There were carried out there, and for the first time, also
_hangings_. Indeed, hundreds of prisoners were executed in this
manner, and both the _Posledniya Novosty_ and the _Dielo_
and the _Roul_ of the period repeat nerve-shattering stories
related to them by the few people (mostly foreigners) who subsequently
contrived to get clear of the Crimea’s confines. Possibly reminiscences
of the sort were partially subjective; yet to discredit them in whole
is sheerly impossible. Wrote a correspondent to the _Roul_:

   In time the Nakhimovsky Prospekt became simply festooned with
   corpses of officers and private soldiers and civilians who,
   arrested then and there in the street, had been executed on the
   spot of arrest, and hurriedly, and with no previous trial.[93]

And wrote a correspondent to the _Dielo_:

   The city is like a city of the dead, with the population
   lying hidden in cellars and lofts, and every fence and wall
   and telegraph post and telephone standard and shop front and
   signboard plastered over with posters saying “Death to the
   Traitors!”[94]

And from another eye-witness we have it that “officers were hanged in
full uniform, complete to the epaulets, but civilians in underwear
only. And there they swung to and fro ‘as a warning to others.’”

Yes, every available pole and monument was used for the purpose, and
also every available tree. In particular did the Istorichesky Prospekt
become richly garnished with wind-swayed corpses; and the same with
the Nakhimovsky Prospekt, Ekaterinskaya Street, Bolshaya-Morskaya
Street, and the Primorsky Boulevard. Previously Commandant Bothmer,
the lieutenant of the German contingent hitherto in occupation of
the Crimea, had ordered the population not to make any complaints
against the Soviet’s officials, “since such complaints only help the
White Guards in their resistance.” And such was the orgy of madness
and slaughter as to include even shootings of sick and wounded from
the hospitals--of a batch of 272 persons from the _Zemstvo’s_
sanatorium at Aloupka,[95] and of doctors and Red Cross nurses (we
find seventeen nurses’ names in a single list) and _Zemstvo_
employees and the well-known National Societist A. P. Laurier (with,
as accusation against him, that he had been editor of the _Youzhniya
Viedomosty_ or “Southern Intelligencer”!) and Plekhanov’s secretary,
the Social Democrat Loubimov, and many others who had taken no part
whatsoever--at all events, no active part--in the struggle.

In fact, these lists might well have had appended to them the words of
Ivan the Terrible under similar circumstances: “Together with a great
multitude of others whose names Thou alone, O Lord, wilt remember.”
And said a correspondent of the Social Revolutionary journal _Volya
Rossii_ or “The Will of Russia”: “Even such names of the slain as
the Bolshevists reported amounted to thousands.”[96]


                            _The Year 1921_

During this year also the Terror in the Crimea continued, so that A. V.
Ossokin stated before the Lausanne Tribunal:

   During July last over 500 hostages were imprisoned on charges
   of having communicated with the Greens. And before the year
   was out many of these hostages even were executed, with some
   twelve or thirteen women included amongst their number--three
   in Eupatoria during April, five in Simferopol on March 25
   (O.S.), one in Kapasoubayar during April, and three or four in
   Sebastopol during the same month, with, as principal accusation
   against them, either that they had helped relatives to escape to
   the mountains or that they had furnished persons contemplating
   such a course with provisions, though in reality the accused had
   furnished the provisions without knowing that the persons whom
   they thus assisted were not refugees at all, but disguised Red
   Guards and _agents provocateurs_.

Also, whole villages were presented with an ultimatum that “unless
you people recall those of your inhabitants who have taken to the
mountains, you shall have your village burnt over your heads.”
Demerdzhi, Shoumi, Korbek and Sabli were amongst the villages so
addressed. However, the threat in no case came really to be fulfilled,
for, on its utterance, the Greens issued a counter-proclamation that in
such a case they would slaughter every Communist family and individual
Communist whom they could catch, whether in town or in village.

And in Ekaterinoslav and the Northern Taurus, during the winter of
1921–22, the same policy of hostage seizure shed rivers of blood.
Also, wholesale disarmaments of villages took place; the procedure
being to fix a given quota of arms for surrender, within twenty-four
hours, by a given village, and if (as usually happened) the quota
specified exceeded the whole store of arms possessed by the village,
to seize ten or fifteen of the villagers as hostages, and then, on
definite ascertainment that the village could not comply with the
order issued, to shoot the hostages in the fashion which had become
stereotyped.

And, on a base used by the Greens being discovered near Theodosia,
three boys and four girls (all aged about sixteen) were shot.
Similarly, a trial of Greens in Simferopol resulted in the deaths of
twenty-two persons, including a local university lecturer, and some
others.

And ever as the _Krim Rosta_[97] reported new “conspiracies”
there followed upon the discoveries executions, even though the
“conspiracies” had seldom had any connection whatsoever with the
Greens. And also upon the Tartar population did the Terror descend.
During August several scores of Mahomedans were shot for “holding a
counter-revolutionary meeting in their Mosque.”[98]

In September two parties of Greens under a Tartar named Malamboutov
placed sufficient reliance upon an “amnesty” offered them to descend
from the mountains, and, in the case of Malamboutov and some others, to
meet with a remarkable fate. The incident has been thus described by
the author of a diary published in the _Posledniya Novosty_:

   As soon as he descended from the mountains, Malamboutov was
   seized by the local Che-Ka, and compelled to sign an “appeal”
   to such of his fellow Greens as had remained behind in hiding:
   the “appeal” stating, after referring to the Bolshevists’ “love
   of peace,” that “the only remaining foe of ourselves, of the
   Green Army, is the common foe of us all, the foe represented
   by Capitalism.” Then, the “appeal” issued, a _posse_
   of officials re-conveyed Malamboutov and his staff to the
   mountains, and had pointed out to them by their captives every
   hiding-place hitherto used by the Greens: with the result that
   for the next two days Malamboutov’s involuntary betrayal of his
   comrades caused the peasantry of the neighbouring villages to
   sit listening to heavy firing in the country where the Reds were
   running down the last remnant of the Greens. Later Malamboutov
   and his staff themselves were shot on the usual plea of
   “espionage,” and the fact posted up (under the repellent heading
   of “This is the class of crime which the soviet power most loves
   to punish”) on every street corner in the neighbouring town. In
   the list were sixty-four names, but it continued to be whispered
   amongst the terrified inhabitants that, though the Che-Ka might
   have succeeded in laying by the heels the persons named on the
   list, these represented no more than a fraction of the Greens
   who had accompanied Malamboutov from the mountains--that, as a
   matter of fact, the remainder of the two bands had discovered
   the treachery in time, and availed themselves of the fact that
   the “amnesty” had allowed them to retain their weapons to fight
   their way back again. And later their side avenged the death of
   Malamboutov with such cruel, such savage, reprisals upon every
   Communist whom they caught as to partake almost of a medieval
   character.

In fact, terrorism remained rampant in the south so long as the Greens
continued their activities there. In Ekaterinodar, on a “mutiny” being
quelled on September 27 and 28, the local _Izvestia_ published a
list of 104 executions which included a bishop, a priest, a professor,
a military officer and a leading Cossack. And at Novorossisk, in the
neighbourhood of which Green activity became especially noticeable,
the Che-Ka attached to the Black Sea flotilla executed both rebels and
hostages by hundreds, in addition to daily shootings in connection
with a “liquidation” of twelve White Guard associations around Kharkov,
and of the “conspiracies” which General Ouktomsky and Colonel Nazarov
organised around Rostov.

Again, when, towards the close of March, the Che-Ka of Piatigorsk
discovered a local “conspiracy,” there followed shootings of fifty of
the “conspiracy’s” leaders[99]; whilst at Anapa sixty-two persons were
shot for attempting to escape from Bolshevism by way of Batoum, even
though (as came out later) they had manifestly been egged-on to the
attempt by _agents-provocateurs_ employed by the local Che-Ka.[100]

The following proclamation which Lautzer, “Special Representative of
the All-Russian Che-Ka for the Northern Caucasus,” addressed to the
populations of the Kuban district and the Black Sea littoral will
illustrate better than anything else the state of things when those
regions were held by the Bolshevists’ Don Army.[101] Said the document:

   (1) Any village or hamlet found to be harbouring persons
   connected with either the White Forces or the Green shall be
   razed to the ground, and its adult inhabitants shot, and its
   property confiscated. (2) Any person found assisting either of
   those Forces shall be shot. (3) Inasmuch as members of the Green
   Forces hiding in the mountains usually leave relatives behind
   them in their villages, such relatives shall be kept under
   observation and, if the forces in question advance any further,
   and the relatives concerned be found to have got any kinsman
   bearing arms against us, be shot, and the families of them
   deported to Central Russia. (4) Should anything in the nature of
   mass opposition display itself in village, settlement, or town,
   we shall, in our turn, be compelled to employ mass terrorism,
   and to execute hundreds of the inhabitants for each soviet
   worker who may be murdered. For the soviet power is determined
   that its heavy, ruthless hand shall sweep away its every foe.

Similarly were all rebellions in the Ukraine quelled, and no difference
at all is discernible between the happenings of 1920 and those of 1921,
save that sometimes the outbreaks came to assume such varying guises
that it is not always easy to distinguish whether a rising was intended
to procure the independence of the Ukraine, or to assist Makhno;
whether it was connected with the Whites, or involved with the Greens;
whether it was a movement of refugee bands, or a movement of purely
peasant origin; whether it was a revolt against the weight of the grain
tax, or an affair altogether apart from “White Guard conspiracies” and
the foregoing factors.[102] The only thing of which we can be certain
is that at least the Bolshevists did not differentiate as regards
these affairs’ _quelling_. For example, a “Special Order No. 69
Relating to the District of Kiev,” issued in 1920, enjoined not only
all necessary employment of mass terrorism, but also infliction of
death upon any person found possessed of a single cartridge after the
expiration of any date for surrender of arms.

Thus Bolshevist terrorism needed but to encounter the smallest
opposition to swell up into a sanguinary massacre. In Proskurovo alone
2000 peasants fell victims, and as soon as ever forces under the
_ataman_ Tiutiunik took the field in the neighbourhood of Kiev
that city too began to see daily shootings of dozens. Below follows a
_résumé_ of an official document which is a copy of the minutes
compiled by the five members of a Che-Ka committee which subsequently
tried Tiutiunik’s beaten following. Issued on November 21, 1921,[103]
the document stated that during the fighting 400 of the enemy had
been killed and 557 taken prisoner, and some of the rebels’ leaders,
on realising the hopelessness of their position, compelled to commit
suicide with bombs and rifles. Then the document added that Tiutiunik
and certain of his staff had been guilty of “conduct unworthy of any
persons in command,” in that they had assured their own escape from
the field before the fighting had well begun. For the rest, the Che-Ka
committee referred to tried 443 persons, of whom it shot 360 on the
ground that they had been “evil and active bandits,” and forwarded the
rest for further examination by “the inquisitional staff.” And later
the Petrograd _Pravda_ announced that “because of the conspiracy
recently discovered in Kiev, a conspiracy directed by the All-Ukrainian
Rebel Committee, 180 officers of Pethera’s and Tiutiunik’s forces have
been placed under arrest.” And, that being so, we can pretty safely
assume that it was not long before a subsequent _communiqué_
announced those arrested officers’ execution.

Later, when a professor of the Kievan Polytechnic named Koval escaped
from Kiev and reached Poland, he reported that yet another “discovery
of a conspiracy of the usual type had led to an intensification of the
Kievan Terror which involved nightly shootings of from ten to fifteen
persons.”

   And when an exhibition in advertisement of the doings of the
   local executive committee was held in the Pedagogic Museum,
   tables of the shootings gave, as a minimum monthly number of
   those shootings, 432.[104]

  [Illustration: Male and female torturers of Eupatoria.

    [_See page 89._]

Particularly large was the number of Petlura “conspiracies” then
discovered. In connection with them sixty-three persons (including
a Colonel Evtikhiev) were shot in Odessa,[105] batches of
fourteen[106] and sixty-six in Tiraspol,[107] thirty-nine in Kiev
(mostly members of the _intelligentsia_),[108] and 215 in
Kharkov--the victims in the latter case being Ukrainian hostages
slaughtered in retaliation for the assassination of certain Soviet
workers and others by rebels.[109] And, similarly, the _Izvestia_
of Zhitomir reported shootings of twenty-nine co-operative employees,
school teachers and agriculturists who could not possibly have had
anything to do with any Petlura “conspiracy” in the world.

Everywhere, too, we read in Bolshevist journals such _communiqués_
as: “Five counter-revolutionary organisations, covering the whole of
Podolia, have been discovered,” “Sixteen persons have been shot at
Chernigov,” and the rest. Hence it is no more than the truth to say
that the mass of such official printings renders individual distinction
between them almost impossible.

Akin to the fate of the Ukraine was the fate of White Russia, where
the year 1921 proved particularly prolific of reports of “rebellions,”
and of accounts of punitive expeditions dispatched to shoot--with
or without trial--all who had participated, or been reported as
participating, in those “rebellions.” “Dozens of persons were shot
daily,” a correspondent of the _Dielo_[110] has stated. “In
particular were many White Russian leaders put to death. At Minsk
a trial of Savinkov supporters has just ended. Seven have been
executed.”[111] Also the English _Daily Mail’s_ correspondent at
Reval wrote: “Here, during September, forty-five persons were shot.”

To the Che-Kas of Podolia and Volhynia there was entrusted the special
duty of “cleansing” the two provinces of all who had displayed
pro-Polish sympathies during the Polish occupation; and this process of
“cleansing” the Che-Kas was effected with the usual mass arrests, the
usual mass deportations to the central provinces, and the usual mass
executions.[112]

Hence there seems to have been always an intimate connection between
“movements of rebellion” and wholesale shootings of Left Social
Revolutionaries, of Anarchists, and even of Tolstoyan Anarchists, the
most pacific of the sections of the Anarchical group--mostly, in the
case of the latter, for refusals to serve in the Bolshevist Red Army;
and an authoritative pamphlet on the subject which has been published
in Berlin says, after citing a large number of instances of the kind:

   We could go on citing instances indefinitely, and so use them
   as to carry conviction that even the most painstaking historian
   of the future could never collate a volume of material which,
   compared with our own volume, would figure otherwise than as a
   drop of water beside all the seas.

To describe the Russian Anarchist movement, or such of its curious
manifestations as more than once led the late Prince Kropotkin to
dissociate himself from its policy, is no part of my purpose; but at
least it may be said that, though the Bolshevists were never averse
to availing themselves of the Anarchists’ assistance whenever such
assistance happened to seem convenient, they, equally, never were
averse to treating Anarchist elements with the utmost brutality
whenever those elements anywhere made good a footing.

The above-mentioned Anarchist pamphlet also reprints an important
telegram which the Central Government dispatched to Rakovsky, then
head of the Ukrainian Council of People’s Deputies, with regard to
preparations for suppressing Anarchist organisations in Southern
Russia. The message, a confidential one, said:

   Let all Anarchists within Ukrainian territory, but more
   especially amongst Makhno’s _entourage_, be placed under
   surveillance forthwith, in order that there may be prepared
   against them any evidence--preferably evidence criminal in
   nature--which may prove useful in the future towards indictment
   of such persons. But also do you keep both this order and that
   evidence secret, and do no more than issue instructions in so
   far as the message, for the present, demands. Only, wherever
   feasible, let Anarchists be arrested and arraigned _at
   once_.

And upon the Crimea followed Siberia[113]: and, upon Siberia, Georgia.
Acting by itself alone, the Trans-Caucasian Che-Ka made thousands
of arrests, and carried out hundreds of shootings. Relating his
impressions of the Bolshevist _régime_ in Tiflis during its
first few days of being, a refugee from Batoum told the _Roul’s_
correspondent in Constantinople that, during that time:

   The town was wholly given up to pillage and rapine.... One
   night a friend of mine saw a huge pile of corpses--300 or so of
   them--lying in the Cathedral Square. All the house walls around
   them were bespattered with blood, and evidently a very large
   number of executions had taken place. In the pile were men and
   women, were old and young, were military and civilian, were
   Georgian and Russian, were rich and poor.

The officials most active in the region were the infamous Peters
already mentioned, the Artabekov who had ravaged the Northern Caucasus,
and the notorious sailor Pankratov--the last-named a man who, after
assisting to quell the Astrakhan rising, and distinguishing himself in
Siberia, had transferred his energies to Baku, where on the island of
Nargen he slaughtered over 100 intellectuals and industrial workers.

Meanwhile, what was happening in the centre of Russia, where civil
war had been over for a long time past, and the immediate results of
such war had faded? There happened what took place everywhere else
during 1921; there hundreds of persons were being shot either for
having participated in some real or invented conspiracy, or for having
vented some hasty protest against the Bolshevist tyranny, or because
(this happened most often of all) their execution was capable of
being presented in the guise of a belated punishment for a real or an
invented criminal offence. Of this latter class a good instance is a
Pskov trial of a group of chemists, merely for having sold alcohol,
with a brutal execution of eight of their number[114]; whilst a trial
of some officials of the State Defence Department in Moscow in October
led to ten or twelve more shootings; and other persons were awarded the
death sentence for alleged abuses in their work at the Commissariats of
Finance and Public Health. Vishniak’s book, _The Black Year_, also
records that, taking the month of June alone, tribunals shot, during
that period, in Moscow 748 persons, Petrograd 216, Kharkov 418, and
Ekaterinodar 315.

  [Illustration: Exhuming Bolshevists’ victims from clay pits
  at Koursk.

    [_See page 92._]

As regards the first three months of 1922, figures of Che-Ka exploits
are to be gained from the _Posledniya Novosty_ of May 5,
which cites an official report for the period, and quotes items of
4300 persons shot, and 114 risings quelled, for the twelve central
provinces, added to mass shootings in Yaroslavl, Saratov, Kazan, and
Koursk, and to a total of 347 shot in Moscow during the month of
January alone. Similarly, the _Golos Rossii_ obtained information
from the statistical branch of the Commissariat of Transport to
the effect that during 1921 the “railway courts” shot, on their own
responsibility, 1759 victims--passengers and employees alike.

Besides, shootings took place from which every human sentiment would
instinctively revolt. An instance is the execution of five lads, out of
twenty-seven put on their trial, at Orel.[115]

In Odessa, also, the dispersal of the All-Russian Committee for
Assistance of the Starving was followed by the shooting of twelve
persons whom the Odessan _Izvestia_ alleged to have been connected
with that organisation. And when six persons succeeded in escaping from
the concentration camp at Ekaterinburg the director of the “Department
of Penal Labour” proceeded to the camp from Moscow, had the ex-officers
confined in the camp paraded before him, selected twenty-five, and shot
them out of hand “as a warning to the rest.”[116]

Again, that autumn sixty-one persons were shot in Petrograd in
connection with the so-called “Tagantsev conspiracy,”[117] whilst a
rising at Kronstadt so alarmed the Bolshevists that they shot sailors
in thousands. Also, according to a statement published in the German
journal, _Frankfurter Zeitung_, the naval garrison of Petrograd
lost 2500 men between February 28 and March 6. And a few of their
number who contrived to escape to Finland reported that the shootings
were carried out on the ice of the frozen river before the Fortress of
SS. Peter and Paul. Oranienbaum’s quota in the same connection, it has
been estimated, was 1400, and included amongst its victims six priests
who somehow had got mixed up with the affair.[118]

Similarly, a Saratov Social Revolutionary and Menshevist conspiracy--to
be more exact, rebellion--which the excessive taxations in kind had
evoked, was followed by local mass arrests and shootings, though, of
course, the official _communiqué_ said that only “twenty-seven”
had been shot; and we do not know the real figure--we know only that
a large number of hostages selected from amongst school teachers,
professional men, and ex-Tsarist officers and officials was seized in
_anticipation_ of a peasant rising, and eventually shot in the
local gaols[119]; and that in connection with that, or with some other,
“conspiracy,” a batch of fifty-eight Social Revolutionaries of the Left
were executed for “banditism”--in reality for participation in the
rising.[120]

Again, a railway workers’ rebellion in Ekaterinoslav had, as a sequel,
a list of “fifty-one” victims, which means, probably, that the true
number was considerably larger. Indeed, we read in Z. U. Arbatov’s
reminiscences, entitled _Ekaterinoslav_, 1917–1920,[121] that
after 200 workmen had been arrested, and fifty sentenced to execution
at once, the rest were, later, and by night, conveyed in two
motor-lorries (the date being June 2) to a spot on the river Dnieper
where, with a machine-gun trained upon them from behind, the whole were
so shot that their bodies fell into the water, to be carried away by
the current, and only a few were left stranded on the margin. And later
more railway employees were sentenced and executed by the All-Ukrainian
Che-Ka at Kharkov. The foregoing details Arbatov had from Bolshevists’
own statements. A minor rising at Kronstadt was suppressed in the same
manner.

At Byisk a “conspiracy” led to 500, or more, arrests and eighteen
shootings; a “conspiracy” (of ex-officers and _koulaki_[122]) in
the Semiriechen district to forty-eight shootings; and a “conspiracy”
at Elizabetgrad to shootings of fifty-five out of eighty-five persons
arrested.

Next, the period arrived when Cossack refugees began to be compulsorily
restored to their homes from overseas. They reached home to find not
an amnesty, but punishment, awaiting them. A Cossack named Chouvillo
who contrived to escape from Yisk after he had been repatriated thither
subsequently informed certain foreign-published Russian journals
that, out of a party of 3500 of his comrades, as many as 894 had been
shot.[123] This statement may have been exaggerated, but at least no
doubt exists that there were frequent shootings of legally or illegally
repatriated Cossack officers; many such cases stand recorded for the
year under review (1921). A correspondent of the Parisian Russian
National Committee has informed us, in an article entitled “The
Return”[124] (an article based upon items which Odessan Bolshevist
journals themselves had published), that as soon as the S.S.
_Reshed Pasha_ reached Novorossisk from Constantinople during the
April of 1921, 30 per cent. of her passenger complement of 2500 were
shot, and that the same had been done after a previous trip of hers
with 1500.

   In our own case the officers and soldiers on board were shot
   at once; whilst of the previous party of 1500, 500 were shot
   at once, and the remainder dispatched to various concentration
   camps of the north, where certain death awaited them.

And even a respite from execution in no way guaranteed security against
execution in the future. This we learn from a letter as recent as the
November or the December of 1923 which was published in No. 16 of the
_Kasachyi Doumy_ (“Cossack Opinion”), and says, amongst other
things, that no one who landed at Novorossisk at the period of which
I am speaking could have failed often to hear the code phrase, “To be
set apart for service in Mogilev.”[125] So much, then, for the system
of deporting the compulsorily repatriated to the interior. Only the
innocence of a credulous foreigner could have made Dr. Nansen believe
that he found social rights still existent in Soviet Russia, or state,
on April 21, 1923, that, “with regard to repatriations of Cossacks
from the Balkan States, the Soviet Government is keeping faith in this
respect, and fulfilling all undertakings given,” seeing that those
undertakings had been defined by two clauses saying:

   (1) That the Soviet Government binds itself herewith to extend
   the amnesties of November 3 and November 10 to all Russian
   refugees repatriated through the good offices of the High
   Commissioner of the League of Nations; and (2) that the Soviet
   Government binds itself herewith to afford Mr. John Garvin
   and other accredited representatives of Dr. Nansen in Russia
   every facility for holding unhindered converse with repatriated
   refugees, to the end that such representatives may verify the
   fact that the Soviet Government is applying the amnesties named
   to all refugees without exception.

And if Dr. Nansen could add to the above statement the words,
“Certainly, two repatriated refugees have been arrested for minor
offences, but already delegates from myself are negotiating with the
Government with regard to these two persons’ fate,” his faith in the
written word of a Bolshevist and his ignorance of Russian realities
must alike have been great! For how could a private person--even a
delegate from the High Commissioner of the League of Nations--control
an independent Soviet Government with regard to that Government’s
refugees, seeing that for such a purpose a State would need to have
been formed within a State, and provided with its own secret service?
Besides, the policy of the Soviet Government is a policy capable
always of postponing its wreakings of revenge, so that persons may
“disappear,” may be sent into exile, or thrown into gaol, long after
they have been granted official guarantees of immunity.

Is any further proof of the existence of such a policy required?
Proof can be discovered at every turn. A good instance is a case
tried before the Military Tribunal of Moscow. During the year 1919
an officer named Chougounov deserted from the Red Army, but returned
to Russia four years later, and was put upon his trial. True, he
expressed “whole-hearted repentance,” and, the locality whence he
had returned being Poland, he had, before returning thence, obtained
from the Russo-Ukrainian Mission in that country a licence to return,
and a recommendation to the All-Russian Executive Committee that he
should be reinvested with civil rights; yet on May 18 he was arrested,
brought before the Military Tribunal of Moscow, and, “in view of his
whole-hearted repentance, and of his voluntary return to Russia, and
of his class origin” (he was a peasant’s son) sentenced only to a term
of--ten years’ “imprisonment in strict isolation”!


                      _The Years 1922 and 1923._

Certain persons, particularly foreign visitors who have scraped
together a superficial acquaintance with Russian life (M. Herriot is
an example of the type), declare that terrorism in Russia is a thing of
the past.

Well, even if we suppose that figures issued by the foreign-published
Russian press were invariably exaggerated (including the figures said
to have been derived from the Bolshevists’ Commissariat for Foreign
Affairs itself, and stating that 2372 persons were shot during the
month of May 1922 alone), the figures, whether exaggerated or not,
are still horrifying as indicating the extent to which political
life in Russia had become extinct, the country come to resemble a
skeleton-strewn field, and all energy to rebel, all will to vent an
open protest, fled from an abject, nerveless, supine population.
Indeed, I should be only too glad to believe that the figures were
exaggerated. Again, according to figures issued by the State Political
Department itself, the O.G.P.U., a continuation of the Che-Ka
organisation, 262 persons were shot during January and February 1922,
and 348 during April, and 164 (including seventeen priests) during the
one night of May 7–8, and 187 (at Kharkov) and 209 in Kharkov Province,
and 200 in Petrograd, during May in general; even if we suppose that
these figures, too, were exaggerated it was at least hypocrisy on
Stallin’s part when he informed the Muscovite branch of the Communist
Party in August of the year named that “we _shall_ have to resort
to terrorism,” and, in defence of the mass arrests of intellectuals
then being carried out, to say:

   Before long our enemies will be forcing us back upon Red
   Terrorism, and compelling us to reply to their activities with
   such measures as were necessitated during the years 1918 and
   1919. So let those enemies remember that we do not fail to keep
   our promises. Already their experiences during the two years
   named should have taught them that much.... It is for those
   who sympathise with our political adversaries to dissuade
   them from going too far, from over-stepping permissible bounds
   of opposition to our policy. For unless they cease from those
   activities, we shall be forced to resume usage of a weapon which
   we should never have used at all if we had not seen our warnings
   disregarded. To our adversaries’ stealthy blows we must oppose
   blows open, stern, directed against every adverse quarter,
   whether actively or passively operative.

For there was no need for such threats: still vivid before the public
memory were executions of churchmen for opposing confiscation of
ecclesiastical property--the most dastardly executions that could
possibly have been conceived, seeing that they were due merely to the
mildest of protests against ecclesiastical spoliation, even as was the
case in July last, when the Revolutionary Tribunal of Petrograd tried
sixteen members of local religious communities, and condemned eleven
of them to death--the condemned including Benjamin, Metropolitan of
Petrograd, himself. And to this, and to the earlier case in Moscow,
when fifty-four ecclesiastics were tried, and twelve of them sent for
execution, there must be added instances in the provinces of Chernigov,
Poltava, Smolensk, Archangelsk, Staraya Roussa, Novocherkassk, and
Vitebsk, where clergy were shot in batches of from one to four on
charges of having protested against despoilment of sacred ornaments.

With these executions for clerical “counter-revolution” went shootings
after purely political trials on charges of having belonged to
non-existent “counter-revolutionary organisations.” And trials of
the sort are still going on: as recently as February 22, 1922, the
_Posledniya Novosty_ published a striking letter concerning
the “liquidations” of some risings in the Ukraine which said: “Such
‘liquidations’ constitute, in reality, a war of extermination whose
object is to finish off any intellectuals who have survived previous
efforts of the sort.” And take the following extract from a letter
written by a refugee from Proskurovo during January of that year. It
says:

   Owing to the almost incredible terrorism which has been rampant
   here (in Proskurovo) during the past few months, people have
   been compelled to escape whilst there was yet time. Such
   intellectuals as remained behind the Bolshevists are already
   arresting.... Koritsky, Chouikov, and my brother have been
   shot. Our Elder committed suicide just before he was led out
   to execution. And his wife is a prisoner in the local gaol....
   Many have been put to death for participating in a “conspiracy.”
   Twenty-three were shot on the 18th last.... As the victims were
   being led out to be slaughtered nine of their companions burst
   through the gaol doors, and escaped. I, too, succeeded in doing
   that when my turn came. This was during the fourth series of
   arrests.... How you may be thankful that you have got clear of
   Proskurovo! At least you have escaped the spectacle of wives
   and mothers and children waiting outside the Che-Ka building
   on execution days!... None of the persons executed had had
   anything to do with political agitation at all. Most of them had
   merely agreed with the “Ukraine Movement.” They fell victims to
   evidence concocted by the Che-Ka itself. In fact, the Che-Ka has
   concocted the whole of this “Proskurovo conspiracy” on the usual
   degraded lines which Che-Kas affect.

And for news of similar terrorist orgies in other quarters of the
Ukraine we need but scan the files of the _Golos Rossii_, or
of the _Posledniya Novosty_, for 1922, when we shall see there
excerpts from the Bolshevist press which tell of repeated executions
of members of Savinkov’s and Pethura’s followings--of 12 members in
Kharkov, of 25 in Odessa, of 55 in Nikolaevsk, of several in Minsk, of
8 in Gomel, of 10 in the Northern Caucasus, of 10 in Pavlograd, of 10
in Semipalatinsk Province (according to some sources, of 5), of 12 in
Simbirsk Province (out of 42 found to be in possession of Antonov’s
proclamations), of 68 in Maikop (amongst them women and young boys--all
shot “to intimidate their fellow-bandits, since with the return of
spring the rebels are losing their sense of fear”), of 13 (from
amongst a group known as the Berdiansk Constitutional-Revolutionary
Association) in Melitopol, and of 13 (students, these) in Kharkov.
Then we must add to these the shooting of the General Staff of the Don
Army--a shooting which became the more known because it included the
shooting also of two Communists; the trial of the Nobel employees;
the trials of repatriated _émigrés_; the execution of Shishkin,
the Social Revolutionary, by the Muscovite Revolutionary Tribunal for
refusing to testify before that court, and dubbing it “a mere organ
of Bolshevist revenge”; the murder of Colonel Peshkourov of Yaroslavl
as a participator in the Savinkov rising of 1918; the execution of 13
officers at Krasnoyarsk; the trial of the Karelian rebels; an execution
of 148 Kievan Cossacks for mutiny; the arrest of 260 sailors after a
naval conspiracy at Odessa; and a batch of executions at Odessa for a
local strike.[126]

From Riga, on August 5, a correspondent of the _Golos_ wrote:

   During the past week both the O.G.P.U. and the revolutionary
   tribunals have been actively engaged in carrying out mass
   arrests and passing death sentences. At Petrograd ten persons
   have been condemned to death by the local revolutionary
   tribunal. In Esthonia a trial has been held of the Esthonian
   Wholesale-Control Committee. At Saratov the local tribunal
   has condemned two social revolutionaries for stirring up a
   peasant rebellion in the Volsk district. And on July 29 the
   tribunal of Voronezh put to death a social revolutionary named
   Sharnov, and on the 28th passed death sentences upon eighteen
   officers previously captured in Northern Caucasia and the
   Trans-Caucasian and Don regions. The tribunal’s sentences were
   carried out in the concentration camp at Archangel, whither the
   officers had been sent at the end of 1920, or early in 1921.
   Amongst the victims were General Mouraviev (aged over seventy),
   Colonel Gandurin, and others.

Then there were cases which seem to have had, not a political, but some
other basis: a shooting of three railwaymen at Kiev; a shooting of
forty persons at Saratov for having looted provisions destined for the
famine-stricken areas; a shooting of six railwaymen at Novocherkassk
for theft; and some wholesale massacres at Tsaritsin, Vladimir,
Petrograd, and elsewhere. Of course, not all of those condemned may
actually have been put to death--indeed, we know that sometimes they
were not; but also we know that journalistic news of death sentences
reached the foreign press only as regards a tithe of those sentences,
and that sometimes the Bolshevist press omitted any details of them at
all. Thus the _Posledniya Novosty_ once quoted from that press:
“Shootings of persons convicted of accepting bribes have been taking
place in large numbers,” and I myself can recall a special “week for
combating bribery” (it was during my last few days in Russia, early
in the October of 1922), and the fact that on the day of my departure
I found the Brest railway station all plastered over with posters
announcing the “week,” and that only subsequently I learnt that the
“week’s” plans had been planned on a scale large enough to include
hundreds, and even thousands, of arrests of railwaymen!

Z. U. Arbatov, who escaped from Russia by way of Minsk, has given us a
vivid sketch of the city’s condition. He writes[127]:

   Affixed with tin-tacks to the wall of a carpenter’s shop we
   saw a list of names headed “Persons of the sort whom the
   Che-Ka punishes.” But just as my eye caught the figure “46” my
   companion dragged me away, and said hurriedly, “Oh, that is
   nothing. We have long been used to it. They put up a new list
   every day, and if one is seen reading it one runs the risk of
   being taken before the Che-Ka. You see, the saying is that no
   one would want to read it who had not got ‘enemies of the Soviet
   Power’ amongst one’s friends, since otherwise it wouldn’t be
   interesting enough. They shoot dozens daily.”

As regards the year 1923, let me first cite a report issued by the
Supreme Revolutionary Tribunal. The report says that between the
January and the March of the year in question the tribunal shot forty
persons, and, during the May of that year, a hundred. Could anything
be more eloquent? And from the Executive Committee of the All-Russian
Che-Ka we have it that during the same period the State Political
Department, the O.G.P.U., executed 826 persons “independently”--that
is to say, illegally, in that only 519 of the 826 had been political
offenders. At the same time it should be stated that later these
findings led to three chiefs of branches of the O.G.P.U., fourteen
“people’s prosecutors,” and certain other officials being dismissed.
Again, from official Soviet publications which I was able to procure
after I had left Russia, and from various correspondents of European
journals, we glean items of the mass and individual executions of
the year in question which enable us to divide the victims into
the usual categories. Hence, first of all come executions for
“counter-revolution.” A good example is the murder of the prelate
Boutkievitz, which so shocked the whole civilised world that the
reader will have no difficulty in remembering it. And then there come
executions for having printed unauthorised political pamphlets. And
then there come cases termed in the official reports “Details,” which
were old affairs raked up after lapses of years--the shooting of a
Savinkov agent named Sverzhevsky for planning to assassinate Lenin;
the shootings of three and six members of the Union for Defence of
Liberty and the Fatherland; the execution of M. F. Zhilinsky, a
Muscovite member of a Savinkov organisation[128]; the shooting of three
officers of the “Olonetz Sharpshooters Division” for having caused
that division to surrender to the British in 1919; the execution of
thirty-three members of a counter-revolutionary organisation active
at Nikolaevsko-Neznamovsk; the shooting of thirteen members of a
Constitutional-Revolutionary organisation at Kiev; the trial of
forty-four persons at Semipalatinsk, twelve of whom were sentenced
to death; the shooting at Perm of two Kolchak officers (Drizdov
and Timotheiev); the shooting at Omsk of Kolchak’s director of
intelligence, Pospielov, an ex-Tsarist Crown Counsel--though previously
he had been granted an “amnesty”; the shooting at Semipalatinsk
of the Kolchak Government’s Chief Justice; the shooting in Moscow
of Pravdin; the execution of Ishmourzin (ex-Commissary for the
Bashkir Republic) for seceding to Kolchak; the trial, in Moscow, of
Piestchikov, Okoulov, and Metkevich, ex-officers of Denikin’s army,
on a charge of “espionage”; the shooting, in Moscow, of Serdinkov,
late Vice-Commandant of Omsk; at Ekaterinoslav, of 28 “rebels”; at
Podolsk, of 26 Petlura men (including a sergeant named Pogoutsky);
in Volhynia, of 64 persons out of 340 condemned--the rest having
their sentences remitted; in the Caucasus, of 9 members of a “rebel”
group operative during 1923; in White Russia (where a correspondent
reported “a great increase of terrorism”), of 10 “rebels”; in Chita,
of a Colonel Ernelich and 6 confederates; in Rostov, of 5 persons; and
everywhere of countless “bandits”--of 15 in Odessa, of 15 and 17 in
Petrograd (including a number of women who had refused to betray their
lovers), of 9 in Moscow, of 6 in Ekaterinoslav, of 5 in Berdichev,
and of 8 in Archangel, whilst in Kharkov also 78 “bandit” trials were
held, and in only a few instances the subsequent death sentences
commuted to imprisonment “because of the accused’s proletarian origin,”
or “in recognition of services rendered to the Revolution and the
Proletariat.” And, finally, we have it from a correspondent of the
_Rousskaya Gazeta_ (“The Russian Gazette”) in Odessa that 16
local “bandits” were sentenced to death for “acts of terrorism against
Communists.” Yet the term “banditism” should be viewed with great
caution. An instance is seen in the fact that the _Izvestia_ once
wrote:

   Last December the case of Soloviev’s White _bandit_
   supporters was brought before the provincial court of Enisey.
   Of the 106 persons arraigned, nine were condemned to death,
   with five who had forged railway tickets, some who had passed
   counterfeit money, and the like.

Also, we must remember the category of persons executed for
“_economic_ counter-revolution.” Instances are the manager of the
Turkhestan Tobacco Company (for “negligence”), four forest wardens
in Tomsk Province, three engineers employed by a concern called the
Union Works, a man employed by the Principal Remount Depot (Topilsky,
an ex-Social Revolutionary), some workers in the employ of the State
Trading and Naval Stores Departments, an engineer named Verkhovsky
and six others in Petrograd, a merchant trader of the Sukharev Market
in Petrograd, four workmen for “sabotage,” and a batch of Communist
traders for “unconscionable speculation in currency.” Also there was
the affair of the Vladimirsky Club, together with executions for
offences similar to the offence then alleged. And during the same
year there occurred several cases of senseless, gratuitous official
revenge for offences committed several years previously. Instances
are the shooting of Lieutenant Stavraky for having helped to quell a
mutiny in the Black Sea Fleet during 1905, the execution of seventy-six
repatriated men of Wrangel’s Army, and the shooting of General Petrenko
after returning home from Prince Island in reliance upon an “amnesty.”
Again, my portfolio contains sundry items relating to offences
connected with official duties--items relating to the shooting, in
Moscow, of eleven employees of the Central Housing Department; to the
trial, at Pskov, of one Porkhov and two other employees of the local
revenue office; to a trial of employees of the Viatka educational
department for acceptance of bribes; to trials of members of local
Che-Kas and revolutionary tribunals for lapses of official duty (a
perfect wave of “official duty” trials seems to have swept over
Russia); to the trial of a member of the Archangel revolutionary
tribunal; and to a trial of the head of the Doubosarsky (Tsaritsin)
criminal investigation department--the two last for having tortured
victims before shooting them.

And what of the many executions of the year which were never reported
at all? That such executions took place I am certain. For example, no
journal ever reported the shooting of nineteen Savinkov supporters
during the May of 1923, though I possess well-founded information that
it took place, and that, of the nineteen then executed, thirteen had
had no connection whatsoever with the offence alleged against them.
And it was only when Sinovary was giving evidence before the tribunal
at Lausanne that the world first learnt that P. I. Smirnov had been
arrested during the previous April in connection with the Savinkov
affair, and shot in Petrograd during the following January.

And what of Georgia, now supposed to have become a Communist State?
The same as everywhere else: the usual quellings of the usual risings.
In this connection we learn best of local conditions from certain
Bolshevist press accounts of the rebellion and the suppression of 1922.
Those accounts include an order to the inhabitants which, though by no
means new in its contents, is at least instructive.

   All inhabitants (the Order said) must report to the authorities
   and representatives of the Red Army both the Christian and the
   family names of any bandit who is known to them, and of any
   person who is harbouring such a bandit, with the whereabouts of
   any person soever who is hostile to the Soviet Power.

These Georgian risings were succeeded by Georgian “conspiracies”: and
journals of the day contain resultant lists of names of from fifteen to
ninety-one persons shot, with the executed described, in every case,
as former princes or aristocrats or generals who had turned “bandit,”
whereas, as a matter of fact, the overwhelming majority of them had
belonged to the plain Socialist or Democrat _intelligentsii_
where they had not been merely rural schoolmasters, or co-operative
employees, or industrial workers, or peasants, and the like,[1]
or known to all just as members of the Georgian Social Democratic
Party.[129]

On July 5, 1923, the Central Committee of the Party just named
published an address to the Central Committee of the local Communist
Party and the local Soviet of People’s Commissaries. The address said:

   Since November and December last large numbers of Socialist
   working people and peasants have been perishing at your
   executioners’ hands, and thousands of others finding themselves
   forced to flee for refuge to the wilds, lest they find
   themselves expelled from Georgia, or thrown into prison. And
   even this, it would appear, has not sufficed you, for you are
   torturing incarcerated comrades in your dungeons, and causing
   them such moral and physical suffering as in not a few cases has
   deprived them of reason, and, in others, crippled them for life
   where it has not killed them outright. From 700 to 800 persons
   are lying in your Che-Ka dungeons, or in the Metekhsky Fortress,
   at this moment.[130]


                            _The Year 1924_

This year, too, must be begun with similar items--with, first of all,
the case of the “spy” Dziubenko, an ex-lieutenant-colonel of Kolchak’s
army who, brought before the military division of the Supreme Court
in Moscow, was sentenced to death and sequestration of his property.
Subsequently the _Izvestia_ reported: “Dziubenko had his sentence
carried out within the legal period.”[131] Then there is the case of
the “spy” Khrousevich, an ex-instructor attached to the Kronstadt
Artillery School, upon whom the same tribunal similarly passed sentence
of death.[132] And from a correspondent of the _Dni_ we learn
of a shooting of some workmen merely for having gone on strike,[133]
and of a session of the Verkhne-Tagilsky “district circuit section of
the provincial court” at which five unemployed and another man were
sentenced to death for having, during January, “promoted disturbances
in factories, and cessations from industrial work.” All these
sentences were duly carried out, and from a pamphlet published by the
Georgian Labour Group in February we learn that in Baku, for the same
offence, eight Russian and three Georgian workmen were executed by the
Transcaucasian branch of the O.G.P.U.--the pamphlet citing as authority
for its statement a letter sent to the _Dni_ by a Muscovite
correspondent.[134]

Hence during this year we find ourselves in the presence of the usual
orgy of death sentences. In particular, the O.G.P.U. staged a great
political trial in Kiev, the pretext for which was an allegation that
the O.G.P.U. had discovered in Kiev a great counter-revolutionary
organisation styled “The Kievan Centre of Action.”

   The present shootings are endless [wrote a refugee to the
   _Novoyé Vremya_ (“The New Times”)], with, as the only
   difference, the fact that things now are done more circumspectly
   than formerly was the case. For example, an inhabitant of
   Tambov will be sent to be executed in Saratov, and a Saratovian
   elsewhere, and so forth, so that all tracks may be covered up,
   and, on a given person disappearing, no one may be able to find
   him again.[135]

I can vouch that the statement embodies a fact.

       *       *       *       *       *

Attempts have been made to determine totals. But what use is that,
seeing that probably the black pall under which the sanguinary events
of latter-day Russian life have lain concealed these five years past
will never be lifted, and that to the end history will have to stand
vainly outside the locked doors which admit to the Red Statistical
Chamber? In the White Sea, it is said, fishermen’s nets still keep
dragging up corpses of Solovetski monks, lashed wrist to wrist with
barbed wire.[136]

However, once a correspondent of the _Roul_, a writer named Egeny
Komnin, did essay to compile a table of totals,[137] and below I will
give the conclusions of his attempt accurately to estimate them.

   By the winter of 1920 [he wrote] the number of provinces
   included within the R.S.F.S.R. was fifty-two, and they had
   fifty-two Che-Kas, and fifty-two special branches, and fifty-two
   provincial revolutionary tribunals. And then there existed all
   the swarm of regional-transport Che-Kas, railway tribunals,
   tribunals of “internal defence” (the “Internal Service Force”),
   and circuit sessional courts--these last being commissions
   periodically sent from the centre to supervise local mass
   shootings. And there were the special branches and special
   tribunals attached to the several armies (which, again, numbered
   sixteen), and the special branches and tribunals attached to
   the several divisions of those armies. Hence, in all, we may
   assume that there existed fully a thousand torture chambers--or,
   if we take into account also the activities of the district
   Che-Kas at that period, more than a thousand; considerably
   more. And later, as the R.S.F.S.R. still further increased the
   number of its provinces (Siberia and the Crimea and the Far East
   becoming overrun), that increase must have been accompanied
   by an increase in the number of the torture chambers. Whence,
   taking the Bolshevists’ own totals for 1920 (though during
   that year no real decrease of terrorism set in--merely it was
   that acts perpetrated by terrorism began to be reported less
   frequently), we can fix upon a certain definite figure for the
   daily average of killing per torture centre, and see thence that
   the curve of shootings rose from one to fifty as regards the
   larger centres, and from one to one hundred as regards regions
   in recent occupation by the Red Army. And since terroristic
   outbursts always were periodical in their outbreaking and their
   decreasing, a modest estimate of the average will work out
   at five persons _per diem_ per torture centre, or, if
   multiplied by 1000 (the total number of torture centres), at
   5000 persons _per diem_, or 2,500,000 _per annum_ for
   the country as a whole. And to think that for six years past, or
   more, this Medusa’s Head has been waving over the ashes of our
   fatherland!

Che-Kas are said also to have appointed special officials, “corpse
numberers,” for the purpose of keeping tally of the dead. The fact,
surely, speaks for itself?[138]




                              CHAPTER IV

                             THE CIVIL WAR

   The truth was dragged from them by torture under their
   finger-nails; explosives were rammed down their throats;
   they had the flesh of their shoulders cut into the form of
   shoulder-straps and stripes; they were converted into unicorned
   devils.... To think of the lies that must have been employed,
   during those years of damnation, to drive mad, and to slaughter,
   a whole army, a whole realm, a whole people!--MAXIMILIAN
   VOLOSHIN.


In its general report on Bolshevist activities during the years 1918
and 1919 the Denikin Commission has stated that the number of victims
during the two years totalled 1,700,000; and, seeing that the materials
collected by that Commission have not yet been fully, or anything like
fully, examined, and I myself have confined my figures exclusively to
deaths resultant from “legal” or “administrative” action, to deaths
following upon sentence passed directly by a revolutionary authority,
there can be little doubt that the actual total of the Terror’s victims
has been incomparably larger. This the reader will have seen for
himself when I touched upon the quellings of rebellions. The peculiar
difficulty lies in distinguishing between excesses born of civil
war, or revolutionary “restorations of order” of the kind carried
out by such forces as the detachments of brutish sailors and female
“punitives” whom the ex-gaol bird Maroussia led to Essentouky during
the March of 1918, and wreakings of Red Terrorism on a preconceived
plan. For upon the heels of an advancing Bolshevist force there never
failed to follow a wreaking of vengeance equally upon a defenceless foe
and upon an innocent civilian population, and a formation of a military
Che-Ka, since the name of an agency of massacre does not matter where
massacre is concerned.

I should have been glad to spare the reader’s feelings in this regard.
Yet, for all that, I must bring to his notice a few instances of what
I mean, even if in such instances I am not presenting absolutely the
worst examples of the animal and human fury which they illustrate.

I will begin with “Case No. 40,” taken from the Denikin materials--the
report of an inquiry held into Bolshevist activity in Taganrog between
January 20 and April 17, 1918. Says the report:

   On the night of January 18 the Bolshevists of Sivers’ Army
   entered, and set to work in the town of Taganrog. And on the
   20th the cadets of the Military School concluded with them an
   armistice--they surrendered on condition that they should be
   allowed to leave the town without hindrance. But the Bolshevists
   did not observe the agreement. On the contrary, they began,
   that very same day, an exceptionally cruel series of executions
   by seizing both officers and cadets and all others who had
   in any capacity acted against them, and either shooting them
   in the street as soon as captured, or sending them to one or
   another of the factories to be shot. Also, for several days
   and nights they carried out house-to-house searches in every
   quarter of the town, that they might thoroughly round up the
   “counter-revolutionaries,” and showed no consideration even
   for the wounded and sick, but penetrated into the hospitals,
   dragged thence all wounded officers or cadets whom they found
   there, and shot them forthwith in the street. Nor did the
   mere deaths of these men satisfy the Bolshevist assailants.
   The latter also made sport both of the dying and of the dead.
   Particularly brutal was the murder of the Adjutant of the
   Military School, a staff-captain who had been seriously wounded.
   For some of the pro-Bolshevist nurses of the hospital took
   the wounded officer by the arms and legs and dashed him to and
   fro against a wall until he was dead. But in most cases such
   “counter-revolutionaries” were removed to a metal or a tanning
   factory for execution--most of all to the Baltic Works, where
   they were killed in fashions so bestial as to lead even some
   of the pro-Bolshevist factory hands to stand appalled at the
   deeds, and to voice protests against them. For example, in a
   metal factory some Red Guards bound the arms and legs of a
   batch of fifty cadets so as to bend the victims’ bodies double,
   and threw them, bound, into the flames of the blast furnaces.
   And later the victims’ remains were found on the refuse heaps
   outside--fused with the slag. In addition, mass shootings and
   executions by other means took place in the factory compounds.
   Some of the corpses subsequently found there were too disfigured
   even to be identifiable. And there they lay (the relatives being
   forbidden to remove them) until, in some cases, dogs and swine
   dragged them away into the open country, and devoured them.
   Only when the Bolshevists had been expelled from the Taganrog
   district were police able to exhume some of the corpses, and
   have them examined, and reported upon, by medical experts.
   Subsequently an assistant in the task of exhumation deposed
   before us that beyond a doubt some of these victims of the
   Bolshevist Terror had been subjected to agonising tortures
   before final dispatch. And so remarkable was the uncalled-for
   cruelty with which some of those unfortunates must have been
   slaughtered as to afford a vivid illustration of the lengths to
   which class hatred and human brutality will run. For on some of
   the corpses were not only wounds of the kind which rifle fire
   ordinarily causes, but also wholesale cuts and stab wounds,
   obviously inflicted before death. And sometimes the number
   of such wounds was so large as to show that the victim had
   literally been _hacked_ to death, whilst in other cases the
   head lay shattered, and in others the head had been transformed
   into an almost shapeless mass in which the last trace of the
   facial contours lay lost. Lastly, there were corpses whence the
   limbs and ears had been cut off, and yet others which still
   had surgical dressings upon them--clear proof that it was from
   hospitals and infirmaries that the victims had been dragged to
   their deaths.

Descriptions of Bolshevist advances and massacres during the March
and the April of 1918 are similar. In the Kuban district not a single
_stanitza_ (Cossack village) occupied by the Bolshevists’ Don
Army failed to pay a full toll of victims. This was particularly the
case with the _stanitza_ of Ladishen, where seventy-four officers
and three women were hacked to pieces. And in Ekaterinodar, again,
wounded men were chopped to fragments with hatchets, and others had
their eyes gouged out. And even as brutally were forty-three officers
slaughtered at Novocherkassk. Naturally, such massacres provoked
rebellions; and of course there followed upon the rebellions reprisals.
In his book, _Notes on the Russian Turmoil_ (Vol. III, p. 153),
Denikin remarks: “The history of these Cossack risings is as tragic as
it is uniform.” To give an example: in some villages in the district
of Labin, which rebelled in June, 770 of the inhabitants were executed
by the Bolshevists over and above those who had fallen in the actual
fighting. Scores of such appalling and inhuman massacres could be cited.

And similar scenes were witnessed in Sebastopol, Yalta, Aloushta,
Simferopol, Theodosia, and other towns of the Crimea. In “Case No. 56”
we find related the story of the so-called “Saint Bartholomew’s Eve”
which was perpetrated in Eupatoria on January 14, when, on the Red Army
reaching the town, there began such mass arrestings of officers and the
well-to-do and all who were reputed to be “counter-revolutionaries”
that within three or four days over 800 persons were lying in
Bolshevist places of confinement. And some of the executions there we
find described as follows:

   The condemned were led forth on to the upper deck (the scene
   was aboard of the S.S. _Roumania_, an auxiliary
   cruiser), and made sport of, and then shot and flung into the
   water. Also, a few were thrown into the water alive, with
   their arms tied at the elbows and the wrists, and twisted
   backward, or else with their legs tied, or else with their heads
   wrenched backward with cords, and tied to their arms and legs,
   or else with gun-wheels lashed to the legs.... And on another
   day forty-six of the captured officers were lined up beside
   the bulwarks of the transport _Truvor_, and, after they
   had had their arms bound, kicked, one by one, into the sea by
   a sailor, so that all were drowned. And these slaughterings
   the relatives and wives and children of the slaughtered had
   to witness as they stood weeping ashore, and beseeching mercy
   for their kinsmen. As for the sailors, they only laughed. The
   most terrible incident of all was the death of Staff-Captain
   Novatsky, the officer accused by the sailors of having led the
   Eupatoria rising. Though already he was seriously wounded,
   the Bolshevists restored him to consciousness, and flung him
   into the cruiser’s furnace. And many other executions took
   place on board the _Truvor_. Before each such execution
   on that vessel (the details had been arranged beforehand by
   the local “trial commission”) sailors were dispatched to the
   open hatchway to call aloud the name of the next victim; and
   upon that the man summoned was surrounded with an escort, and
   marched through other armed Red Guards to the precise spot of
   execution, where armed sailors took him over, removed from him
   all his garments, fettered his arms and legs, laid him flat upon
   the deck of the ship, cut off his ears, nose, lips, generative
   organ, and (though this last only in certain cases) arms, and,
   finally, threw him into the sea: after which they washed down
   the deck to remove the traces, and turned to the next item in
   their filthy work. All the night was taken up with that work,
   for each execution occupied from fifteen to twenty minutes.
   And whenever the victims’ terrible cries and moans threatened
   to become audible to the remaining prisoners in the hold, the
   cries were drowned by starting the vessel’s engines, and so
   leading the prisoners to think that the vessel was leaving the
   harbour. In all, during those three days January 15, 16, and 17,
   the transport _Truvor_ and the cruiser _Roumania_ saw
   drowned, or otherwise done to death, no fewer than 300 officers.
   And later a Bolshevist sailor named Koulikov stated to a meeting
   of his comrades that he had thrown sixty victims into the sea
   with his own hand.

   Again, when some thirty or forty persons disappeared from the
   town during the night of March 1, it was found later that they
   had been taken to a spot on the seashore five versts away,
   and there shot with explosive bullets. Moreover, it was found
   that, before being shot, they must have been lined up before
   a huge open grave, and then stabbed with bayonets and slashed
   at with swords. Also, it came out that in many cases a man
   had not been killed outright when he was shot, but had merely
   fallen wounded and unconscious, and, in that condition, been
   buried with the rest; and that once when the executioners had
   been dragging a fallen man to the graveside by his legs he had
   suddenly recovered consciousness, regained his feet, and run
   for his life--whereupon, before he had covered more than twenty
   _sazheni_, a second bullet had laid him low.

Again we find written in Krishevsky’s reminiscences:

   When Bolshevist rule was established in the Crimea it was
   established in the most bloodthirsty, cruel, and ruffianly
   forms possible, as a rule based solely upon crude, tyrannical
   local authority. And whole rivers of blood began to flow in the
   towns, and Bolshevist sailors to rage everywhere, and robberies
   to occur, until there had become formed a general, permanent
   atmosphere of plunder and pillage of the citizens.

And to this Krishevsky adds a description of shootings of eighty
officers in Yalta, of sixty in Theodosia, of 100 (with sixty ordinary
citizens) in the prison yard at Simferopol, and so forth. Then he
continues:

   During the same February Sebastopol saw a second massacre of
   officers, but this time a massacre so well organised that the
   victims were slaughtered according to a regular schedule. And
   not only were naval officers killed on this occasion, but also
   _all_ officers, and likewise many prominent citizens. So
   that, in all, the victims totalled something like 800 persons.

We know, too, that these victims were done to death in the foulest
fashion, after first having had their eyes burnt out. And the
Tartar population of the Crimea similarly perished in hundreds, for
the Bolshevists knew that that population had no liking for the
Bolshevist _régime_. “To establish the number of victims with any
precision is impossible”--thus ran the Denikin Commission’s report
with regard to the Bolshevists’ doings in Stavropol between January
1 and June 18, 1918. “As a matter of fact, people were shot with no
previous examination or trial, but solely on the strength of verbal
orders issued by town commandants, or by leaders of the Red Guard
detachments.” Further confirmation of which is to be found in certain
reminiscences written by B. M. Krasnov, ex-procurator of the district
on behalf of the Provisional Government, and published by J. V. Hessen
in _Archives of the Revolution_: in which reminiscences we read
of precisely similar deeds, and also of outrages committed upon Kalmik
women and children, and of cuttings off of victims’ ears, and of
wholesale rapings and torturings of the pupils of a high school for
girls.[139]

The materials collected by the Denikin Commission portray also things
done in Kharkov and Poltava and other towns of the region. Here, again,
we find ourselves confronted with every sort of outrage, and read
of “corpses with hands chopped off,” “bones broken in half,” “heads
wrenched from the trunk,” “jawbones shattered,” or “generative organs
missing.” For every common grave yielded dozens of such bodies, and
there was included amongst them that of the seventy-five year old
Archbishop Rodion, who had been scalped before death.

And whenever advances or retreats of the Bolshevists during the civil
war brought them to a place for the second time they took care that
that second visit of theirs was even more terrible than the first, and
marked by orgies no longer unpremeditated and elemental, but organised
and systematised into a regular wreaking of brutish revenge. For
example, let us take a description of the sanguinary scenes witnessed
in Armavir when, in 1918, the Kuban Terror was drawing to its close. A
significant feature is the fact that in this case revenge ceased to be
directed exclusively against Russians, for the Denikin Commission has
reported:

   Earlier, in July, when General Borovsky’s division had entered
   Armavir, the Armenian population of the place had welcomed
   the General’s troops with bread and salt, and borne the whole
   expense of burial of the officers who had fallen during the
   advance; but now, when strategical considerations compelled
   General Borovsky to leave the town, and the Bolshevists
   returned, mass executions at once became the rule. The first to
   be hacked to death were 400 Armenian refugees from Persia who
   had pitched for themselves a camp beside the railway line. And
   their women and children were slaughtered with the men. And,
   that done, the executioners turned their attention to the town
   itself. Over 500 peaceable citizens were either bayoneted or
   sabred or shot in the town’s buildings, streets, and squares;
   whilst Ibn Bok, the Persian Consul, also was hacked to death,
   and, the Bolshevists having by this time forced their way into
   the courtyard of the Consulate, 310 Persian subjects who had
   fled thither for refuge and protection were massacred with
   machine-gun fire.

Also, the remarkable book _Seventy-four Days of Bolshevist Rule_,
written by A. Lokerman, and published in Rostov during 1918, gives us
a description of like events in Rostov, and, referring to the local
mass shootings in general, and to the massacres of hospital patients in
particular, says:

   After being divested of their clothing at Sivers’ headquarters
   (save that a few were allowed to retain their trousers and
   boots, and a few even their shirts as well, since those
   garments could, of course, be removed after execution), the
   prisoners, men naked and barefooted, were, in this twentieth
   century, marched along a snow-covered street to the churchyard,
   and shot. And though most of them died praying and crossing
   themselves, it need hardly be said that such concessions to
   “_bourgeois_ prejudice” as a blindfolding of the prisoners,
   or a permitting of a priest to be present, were ignored.

Moreover, boys of fourteen and sixteen, including high school lads and
students of the local training college, were shot for having enlisted
in the Volunteer Army: Sivers’ headquarters had peremptorily ordered
the killing of every ex-member of that Army, regardless of whether or
not the victim had taken any real part in the Army’s activities, or of
his age. Again, persons who set foot outside a dwelling after eight
o’clock at night were shot--shot without delay; the patrol catching
them in the deed at once carried them off to the nearest secluded spot,
and made an end of the business. Another feature of the affair was that
shootings were carried out against the walls of the local hippodrome,
where everyone could view the spectacle, or against a railway
embankment--and in both cases in broad daylight. And not infrequently
the corpses were subsequently mutilated to the point of becoming
unrecognisable. And of course the executions were accompanied with such
catch cries as “Death to the _bourgeoisie_!” and “Death to the
capitalists!” even though obviously the vast majority of the victims
had had no sort of connection either with capitalists or capital,
but were secondary school students, and _alumni_ of the local
university, and representatives of the professions. Of course, also,
the latter circumstance might make the affair seem, at first sight,
to have been a massacre of intellectuals alone; but as a matter of
fact the slaughtered were drawn from every class, but, above all, from
the peasantry. In 1918, before their withdrawal from the district,
the Bolshevists capped these revolting atrocities with a retreat as
merciless in its progress as the advance had been; so that when, for
example, they abandoned Sarapol, and found the task of evacuating
the prisoners from the local gaol to be one of some difficulty, they
effected a speedy clearance by at once shooting the whole of the gaol’s
inmates.[140] Mr. Alston confirmed this by writing to Lord Curzon (on
February 11, 1919): “One of the Bolshevist leaders stated publicly
that, if the Bolshevists should be obliged to leave the town, they
would first massacre a thousand of the local inhabitants.”[141]

The same British White Book has given us some interesting information
concerning certain features of the civil war in North-Eastern Russia in
1918 and 1919. Sir Charles Eliot then wrote to Lord Curzon:

   Usually victims were shot, but also they were either drowned or
   sabred. As regards Perm and Kungur, victims were massacred at
   the rate of thirty or forty or sixty at a time; whilst in many
   cases these massacres were preceded with torturings and other
   outrageous acts. For example, at Omsk some labourers were first
   flogged and beaten with butt-ends of rifles and pieces of iron,
   to make them give evidence; and often enough such victims have
   had to dig their own graves before death, or to stand with their
   faces to a wall whilst their executioners fired shots round and
   about their ears, and only after a considerable time fired to
   kill. I have been told this by persons actually respited from
   such massacres.[142]

General Knox wrote to the British War Office:

   At Blagoveschensk we found officers and men of Torbolov’s
   detachment who had had gramophone needles thrust under their
   finger-nails, and their eyes gouged out, and iron nail-marks
   on the flesh where the shoulder-straps had been, so that the
   bodies, frozen as stiff as statues, made a spectacle truly
   hideous to look upon!... Removed to Blagoveschensk, the victims
   had nevertheless been slaughtered at Metzanovaya.[143]

Below follows a report sent to Lord (then Mr.) Balfour by Mr. Alston
on January 18, 1919, on the basis of statements made by the then Czech
Chargé-d’Affaires, and with, for subject, certain remarkable events at
Kiev.

   Even the ferocious behaviour of the Turks in Armenia pales
   before what the Bolshevists are doing in Russia.... During
   the July fighting in the Usuri district a Dr. T---- found
   bodies of Czech soldiers mutilated to the frightful extent of
   having had generative organs cut off, heads cleft open, faces
   slashed, eyes gouged out, or tongues extracted. Moreover, it has
   been stated by Dr. Girsa, the Czech National Council’s local
   representative, and by his assistant, that a year ago when the
   Bolshevists captured Kiev and shot several hundred officers,
   these officers were haled from their quarters, and, in spite
   of the terrible coldness of the weather, stripped to the skin
   except for their caps, bundled into carts and motor-lorries, and
   forced to stand naked for hours in the piercing frost, until
   their Bolshevist executioners should receive word to shoot them
   either individually or in groups as best suited an individual
   executioner’s fancy. Dr. Girsa then was surgeon in Civilian
   Hospital No. 12, and, from the first, owing to the ruthless way
   in which the Bolshevists attacked all officers and members of
   the educated classes, this hospital became terribly overcrowded
   with wounded men. And these had to be hidden in closets lest the
   Bolshevists should drag them out into the street, and shoot them
   out of hand. Even as it was, many of them were dragged out, and
   massacred without mercy--officers in some cases suffering from
   abdominal wounds or broken limbs or other such injuries. Also,
   Dr. Girsa has told us that later people saw bodies of officers
   being eaten by dogs where they lay, and that his assistant’s
   wife beheld a whole car-load of frozen bodies being driven to
   a dumping-place outside the town. Everywhere people were taken
   from their homes in the middle of the night, and hospital
   beds emptied, and patients in a gravely serious condition
   slaughtered, and men shot without trial.[144]

In the same fashion Mr. Alston wrote to Mr. Balfour on January 14, 1919:

   The number of brutally murdered, but innocent, civilians in
   this town has run to hundreds, whilst officers who have been
   taken prisoner by the Bolshevists have had their shoulder straps
   nailed to their shoulders, and young girls been raped, and
   civilian bodies found with the eyes scooped out and the noses
   missing. At Perm twenty-five priests have been shot. Also,
   Bishop Andronik has been buried alive. I have been promised the
   totals of killed and other details later.

Hence, no matter whence it comes, or to what locality it relates, our
information shows a uniform monotony of horror. Esthonia, Latvia,
Azerbaijan--none were an exception to the rule. And German State Papers
have said the same of Valk, Dorpat, Wesenburg, and elsewhere in that
region; and the same with the British White Book--uniformly one reads,
in these publications, of hundreds of persons with eyes gouged out,
and the like. Also, the author of some reminiscences dealing with the
rebellion in Transcaucasia has stated that, during an insurrection in
Elizabetpol in 1920, 40,000 Mohammedans perished at the Bolshevists’
hands.[145]

Only by noting facts of the sort can we grasp the full extent of the
phenomenon known to us as “The Red Terror,” for they appeared wherever
civil war broke out. And the deeds which those facts represent were
not deeds done in the heat of conflict, in the moment when the animal
passions of humanity are most easily aroused, nor yet deeds which
can be put aside with the comment either that they were “excesses of
warfare,” or that they were perpetrated only by Chinese executioners,
or by the “International Contingents” which became exceptionally
notorious for their cruelty, and led Vershimir to make the typical
comment that the “International Battalion” of Kharkov “committed
atrocities exceeding even what we know as horrible.”[146] No; so far
from the Bolshevists’ excesses being deeds born of a momentary impulse,
they were deeds born of a regular system of cruelty, of a settled
policy of preconceived intent. And a proof of this is that, shortly
before the date of the attempt upon Lenin’s life, Latzis evolved, and
published in the _Izvestia_ (he did so on August 23, 1918), “new
regulations for civil war” which were to replace the old code evolved
of custom and of convention, and, in particular, to do away with the
rule about shooting prisoners of war. This rule Latzis considered to be
especially “ridiculous.” “In a civil conflict,” he wrote, “we should
take for our one law the maxim that all persons bearing arms against
us must be slain, even if already wounded.” And the Bolshevists did
not merely unchain the elemental passions: they also, for guiding
those passions into the channels which they desired, evolved a regular
propaganda system--an example of this being that they caused the doings
in the Kuban district of March 1918 to be accompanied everywhere with
the slogan of “Long live the Red Terror!” afterwards that slogan was
adopted in due form by the Piatigorsk branch of the Communist Party.

From a Bolshevist who took part in the civil war in Southern Russia we
have the following description of an amazing scene:

   One day I found some Bolshevist Cossacks shooting officers
   against a haystack. Truly I was pleased at this, for it showed
   me that we had no aimless sport here, but civil war of the
   right kind. So, riding up to the men, I saluted them. And they,
   recognising me, cheered, and one of their number said: “So long
   as we have Red officers like yourself we shall not want also for
   White officers. Here are a few of them now being finished off.”
   And I replied to this: “Quite right, my friends! Continue the
   good work in constant remembrance that only by leaving not a
   single White officer alive shall we attain freedom.”[147]




                               CHAPTER V

                           “CLASS TERRORISM”

   Proletarians, never let it escape you that cruelty is a remnant
   of slavery, and a testimony to the brutality which still lurks
   in us all.--JAURÈS.


So far the data concerning risings which I have extracted from the
British White Book deal exclusively with the suppression of peasant
outbreaks--outbreaks of the kind which never failed to occur where the
Bolshevists had been in occupation; but also I have at my disposal data
dealing with the suppression of risings of industrial workers in the
towns. On March 5, 1919, Sir C. Eliot wrote to Lord Curzon:

   Industrial workers who oppose the Bolshevists are treated
   precisely similarly to peasants who do so. Last December a
   hundred labourers belonging to Motovilyky, near Perm, were shot
   merely for having protested against the Bolshevists’ doings in
   the locality.[148]

Nor do English reports alone furnish an endless succession of such
facts! Similar reports appear both in the ordinary Russian press and
in the Bolshevists’ official sheets (for at that period it was still
possible for a private Russian journal to describe the outbreaks which
Bolshevist tyranny in general, and seizures of food stuffs in payment
of the grain tax in particular, periodically evoked amongst the rural
classes). And always suppression of these risings was accompanied
with bloodshed: even the history of Russia, rich as it is in peasant
outbreaks, cannot show any suppressions of popular outbreaks comparable
with those perpetrated by the Bolshevists--no, not even the serfdom
period.

Of course, one reason of this is that modern improvements in mechanical
equipment, and the invention of tanks and machine-guns and poison gas,
enabled greater resources to be brought to bear against the rebels than
had ever before been the case.

During 1918 and 1919 I collected abundant material on this particular
subject; and though I lost it all again during the house-to-house
searches which subsequently became the rule in Moscow, as in every
other city of Russia, I can at least cite an interesting document
which gives a summary of events in Tambov Province just before the
Antonov rising--before the rising which, once started, spread like
wildfire, and was, primarily, a retort to the anti-peasant policy known
as “class terrorism.” Of date the end of 1919, and with, for subject,
the suppression of the Tambov “disorders” of the recent November, the
document represents a memorandum presented to the Council of People’s
Commissaries by a local group of Social Revolutionaries. The late
ebullitions of popular wrath in the Tambov region had been due to
many causes, including mobilisation, power to requisition stock, and
compulsory registration of Church property; and, having started in one
_volost_, or minor district, the unrest speedily spread until it
had involved the province as a whole.

   The Soviet Power (the local Social Revolutionaries’ memorandum
   stated) has sent thither punitive expedition after punitive
   expedition, and we venture now to submit to the Council a
   brief exposition of bloodthirsty doings which throw into the
   shade even those once perpetrated in the same region by the
   _oprichnik_[149] Louzhenovsky. For every _volost_ in
   the Spassk district whither a punitive expedition was dispatched
   has seen peasants flogged as abominably as indiscriminately, and
   many of them shot. Also, ten peasants and a priest have been
   publicly executed in the square of the town of Spassk, whilst
   the inhabitants of the villages whence the victims came had to
   attend the spectacle, and then supply transport for the bodies’
   removal. Also, thirty men have been shot behind the prison of
   Spassk after first being compelled to dig their own graves.
   In the Kirsanov district their frenzy of cruelty has led the
   “forces of pacification” even to keep victims locked up in a
   shed for days with a hungry boar, until some of those subjected
   to the torture of fear became bereft of reason. And the head of
   the Nashtchokin Committee in Aid of the Destitute presumed to
   perpetrate unauthorised executions long after the last punitive
   expedition had left the neighbourhood; and in the Morshansk
   district hundreds have been shot with shell fire, and thousands
   wounded, and villages almost destroyed with the same, and the
   peasants’ property looted by Red Guards and civilian Communists,
   and their stocks of meal and grain taken away. But the fate of
   the Michaevsk peasants has been worst of all. For in Michaevsk
   every tenth hut has been burnt to the ground, and the men,
   women, and children all driven into the woods. And at Perkino,
   though the villagers took no active part in the rebellion, but
   only elected an independent soviet of their own, a detachment
   from Tambov has come and put all that soviet’s members to death.
   And when fifteen peasants of Ostrov were brought to the prison
   at Morshansk they were seen first to have been horribly injured,
   whilst at this very moment there is lying in that prison a woman
   who has had all the hair plucked from her head. And dozens of
   cases of rape have taken place in Morshansk, and eight peasants,
   after being grossly maltreated by Red Guards, have been buried
   alive. And as regards the Bolshevist officials who have most
   distinguished themselves in this region, they are Tsufirin,
   the leader of the punitive expedition, a Communist named
   Parfenoy whom the Tsarist Government brought back from exile
   in answer to a petition, and Sokolov, an ex-sergeant-major.
   In short, in this district of Tambov whole villages have been
   destroyed--some of them by incendiary firing, and some by
   shell firing--and many inhabitants executed. And Bondary has
   had its local clergy shot for having held a service after the
   Bolshevists had deposed the local soviet.[150]... The extent
   to which the Bolshevists have shown tact and decency in their
   suppressions of the risings is best illustrated by the fact
   that they commissioned a sixteen-year-old youth named Lebsky to
   lead a punitive expedition, and appointed to the post of head
   of the Tambov Che-Ka a certain A. S. Klinkov--an ex-fraudulent
   bankrupt trader, an ignoramus, an extortioner, a drunkard, and
   a man who, up to the outbreak of the October revolution, was
   engaging in discreditable speculative operations. And that
   post he is still holding, and it gives him a right of disposal
   over all prisoners’ lives, and he uses that right for shooting
   prisoners indiscriminately. And in addition to dispatching
   punitive expeditions, the authorities have initiated a practice
   of dispatching certain Communist _nuclei_, in order that
   those _nuclei_ may “acquire” a taste for fighting, although
   they are nothing better than bands of ruffians, and spend most
   of their time in carousing, committing arson and theft, and
   transforming the great principles of “liberty, fraternity,
   and equality” into the horrible principles of the medieval
   Tartar invasions.... Also, we must call your attention to
   the sanguinary work perpetrated by the Lettish detachments.
   Universally they leave behind them terrible memories. And every
   prison and dungeon under the Che-Ka is filled to overflowing,
   the number of persons arrested having come to amount to
   thousands, with cold and starvation causing disease to become
   rampant amongst them. And their ultimate fate, in most cases,
   is certainly that they will be shot. And that will continue to
   be prisoners’ fate so long as commissaries and Che-Kas like the
   present ones hold power.

The result of the constant increase in peasant risings was that
eventually they overflowed from the villages into the towns. The
Berlin-published Russian journal _Roul_ gives us a particularly
vivid description of a peasant upheaval in Petropavlovsk. True, the
peasants figuring in that rising are described as “White forces,” but
the movement was a purely popular one, and I will cite the conclusion
of the eye-witness’s narrative:

   Here the Red Terror began as soon as ever the Red soldiers had
   entered the place. And with the Terror went mass arrests, and
   mass shootings with no preliminary trial. Also, every telegraph
   and telephone pole soon was bristling with posters to the effect
   that, in the event of another raid by a White detachment,
   the town would be razed to the ground by the Red artillery.
   A doctor of ours who was taken prisoner by the White forces,
   and subsequently restored to us, has since told us that the
   Red Terror has assumed even more ghastly forms in the villages
   than in the towns--that in the villages every single hut has
   been pillaged, and all the cattle stolen, and a great number of
   families killed without a sparing even of the aged and women and
   children. And in other huts there are left only the aged and the
   infants, for the adult members of the household have all escaped
   to the White army, whilst both the open roads and the village
   streets are lying heaped with peasant corpses so mutilated as to
   defy identification, but thrown there “to serve as a warning to
   others,” with the people forbidden to take them away for burial.
   Also, the doctor has told us that in some cases the peasants
   have wreaked such ruthless vengeance upon the Communists that
   the public hall of Petropavlovsk is standing lined with rows of
   mutilated Communist corpses, and on each Sunday between February
   and May last the Communists accorded choral rites of burial to
   fifty or sixty of these slain comrades at a time, whilst both
   the market square and what used to be the butchers’ market are
   lying strewn with (again, “as a warning to others”) bodies of
   anti-Communist hostages who were slaughtered as soon as ever the
   Bolshevists had consolidated their position in the town, with,
   amongst them, the mayor, the deputy mayor, the local magistrate,
   and several prominent merchants and other citizens. Moreover,
   a huge number of unknown victims has been shot in the Che-Ka’s
   courtyard; both by day and by night, for months past, firing
   has been heard there. And in some cases the victims were not
   shot at all, but slashed to death with swords: in which case
   their cries of agony reached the ears even of the surrounding
   inhabitants. And amongst the executed were the local bishop
   and most of the local cathedral staff, on the accusation that
   they had rung the cathedral bells in welcome to the Whites--the
   Communists having ignored the fact that when the Whites had
   entered the city the time had been just four o’clock in the
   afternoon, when, of course, the bells were tolling for evening
   service! At this very moment the bishop’s body is lying, as a
   further “warning,” in the public square near the road leading
   to the railway station, where the Eastern Siberian Army has its
   headquarters. And I have been told that as soon as the staff of
   those headquarters entered the town they ordered all prisoners
   arrested before the arrival of the White forces--even prisoners
   arrested merely for trifling offences, and sentenced merely
   to a few weeks’ or a few months’ imprisonment--to be shot. I
   myself left Petropavlovsk on May 10. Everything then was quiet
   in the town, despite that many Red Guards still were there.
   Only in the surrounding districts was the rebellion not yet
   wholly quelled, and peasant prisoners still were being brought
   in from the villages, and mutilated remains of Communists being
   given musical burial on holidays. Also, I know of a case in the
   district of Mozhaisk where the peasants had become so embittered
   that, after catching a commissary, they divided him in two with
   a wooden saw.

The first volume of the _Bulletin_ issued by the Social Revolutionaries
of the Left gives, under date of January 1919, similar details with
regard to other localities. We read that in the Elifansky district of
Toula Province, towards the close of 1918, 150 peasants were shot; in
the Medinsk district of Kalouga Province, 170; in the Prousk district
of Riazan Province, 300; in the Kasimov district, 150; in the Spassk
district, several hundreds; in Tver Province, 200; and in the Velizhesk
district of Smolensk, 600.

And as regards risings which took place in two villages around
Kronstadt during the July of 1921, our information is exact. We know
that in the one village 170 persons were shot, and in the other 130,
and that in each case the principle observed was to select every
third man. Again, during a rising in Kolivan (Tomsk Province), during
1920, over 5000 peasants were shot,[151] while a like rising in Oufa
Province has been declared to have been suppressed so ruthlessly
that even the official data had to admit to 10,000 being the number
shot, whilst unofficial data gave the number as 25,000, or more.[152]
And from a correspondent of the journal _Znamya Trouda_ (“The
Labour Standard”) we have it that “in the Volkovsky district of
Kharkov Province hundreds of peasants were shot”--the Left Social
Revolutionaries of Moscow having contrived to have the statement
conveyed to and published in the city itself. In one village 140
persons are said to have been executed.[153] And the following
description of some mutinies in White Russia during 1921 constitutes a
page from the history of a regional struggle the causes of which were
the food tax and the punishment of acts of opposition to the tax:

   The whole of the Liaskovicheskaya _volost_ in the Bobrinsk
   district has been fired by the Bolshevists [the description
   says]. Peasants have been arrested, and exiled either to
   Vologda or to the famine-stricken areas, and had their property
   confiscated. And the Bolshevists still are seizing hostages
   by the dozen wherever a peasant insurgent band appears. The
   punitive expedition operating in this neighbourhood is Stok’s.
   Before execution he tortures his prisoners, and seeks to extort
   confessions, by crushing their fingers in door-cracks.[154]

Now let me cite a document that was published at the time of the
suppression of the Antonov rising. The document is an Order issued by
the “Plenipotentiary Committee of the All-Russian Central Executive
Commission.” Of date June 11, 1921, it says:

   (1) Citizens refusing to divulge their names shall be shot
   without trial. (2) The decree authorising seizure of hostages
   shall be read to all villages guilty of concealing arms, and
   hostages shall be seized and shot unless the arms first be
   handed over. (3) Households harbouring bandits (peasants in
   rebellion) shall be arrested and exiled, and deprived of their
   property. Also, the chief worker in each such household shall
   be shot without trial. (4) Households harbouring members of
   bandits’ families, or concealing those families’ property, shall
   themselves be treated as bandits, and have their chief worker
   shot without trial. (5) The property of a bandit whose family
   may succeed in escaping shall be apportioned to any peasants who
   have remained faithful to the Soviet Power, and his dwelling be
   burnt. (6) Let this Order be carried out with the most ruthless
   severity.[155]

Tambov and its neighbourhood, therefore, were drenched with blood, and
Gan, the Left Social Revolutionary, in no way exaggerated when, in
addressing a Bolshevist revolutionary tribunal, he said[156]:

   Thousands of our peasants have been shot by you and other
   circuit tribunals and provincial Che-Kas. You have mown down
   defenceless people with machine-gun fire; you have exiled
   peasant families to the northern provinces not merely in
   thousands, but in tens of thousands, and pillaged and burnt
   their property.[157] And members of my party possess also data
   referring to other provinces--to the Provinces of Samara and
   Kazan and Saratov. And both from there and from everywhere else
   our information is the same.

   In Bouzoulok, during 1920, 4000 persons were shot; in Christopol
   600[158]; in Elatina (where you forced the victims to dig their
   own graves) 300.[159]

All of which applies to Central Russia--rather, to Great Russia--alone,
without mentioning the Ukraine and Siberia.

Another device utilised by the Bolshevists was _mock_ shootings;
on which occasions the prisoners were divested of their clothes,
compelled to dig, as it were, their own graves, and, on the order to
fire being given, fired at merely with shots above their heads. Many
such cases occur in Maslov’s well-known book, _Russia after Four
Years of Revolution_.

“In Arskaya _volost_ (Kazan district) thirty peasants were placed
in a row, and had their heads slashed off with swords.” Such is the
statement to be found in No. 1 of the _Bulletin_ issued by the
Social Revolutionary Party! And the journal continues: “Floggings?
Floggings take place everywhere. Rods, ramrods, cudgels, whips, fists,
rifle butts, and revolver stocks all are used for the beating of
peasants.”

Officially it has been stated that floggings have ceased to be
inflicted in Russia, “for the reason that corporal punishment lies
beneath the dignity of a Peasants’ and Workers’ Government”; but the
facts do not coincide with the statement. In his book _The Moral
Aspect of the Revolution_[160] Steinberg, ex-Bolshevist Commissary
of Justice, adduces an interesting collection of communications
relating to floggings which he and his fellow Communist administrators
carried out during the earlier days of the Bolshevist _régime_.
And the collection carries the more weight in that its basis rests upon
reports published by the Soviet press itself--by the _Pravda_,
and by the _Izvestia_. Certainly the former journal published
an article entitled “_Derzhimordi_[161] under the Soviet Flag,”
which told how a grain surplus was beaten out of a reluctant rural
population, and a rebellion of _koulaki_ suppressed, by the Che-Ka
of Nikolaevsk (Province of Vologda):

   The Che-Ka collected a multitude of peasants into an icy-cold
   barn, divested them of their clothing, and beat them with
   ramrods. And in the Brilsky district (Vitebsk Province) peasants
   were beaten by order of the local Che-Ka. And in the village of
   Ouren (Kostroma Province), though peasants donned five shirts
   apiece to soften the blows, it was in vain, since the whips,
   made of twisted wire, cut right through the material, and drove
   it into the wounds until it dried there, and had later to be
   soaked out with warm water.[162]

Again, a letter sent to the Central Committee of the Communist Party
by Madame Spiridonova quotes an informant as saying: “A third of the
men of our _volost_ were lined up, and beaten with clenched fists
in the presence of the other two-thirds. Anyone trying to escape the
beating with fists received also a flogging with whips.” To which
the informant adds an account of the doings of a “requisitionary
expedition”:

   Whenever ... the expedition reached a fresh village its officers
   made the members of the village council kneel down before them,
   that the peasants might conceive a proper respect for the Soviet
   Power. “And flog them too,” the officers said, “so that they may
   remember us the better.”

After this can one wonder that the _Pravda_ had eventually
to admit that the term “Communist” had come to be synonymous with
“hooligan,” “ne’er-do-weel,” and “charlatan”? “We are treated like
senseless beasts,” once a peasant said.

But what a Terror of requisitionary expeditions and formations of
“committees of poorer peasants” and armed, hooligan dictatorship really
meant in a rural district can be realised only by trying to imagine the
conditions of peasant life whilst that Terror was in force. I quote
some villagers of Makarievo: “Whereas we used only to have the police
commissioner riding upon our backs, now we have the commissary riding
there.” And in a passage from a report published in the _Pravda_
we read:

   Whenever an expedition that was collecting the grain tax in the
   Khvalinsky district (Saratov Province) reached a village the
   peasants were commanded to surrender their best-looking girls to
   the officials.

In the same spirit a grain-tax commissary instructed a local “committee
of poorer peasants” to

   inform your inhabitants that within three days they shall
   render me 10,000 _pouds_ of grain, and that any person
   not complying with this Order shall be shot with my own hand,
   which finished off, only last night, a disobedient rascal in the
   village of Varvarinka.... Also, I empower so-and-so to shoot in
   the same way anyone not complying with my Order in this rascally
   _volost_ of ----. And the name of the _volost_
   followed.[163]

Hence we see that shootings and floggings were the two symbols of “the
period leading to Socialism.”

But neither real life nor life in fiction could furnish a parallel to
an incident which occurred in the Shatsky district of Tambov Province,
and is to be found described by Steinberg in his book:

   In this district the peasants had a particular veneration for
   an _ikon_ of the Vishinskaya Madonna; and when influenza
   broke out in the district a solemn procession was held in
   the _ikon’s_ honour, and a celebrating of Mass. And, on
   the Bolshevists seizing both _ikon_ and clergy, and
   the peasants learning later that the Che-Ka had insulted the
   _ikon_, and “dragged it about the floor,” they set forth
   to “rescue Our Lady,” with women and children and the aged and
   everyone else joining the throng. And then the Che-Ka turned
   machine-guns upon them, and mowed them down in rows as, “with
   terrible eyes which saw nothing,” they moved forward over the
   bodies of dying and dead, and mothers, flinging themselves
   before their children, cried: “O Holy Virgin and Defender, bless
   us as gladly we lay down our lives for thee!”

Always the Bolshevists made it clear that the Terror was directed not
so much against the _bourgeoisie_ as a class as against all classes in
general, and that the _intelligentsia_ happened to become the special
victim of the Terror because the _intelligentsia_ happened to comprise
all classes.

“The prime object of the Terror,” said a leading article in the
Che-Ka’s _Weekly_, “is the destruction of the spiritual leaders
and directors of the enemies of the Proletarian Government.” True,
sometimes decrees of local Che-Kas and tribunals stated that a sentence
had been remitted “because of the accused’s proletarian origin,” but
this was a blind, a mere masking of the Terror’s true nature, and for a
time deceived the less thinking sections of the Russian population, but
soon ceased to deceive even them.

It has been related of a certain Bolshevist official that, when holding
an inquiry in a village, he obtained such “evidence” as he required
merely by shouting out, “Show me your hands!” And if he next cried
“Strip the fellow!” the clothes were at once torn from the prisoner’s
back, and the prisoner himself set against a lorry, bayoneted, and
thrown into one of the cavities locally known as “plague pits” through
cattle having been thrown into them during an earlier season of
cattle plague. And a match for this official in rude arrogance was a
certain Mousikin who had been an artisan in the Lefortovsky Quarter of
Moscow. The _Pravda_ itself has told us how, at the time when the
Muscovite Soviet was debating the question of suspending the Che-Kas,
and Latzis propounded the thesis that legal trials were not needed,
Mousikin capped this by saying:

   Why even _question_ prisoners?... Personally I should just
   walk into the accused’s kitchen, look at his stock pot, and, if
   the pot should contain meat, account him an enemy of the people,
   and shoot him against his own kitchen wall.

Yet if this truly “proletarian” procedure had been followed in 1917 and
subsequently, not a man of the privileged Communist Party would have
escaped execution! Yet they have a saying that “if a man will not work,
neither shall he eat”!

Again, how are we to credit Latzis’ assertion that his Party never
permitted the Terror “to touch peasants and industrial workers who
have erred merely in being misled,” or Mousikin’s statement in No. 3
of the _Weekly_ that “in no instance have we directed terrorist
persecution against the working-classes”? For, to take only a single
instance, the inhabitants of Odessa had no sooner begun to protest
against the mass shootings instituted by the local Che-Ka during the
July of 1919 than that Che-Ka issued an order that:

   Inasmuch as certain counter-revolutionaries are spreading false
   rumours, and saying that industrial workers have been shot, the
   Praesidium herewith announces that in no instance has such a
   worker, nor yet a peasant, been shot, but merely a few proven
   bandits and murderers.

And the document added that “any counter-worker so disposed” might come
and inquire into any allegation of a worker having been shot by the
Che-Ka. Finally, “from now onwards the supreme punitive measure allowed
by the law during a state of siege shall be applied to anyone from
whom a false rumour shall emanate.” Which warning would scarcely leave
anyone “disposed” to indulge in inquiries of the kind indicated, or in
any inquiries at all![164]

In 1920 there took place in Astrakhan massacres exceptional in their
scope even for Soviet Russia. And in September of the same year sixty
representatives of the workers of Kazan were shot for requesting an
eight hours day, a revision of the scale of wages, and the deportation
of the Magyars who had long been making trouble in the district.[165]
Later these doings led the Left Social Revolutionary Party of the
country to appeal to the workers to refrain from participating in
the ensuing May Day celebrations, on the ground that “ever since the
October Revolution the Communist Government has been shooting toilers
in their thousands--peasants, soldiers of the ranks, industrial
workers, and sailors alike.”[166]

On an official building in Soviet Russia there stands inscribed the
motto, “For the _Bourgeoisie_, Prison! For the Peasants and the
Industrial Workers, Comradely Persuasion!” And in the ravine near
Saratov which I have described the contained abomination is made up of
peasants and industrial workers just as much as of _bourgeois_ and
intellectuals and prominent politicians. Nay, it even includes members
of the Socialist Party! Similarly, the concentration camp near Kharkov
which witnessed most of Saenko’s exploits was, though nominally a camp
for _bourgeois_ alone, a camp crowded with representatives of all
classes, but most of all with representatives of the peasant class.

In fact, what was the amount of peasants’ and workers’ blood shed
during the Red Terror? The question is one which will never admit of an
answer. Once I attempted, with my card index library, to make a table
of social statuses. True, this applied to the year 1918 only, and the
data were far from complete; but at least I succeeded in arriving at
the following improvised classification:

    Intellectuals                                   1286
    Hostages (from the professional classes
      exclusively)                                  1026
    Peasants                                         962
    Urban Dwellers                                   468
    Persons Unknown                                  450
    Criminal Elements (which in many cases
      represented persons arrested, in reality,
      for political reasons)                         438
    Officials convicted of professional misconduct   187
    Domestic Servants                                118
    Soldiers and Sailors                              28
    _Bourgeois_                                       22
    Clergy                                            19

And though the above grouping is a casual grouping only, it is
sufficient to refute the statements of leading Bolshevists, and
to dislodge the corner-stone on which Communists strive to rear
_apologiae_ for their system. It was inevitable that the
internecine struggle for power should become what it was. Inevitably
that struggle came to resemble the parallel struggle witnessed
during the French Revolution. And though this incontrovertible
thesis is sometimes contested, the day will come when it will stand
corroborated. Take another illustration of it. On August 21, 1919,
an ex-warder from the Che-Ka gaol at Nikolaevsk testified before
the Denikin Commission that the lot of workers and peasants in that
prison who lacked the means to purchase its alleviation was far harder
than was the lot of their fellow workers and peasants, and that many
more of the latter were shot than of intellectuals. And a Denikin
Commission document declares that when the municipality of Nikolaevsk
was assisting the Commission to make local enquiries, and to attempt
to fix the total of shot, it finally obtained proof of a total of
115 (though the real number must have been much larger, seeing that
many burial pits could not be located, and advanced decomposition
rendered two such pits impossible of examination, and the Che-Ka had
published only partial lists of its victims, with no information
whatsoever as to local deserters from the Red Army) and then helped the
Commission to determine the social status of 73 out of the 115, with
the result that the list was found to be headed by 25 merchants and
other _bourgeois_, and filled up with 15 members of the working
_intelligentsia_ (engineers, doctors, students, and the like) and
as many as 33 peasants and industrial operatives.

In fact, as the Terror spread, the Bolshevists’ prisons became more and
more filled with the proletariat and the working _intelligentsia_,
and the shootings of the latter proportionately more numerous.

In addition to which there has now become added the category of
Socialists.

       *       *       *       *       *

The statement that the Red Terror was a response to a White Terror, a
war of extermination against “enemies of our class who constantly plot
the ruin of the industrial and agrarian proletariat,” is a statement
explicable only on the hypothesis of political exigency. For it was the
Bolshevists’ own appeals to their Red Army that caused the civil war
to become the cruel, truly brutal thing that it became, added to the
fact that with Bolshevist propaganda went misrepresentations designedly
calculated to demoralise certain social sections. Such was the call
(and the menace) to volunteers to engage in “espionage” work--an order
issued by Piatakov, head of the Donetz Che-Ka, and proclaiming that
“any failure of any Communist to denounce a traitor will be regarded
as an offence against the Revolution, and punished with all the vigour
of the laws of the present war-revolutionary period.”[167] Thus
denunciation of one’s neighbour was elevated into a civic duty, into a
civic virtue! Bukharin, for his part, said:

   Henceforth all of us must become agents of the Che-Kas, whether
   in our houses, or in our streets, or in our public places, or on
   our railways, or in our soviet institutions. Everywhere and at
   all times must we watch for counter-revolutionaries, apprehend
   them, and consign them to the nearest Che-Ka.

And Miasnikov, the Communist who assassinated the Grand Duke Michael,
and subsequently fell into disgrace for having published a pamphlet
opposing Lenin’s policy, advised that:

   Every one of us workers do become an agent of a Che-Ka,
   and keep the Revolution apprised of what is being done by
   Counter-Revolution. Only so shall we become strong and secure
   towards future efforts. For an honest citizen no other mode of
   procedure is possible. It is no more than his duty.

That is to say, the Communist Party was to become one huge
politico-police force, and Russia herself one huge Che-Ka for the
purpose of stifling freedom and independent thought. And take a
suggestion tendered to Moscow by the Che-Ka of the Alexandrovskaya
Railway:

   That all railway workers be charged to inform their railway
   Che-Ka of any public meeting known to be pending, so that
   representatives of the Che-Ka may attend the gathering, and note
   the gathering’s proceedings.

And not only were the people as a whole called upon to engage in
“espionage.” Also the people as a whole were requested to sanction the
most odious forms of tyranny. For example, the Kievan revolutionary
tribunal cried:

   Communists, Red Guards, and others, fulfil your great mission
   by keeping constantly in communication with our investigation
   department, so that wherever you may be--whether in a city, or
   in a village, or a few paces away, or ten versts distant--you
   may telegraph to us your information, or else call in person,
   and so enable our inquiry agents to hasten to the spot.[168]

And the same city of Kiev saw its provincial committee of defence
empower not merely _individuals_, but the _population as a
whole_, to:

   Seize and detain any and every person soever who shall be
   found seeking to thwart the Soviet Government, and to select
   hostages from the wealthy, and to shoot such hostages if any
   counter-revolutionary manifestation shall take place, and to
   subject villages to military investment until arms have been
   surrendered thence, and to undertake indemnified domiciliary
   searches after the expiration of dates for surrender of arms,
   and to shoot all persons found still in possession of the
   same, and to fix general contributions, and to deport leaders
   and instigators of rebellion, and to make over those leaders’
   property to non-affluent dwellers.[169]

Frequently, also, the Soviet’s provincial press displayed such
advertisements as: “The Provincial Che-Ka of Kostroma herewith
proclaims that it is the duty of every citizen of the R.S.F.S.R.
to shoot at sight Citizen Smorodinov, now standing convicted
of wilful defection.” And once a “Comrade Ilyin” wrote from
Vladikavkaz: “Each of you Communists possesses the right to kill any
_agent-provocateur_, or person guilty of sabotage, or person
seeking to hinder you from winning the victory over your foeman’s
body.”[170] Lastly, in 1918 a revolutionary tribunal in the South
went so far as to confer upon all its Communist supporters “power of
life and death over counter-revolutionaries of every species,” and a
Red Guard association in Astrakhan to order that, if a single shot
should be fired at either a Communist worker or a Red Guard, hostages
from amongst the _bourgeoisie_ “shall be executed within twenty
minutes.”




                              CHAPTER VI

                            CHE-KA TYRANNY

   Wild beasts should be shot, but not wantonly teased and
   tormented.--A. P. POLONSKY.


The instigators of the Red Terror did more than afford full scope to
lawlessness outside Che-Ka premises; they also established within
those premises a complete system of illegality, and a mere glance at
official comments on lists of shot will bring before the imagination
an unforgettable spectacle of outrage. Frequently persons were shot by
order of officials who did not so much as know what the accusations had
been, or even the victims’ names. “Shot--Names unknown”!

On June 18, 1918, Gorky’s journal, the _Novaya Zhizn_ or
“New Life,” published an interview with Dzherzhinsky and Zachs,
who expounded to the journalist the policy of the Che-Ka, whilst
Dzherzhinsky, in particular, said:

   Those who accuse us of secret murder do so wrongly. As a matter
   of fact, the Che-Ka consists of eighteen tested revolutionaries,
   is representative both of the Party’s Central Committee and
   of the Party’s Central Executive, and can pass a sentence of
   death only by an unanimous decree--one dissentient vote alone
   being sufficient to save an accused’s life. Above all things
   our strength lies in the fact that we know nor brother nor
   friend, and treat with especial severity any colleague found
   wanting in rectitude. Hence the Che-Ka’s personal reputation
   stands above suspicion. Also, it is swiftly that we deal out
   justice: it is seldom that we allow more than one or two or,
   at most, three days to elapse between arrest and sentence. At
   the same time, that does not mean that our findings are not
   invariably well-founded. The possibility of a mistake is always
   present, but as yet no instance of such a _contretemps_ has
   occurred, and the best proof of what I say is to be found in our
   protocols, which will show that, in most cases, a criminal, on
   being confronted with a mass of circumstantial evidence, at once
   confesses to his guilt. And how could guilt be made clearer than
   by a confession from the accused himself?

True, the correspondent of the _Novaya Zhizn_ next referred to
rumours as to employment of physical violence during examinations of
prisoners; but Zachs at once replied:

   Rumours of that kind are false; and the more so because we make
   it our particular business to exclude from our labours any
   element which threatens to prove unworthy of sharing in those
   labours.

Whence, as I will show, the interview constituted a tissue of lies.


                      _Callousness in Executions_

For one thing, the above-named officials’ assertion that eighteen
members were required to pass a death sentence was false. All too
frequently such a sentence was passed by two or three members
alone--even by one after a “people’s justice” had been empowered with
the capital penalty.[171]

“It is swiftly that we deal out justice.” Well, possibly Dzherzhinsky
and his kind did deal out justice swiftly on occasions of mass
shootings. At the same time, I know of innumerable cases when things
were otherwise, and months passed before the accused was even
questioned, and, from first to last, the proceedings with regard to
a given prisoner occupied more than a year before they reached their
inevitable end in execution.

“We are accused of secret murder.” Quite so. Seldom were shootings
officially reported, even though on September 5, 1918, during the
height of a wave of Red terrorism, a resolution of the Council of
People’s Commissaries called for “compulsory publication both of names
of the shot and of reasons for applying the supreme punitive measure!”

The exact manner of fulfilling this resolution, so far as practice
was concerned, can be gained by perusing casual announcements in
the Central Che-Ka’s _Weekly_, whose purpose was “co-ordination
and direction of the provincial Che-Ka’s activities.” To take a
particularly instructive illustration. On Oct 26, 1918, six weeks after
Madame Kaplau’s attempt upon Lenin, No. 6 of the _Weekly_ published
what purported to be a list of the persons shot for the deed. Yet
though, in reality, the number of the shot had amounted to several
hundreds, the list’s total amounted only to ninety, and in sixty-seven
instances gave no Christian name or patronymic, and in two instances
only some initials, and in eighteen instances only a surname and the
social status--“Razoumovsky, ex-lieutenant-colonel”; “Kotomazov,
ex-student”; “Mouratov, co-operative employee”; and so forth. And only
in ten instances was any reason for the execution appended, with, even
so, the accused merely described as “an obvious counter-revolutionary,”
or “a White Guard,” _et cetera, et cetera_. And though the list also
contained such entries as “Khvostov, ex-Minister of the Interior, and
a counter-revolutionary,” and “Vistorgov, Arch-Priest,” the reader was
left to guess that a bare entry of “Maklakov” referred to another man
who had been a Minister of the Interior. True, in the latter case,
the identity was easy enough to discern; but what of the many plain
Zhichkovskys and Ivanovs and Zhelinskys and so forth who figured with
him? No one was to be allowed to know who they had been. Nor, probably,
will anyone ever know.

And if the central authority’s orders were carried out by that
authority’s central subordinate organisations in such a manner, what
must have been the case in provinces remote from the centre? Well,
there the Terror assumed forms truly bestial, and official reports of
shootings became even more obscure than reports of shootings in the
metropolitan neighbourhood. “Thirty-nine prominent landowners have
been shot after arrest for connection with the counter-revolutionary
organisation known as ‘The Union to Support the Provisional
Government’”; “Six adherents of the late Imperial _régime_ have
been shot”; and so forth. Or a few names would be published over a note
that the remaining, unnamed persons in the list had met with a like
fate.

And the same procedure continued even after what Moroz, the notorious
Che-Ka employee, described (in No. 6 of the _Weekly_) as “chaotic
disorder” had passed away. Whence Dzherzhinsky’s denial that his Che-Ka
committed secret murder was out of place. It did so in every sense of
the term. Sometimes it passed a death sentence without even having seen
the person whom it was condemning, or even listened to a plea on his
behalf. Also, it was seldom that the names of the condemners themselves
appeared, or that the permanent identity of a Che-Ka’s _personnel_
became public property. (In passing, shootings carried out without
any notification of occurrence, or of names, acquired the special or
technical name of “blind-alley” shootings.)

Hence, what impudence must have been needed for a man like Chicherin
to reply to a correspondent of the Chicago _Tribune_, when the
latter inquired how many persons had been shot “by order of secret
tribunals,” and what the fate of the surviving members of the Tsar’s
family had been:

   In Russia no such thing as a “secret tribunal” exists. And as
   regards the number of persons shot by order of the Che-Ka, the
   number has already been published. Nor do I know anything about
   the Tsar’s daughters, save that I have read in some journal that
   they are now supposed to be residing in America![172]

Again, Dzherzhinsky spoke of “confessions of guilt from the accused
himself.” Well, I myself have heard such “confessions” made--made under
pressure of threats, at the point of a revolver. So also have many
other inmates of Che-Ka gaols.

“Rumours that we employ physical violence are false.” We shall see
about that, and in the meanwhile it may be said that Che-Kas inflicted
the most excruciating of tortures, and that the Che-Kas which inflicted
them were not exclusively Che-Kas sitting in the more remote provinces.
For human life came to be so valueless in Soviet Russia that Golodin (a
deputy sent from Moscow to sit on the Che-Ka of Kungur) put things in a
nutshell when he said: “Nowadays, neither suspicion nor investigation,
nor even proof, is needed for the shooting of an accused. When the step
is deemed advisable one can just shoot, and have done with it.”

Next, let us consider some of the _published_ reasons for
executions, as occasionally set forth in the official and semi-official
Bolshevist press. They are significant. Sometimes we come across a
reason at least definite to the point of describing the “criminal” as
“a cunning and crafty counter-revolutionary,” or as “a wife fully
cognisant of her husband’s activities,” or as “the son,” or “the
daughter,” “of a general” (these examples are from the registers of
Petrograd); but more often was the “crime” set down, with amazing
effrontery, as, in the case of Gorokhov, a peasant, and others,
“assaulting a commissary”; in the case of Rogov, a shopkeeper, as
“using his premises for intrigue against the Soviet”; and so forth, and
so forth. Moreover, many were just described as “Shot in the ordinary
course of the Red Terror,” and there is nothing excessively explicit
about “twenty well-known White Guards,” “Zvierev, a doctor and a White
Guard,” “sixteen _koulaki_,” “an ex-member of the Constitutional
Democratic Party,” “a counter-revolutionary by conviction,” and entries
of the same kind. In fact, I possess a host of cuttings from the
official press to swell these instances, but anyone could obtain them
by scanning the first six issues of the _Weekly_.

One list brought especial grief to all who had known the victims
named. That list was a list comprising the names of men once prominent
in the educated world of Russia, and including, amongst others, such
intellectuals as N. N. Stchepkin, A. D. Apferov, A. S. Apferov,
A. A. Volkov, A. I. Astrov, V. I. Astrov, N. A. Ogorodnikov, K.
K. Chernoevitov, P. V. Gerasimov (who was shot under the name of
“Grekov”), S. A. Kniazikov, and many more--the names numbering, in all,
sixty-six, and appearing in the journals of Moscow on September 23,
1919. These murders the conscience of Society will never to the end
forgive. And this applies especially in the cases of A. I. Astrov and
V. I. Astrov, who were shot as “spies in Denikin’s employ” because in
their house there had allegedly been found (1) “a plan for reorganising
our legal courts and means of transport and commissariats when the
Soviet Power shall fall,” and (2) “a proclamation to the Volunteer
Army.”

But why, also, were N. I. Lazarevsky and Prince Oukhtomsky and others
shot? The official report is dated September 1, and says of Lazarevsky
that

   he had ever been a convinced supporter of a Social Democratic
   _régime_, and looked for the Soviet Power speedily to come to an
   end, and prepared plans in connection with the problems of (_a_)
   reorganisation of local self-government, (_b_) disposition of
   various Soviet paper currency issues, and (_c_) re-establishment
   of the credit system on Russian territory;

whilst of Prince S. A. Oukhtomsky, the sculptor, it was said in the
report that “he had betrayed to an organisation engaged in transmitting
information to foreign parts certain items concerning the condition of
our Russian museums [!], and prepared an article on the subject for the
White press.” And another of those shot was the poet Goumilev.

Similar to this report was a report of the trial of N. N. Stchepkin.
The same document added that “Maria Alexandrovna Yakoubovskaya, a
member of the Constitutional Democratic Party, and a school teacher,
had been found to be in communication with an agent of Kolchak’s”; but
as a matter of fact the lady’s real “crime” had been that on August 29,
1919, a few days before the Bolshevists were expelled from the city of
Kiev, she had been found in a house where some other arrests (arrests
in no way connected with her) were about to be carried out. At the same
period the Kievan _Izvestia_ published 127 names of persons as
shot for “themselves carrying out mass shootings of workers and members
of the Communist Party in localities recently vacated by Denikin and
Petlura”: and though these persons may really have been the sworn foes
of the workers and the poorer peasants, which the report declared them
to have been, we have only the Bolshevists’ word for the fact.

Again, take events in Odessa. We read:

   Nikiforov, an ex-magistrate, and subsequently caretaker at the
   works of the Odessa Shipping and Transport Company, has been
   shot for attempting evasion of mobilisation, for refusing to
   work for the good of Soviet Russia, and for obtaining his post
   at the aforesaid works solely for the purpose of engaging in
   espionage and propaganda amongst unenlightened members of the
   proletariat.

And an old lady named Sigismundova was shot for having received a
letter from her officer son at Varna! She was shot, that is to say,
for “having been in communication with an agent of the Entente, and of
the Entente’s hireling Wrangel.”[173] And in Odessa, in 1919, General
Baranov was shot merely for having taken a photograph of the Catherine
II Memorial in that city--the said memorial having had the misfortune
to be situated in the very square confronting the local Che-Ka’s
premises.[174]

We have seen that revolutionary tribunals shot, in addition, persons
convicted of such offences as drunkenness and petty theft. And the same
thing happened to an individual who was found to be in possession of
an officer’s badges, and to another for having “criminally recovered a
son’s body,” and to a butcher of Moscow for having “insulted” images
of Marx and Engels by calling them “scarecrows,”[175] and to some
doctors of Kronstadt for having “made themselves popular with the
local workers.” So need we wonder that the Communist officials of
Ivanovo-Voznesensk threatened similarly to shoot anyone who concealed,
or failed to register, a sewing-machine,[176] or that Mitayev, the
commandant of Vladikavkaz, vowed to “cleanse from off the face of the
earth” anyone selling intoxicating liquor,[177] or that the commissary
of posts and telegraphs at Baku issued an order that any telephone girl
found guilty of tardy response to a call, or of response to a call “in
an uncivil manner,” should be shot within twenty-four hours?[178]

True, of death sentences passed the All-Russian Che-Ka kept protocols;
but did Dzherzhinsky really imagine that protocols like those drawn up
in Kiev during 1919 were good enough to go upon? No. 4 of the Berlin
review _Na Chouzhoi Storonyé_ (“In Foreign Parts”) published
some astonishing Kievan returns of the sort, and also some cognate
returns drawn up by the All-Ukrainian Che-Ka under friend Latzis.
Which returns, with their original seals and signatures, now lie
lodged in the archives of the Denikin Commission. From them let us
take an example or two. They show that once (so easy is it to sign
a death warrant) the All-Ukrainian Che-Ka decided fifty-nine cases
at a sitting, and that on May 19, 1919, the same Che-Ka not only got
through its ordinary routine work for the day, but also tried forty
“personal” cases, and passed, in twenty-five of those cases, a sentence
of death. And the sentences must have been (to use Dzherzhinsky’s
word) “well-founded,” for the returns which give them do not so much
as mention the antecedent “crimes.” And the same applies to some
executions carried out at Kharkov when two Che-Ka employees named
Portugeis and Feldmann, as they shot the prisoners, merely achieved
such a brief and rough jotting down of notes in pencil as, for example,
“Baeva--Shot as an incorrigible criminal.”[179]

But, of course, to a Che-Ka employee, to an individual who despised the
old ethics, the old “_bourgeois_ prejudices,” such proceedings
would seem no more than “trials in legal form terminating in justified
shooting.” Indeed, Sigal of Odessa, an ex-Che-Ka official, and at one
time an ex-student of the University of Novorossisk, stated, in answer
to a question from the Denikin Commission, that it had been quite a
common practice for the Che-Ka’s secretary merely to send out word that
“the trial must be conducted in such a manner as to result in at least
fifteen persons being sent to the wall.”

And the same callousness with regard to human life frequently caused
two or more persons to be shot through the fact that both or all of
them bore the same or similar names. This might happen accidentally,
or it might purposely be done to avoid any possibility of a mistake.
I myself know of such a case when, in Odessa, three doctors named
so wholly dissimilarly as Volkov, Valsov, and Vorobiev were shot in
a batch[180]; whilst in another case a man named Ozerov was shot
before the “people’s prosecutor” had discovered an error to have been
made--whereupon the rightful Ozerov was shot as well.[181] We find
several such cases in Averbuch’s book _The Che-Ka of Odessa_.

Again, the same Che-Ka once received information concerning some
“counter-revolutionary activities” said to have been carried on by
a man called Aaron Chonsir, but not at the same time, unfortunately,
the man’s address: wherefore the “people’s prosecutor” engaged in the
case ordered the local street directory to be looked through, and then
caused _eleven_ persons of the accused’s name to be arrested and
imprisoned. Only after a fortnight of enquiries _which included
several applications of torture_ were two out of the eleven Chonsirs
selected, and shot. And the reason why still as many as two were shot
(although the original indictment had called for the arraignment only
of one) was that the “inquisitional department” had not been able to
make up its mind even with regard to the pair chosen, and so had made
sure of bagging the real “counter-revolutionary” by shooting both the
one and the other. Similarly a responsible witness who could not well
be suspected of attempting to colour his testimony has stated that once
an ex-assistant procurator named A. S. Baranov was shot in mistake for
an officer of the same name; also, that once the witness was present
in a cell when the name of “Vivordtsev, Alexey” was called out, as
denoting a certain prisoner destined for execution, and when the only
Vivordtsev in the cell was pointed out to the authorities, but stated
to possess the initials _K. M._, the authorities, undeterred,
replied: “Never mind the exact name! All that we want is a Vivordtsev.”
Lastly, an educated landowner testified before the Denikin Commission
that a peasant named Yakov “Khromoy” (“the Lame”) of the village of
Yavkino was shot in mistake for a perfectly sound Yakov belonging to
the same village, whereas the man executed was (as his name implied) a
cripple.

Occasionally, however, the lives of persons placed in such a position
were saved at the last moment by a lucky accident. Cases of the sort
occurred under the “inquisitional departments” at Moscow, and similar
ones are to be found recorded both in the British White Book and in
_The Che-Ka_; whilst Nilostonsky tells of like incidents in Kiev.

In fact, “inadvertent” executions became so frequent as at last to
give rise to a special class of victims, and to acquire the name of,
in Che-Ka parlance, “mistakes.” In 1918, when the Che-Ka of Moscow
discovered a secret organisation of ex-officers known as the Levshinsky
Club, _all_ ex-officers, without exception, who happened to live
in the Levshinsky Perëonlok[182] were arrested, and thrown into the
Butyrka Prison--where, for fellow inmates, they had the persons who
had been arrested in connection with the Lockhart affair. And of these
ex-officers (who numbered in all, twenty-eight) only six lived to tell
the tale. And take the following:

   In Brounitsy, near Moscow, the commissaries took to shooting
   anyone whose looks in any way displeased them. Hence there was
   no need at all for the local executive committee to assemble:
   one of its members needed merely to say, “We have decided to,
   _etcetera, etcetera_,” and nothing remained to be done save
   to send Red Guards for the victim, to give him a spade with
   which to dig his own grave, to take him to the courtyard of the
   local riding-school, to shoot him there, and to bury him.

All of which things at least help us to understand passages in Latzis’
statistical articles which state that “shootings had to be employed to
intimidate the population,” or “to produce the required effect,” or
“to kill any leanings towards sabotage and conspiracy,” and the rest.
In Yaroslav, for example, he and his party shot hostages merely on the
ground that a rising of _koulaki_ was anticipated, though it had
not actually come to pass. And on February 11, 1919, Mr. Alston wrote
to Lord Curzon:

   According to the Bolshevists, the only way to forestall
   counter-revolutionary movements in this town (Ekaterinburg) is
   anticipatorily to terrorise the inhabitants.[183]

But perhaps the vilest episode of all was the shooting of a whole
family of hostages in Elizabetgrad during the May of 1920, when the
four little daughters of an officer, children from seven to three years
old, were shot along with their grandmother of sixty-nine!

A passing thought is: How came “counter-revolutionaries” sometimes
to be shot forthwith, and sometimes to be kept until later? There
would seem to be a mystery here. When, during the autumn of 1918, a
policy of shooting ex-Tsarist Ministers was entered upon, Bouligin,
the ex-Minister of the Interior, had his life spared during the year
just named, but on September 5, 1919, was brought before the Che-Ka of
Petrograd, and tried for having pursued a reactionary policy as long
ago as 1905! “Wherefore it is resolved that Citizen Bouligin be shot,
and have his property confiscated, and handed over to the Executive
Committee, for transference to certain workers in a State factory.”[184]

Perhaps _this_ was one of the protocols which Dzherzhinsky
declared to be “well-founded”?


                    _Physical Outrage and Torture_

If the reader will recall what has been said in connection with
Che-Kas, he will scarcely doubt--nay, he will feel certain--that
physical outrage was practised in Che-Ka dungeons. The appeal to
European public opinion framed by the Paris Executive Committee
of the Russian Constituent Assembly in no way exaggerated when it
protested against “the present orgy of political murder in Russia, with
employment of physical torture and physical injury.” For all that has
ever been written about the ancient Russian prisons--in particular,
about “the Russian Bastille,” as the Schlüsselburg Fortress, the
repository of olden-time important political offenders, has been
called--pales before the prisons and the prison system established by
the Soviet Government. And we have seen how Peter Kropotkin declared
the Soviet’s prison conditions, and the practice of seizing hostages,
to constitute a return to the old methods of torture.

During my confinement in the Butyrka Gaol I became acquainted with
a Dr. Moudrov of Moscow, whose “offence” I do not know--I only know
that he had never had any definite indictment framed against him, and
that, inasmuch as he had spent several months in the Che-Ka building’s
dungeons before being transferred to the Butyrka, he had become so
acclimatised to the prison atmosphere as to be able to be entrusted
by the prison authorities with the duties of medical officer to the
establishment (previously no medical staff at all had been in existence
there), and dealt so efficiently with the prevailing epidemic of typhus
as to be left unexamined by the Che-Ka. But at length a day arrived
when he passed from us in the very midst of his mission of healing,
and never returned; and soon afterwards we heard that he had been
shot. No explanation has ever been forthcoming for this insensate deed
of cruelty, and probably it would be impossible to present one. All
that the _Izvestia_ of October 17 said was that Dr. Moudrov “had
formerly been a member of the Constitutional Democratic Party.”

Another encounter in the prison similarly affected me. When, during the
summer of 1922, I was summoned to give evidence in the great trial of
Social Revolutionaries that was then held, I happened to walk from the
cells to the court beside a thin, middle-aged man whom, on the way, I
contrived to engage in a little conversation, and thereby discovered to
be a Colonel Perkhourov who had taken part in the Savinkov rising at
Yaroslavl in 1918, and been thrown into the Che-Ka building’s cells,
and, though those cells were, supposedly, only a place of detention
pending inquiry, half-starved, allowed no books or interviews, and
conceded no facilities for exercise. And though I could not clearly
ascertain whether until now he had escaped the authorities’ memory,
or whether he had purposely been held over for the present occasion,
at all events I found him being conducted to the court in the same
capacity (as a witness) as myself. But no sooner had the proceedings
begun than he found himself transferred from amongst the witnesses
to amongst the accused! And later he was taken to Yaroslavl, and,
according to an officially published statement, shot.

These are examples with which I myself came in contact: but there were
hundreds of others. And if this kind of thing could happen in the
centre of the country, at a time when the anarchical conditions of the
Bolshevists’ early days of rule were supposed to have given place to a
semblance of regular and established order, what must have happened in
far-removed provinces where there sat enthroned despotism in its vilest
forms?

Well, there was torture in progress there. For the mere fact of having
to live for months, for years, in daily expectation of death alone
constituted torture. And so did the provincial Che-Kas’ universal
system of mock shootings; and during the time that I was in the
Butyrka I had many such cases of shootings personally related to me by
informants whose veracity I have no reason to doubt, seeing that they
were confiding to me their narratives whilst the shock communicated to
their nerves by their horrible experiences had not yet wholly faded.
Amongst others who were subjected to such an ordeal were some prominent
co-operative officials of Petrograd who had been “tried” before the
Supreme Revolutionary Tribunal during the autumn of 1920: and in their
case the torture took the form of nightly being led out as though for
execution, and forced, despite the intense frost, to strip to the last
shred of clothing, and witness real executions of other prisoners
before being led back to their cells for the whole ghastly “rehearsal”
to be repeated a few nights later.

But sometimes persons subjected to this mental torture would so lose
their self-control as to make any admission rather than be compelled to
go through the experience again. An American named Kalmatiano who was
sentenced to death at the Lockhart trial, and subsequently reprieved,
told V. A. Miakotin and myself, when the three of us were lying in the
Butyrka gaol together, that thrice he and a fellow-accused named Fride
had been taken out of prison as though for execution, and that though,
on May 10, 1920, he was informed that his sentence had been commuted,
his sentence of death had been passed as long previously as the year
1918, and meanwhile he had had to spend the whole of the intervening
time in daily expectation of being shot.

A Madame E. O. Kolbasina who was imprisoned with us has since
related[185] a similar experience told her by a fellow inmate. The
scene of the experience was the Che-Ka’s building in Moscow, and the
following is the lady’s account of what happened:

   Convicted of offering a bribe of 100,000 roubles for the life
   of an officer, I was conducted to the basement of the building
   as though for execution, and saw there a number of corpses clad
   only in strips of clothing. How many of them were there I do
   not know, but in particular I remember two--the corpse of a
   woman and the corpse of a man, the latter clad only in a pair
   of socks. In each case the dead people had been shot through
   the back of the head, and the floor actually felt slippery to
   my feet with blood. Unwilling to undress myself, I left it to
   the executioners to do it for me, but they shouted, “Undress,
   you!” and I felt my hands raise themselves mechanically, and
   automatically undo the buttons of my cloak, and take it off. And
   just as I was going to do the same with my gown I heard a voice
   reach me as though half-muffled, as though filtered through
   cotton-wool, and say, “Kneel down,” whilst at the same moment
   I felt myself pushed on to one of the heaps of corpses--as a
   matter of fact, on to a corpse that was still quivering, and
   emitting gasps! And then the voice from a distance came to
   me again, and seemed to say as in a whisper, “Up again, you,
   and quickly!” whilst someone gave a tug at my arm, and I saw
   Romanovsky, the “people’s prosecutor,” standing before me with
   a grin on his face--ah, you know the look of that foul, low,
   underhand countenance!--and saying to me: “How now, Ekaterina
   Petrovna?”--for also you know how he calls his victims by their
   Christian names and patronymics--“how now, Ekaterina Petrovna?
   You have had a little scare, have you--a little shock to the
   nerves? But that is nothing, nothing. At all events it may make
   you feel rather more disposed to be communicative with us in
   future. Is not that so?”[186]

And Madame N. Davidova, for her part, has noted the following:

   To-day we heard that ... the Baroness T--gen was not shot, after
   all, but only her husband and some others.

   Yet she had to stand by and see it done, as supposedly she
   waited for her own turn to arrive! Only when everyone else had
   been shot was she told that she herself had been reprieved, and
   made to clean up the execution room, and wash away her husband’s
   and his companions’ blood.... Her hair, I have been told, has
   turned completely grey.

_A propos_ of the Saratov ravine, a narrator has said in _The
Che-Ka_:

   During the October of 1919 two young women were brought to the
   ravine, stripped of their clothing, and, under threat of a
   revolver, made to stand at the edge of the yawning abyss--this
   being done in order to force them to disclose where some
   relatives were. And [the narrator adds] when later I saw these
   young women their hair had turned white.

Consider also the mental and physical agonies which Ivan Ivanovich
Kotov, an ex-member of the Russian Constituent Assembly, must have
endured in 1918 as he was being dragged to slaughter from the hold of
a barge after having had a leg and an arm broken, and an eye gouged
out![187]

The Che-Ka of Ekaterinodar, in particular, went in for intimidatory
measures, and an example of them is seen in the case of a Doctor
Shestakov who, after being taken across the river Kuban, and forced
there and then to dig his own grave, and in every way led to suppose
that he was about to be executed, was fired at only with a volley
of blank cartridges. And a man named Korvin-Piotrovsky was treated
similarly, and again and again, with, as a finishing touch, a cruel
flogging, information that his wife and ten-year-old daughter had also
been arrested, and an enforced witnessing of their subjection to a
“mock” execution similar to those which had so often been inflicted
upon himself.

  [Illustration: Exhuming Bolshevists’ victims at Odessa.

    [_See page_ 152.]

Again, according to an article in _The Che-Ka_:

   Tortures in these districts [Ekaterinodar and Kuban] are both
   physical and mental. And Ekaterinodar has a particular method
   of their application, as follows. The victim is laid upon his
   back on the floor of his dungeon, whilst two burly Che-Ka
   employees tug at his head, and two others at his shoulders,
   until the muscles of his neck are absolutely stretched and
   taut. Then a fifth man falls to beating the victim’s neck with
   a blunt instrument--usually the butt-end of a revolver--until,
   the neck swelling, blood gushes from the mouth and nostrils,
   and frightful agony is suffered. And I will tell you also how
   a Madame Dombrovskaya, an ex-school teacher, was tortured in
   her solitary confinement cell. It seems that the accusation
   against her had been that there had been discovered at her house
   a suit case of officers’ clothing which the officer concerned,
   a relative of hers, had left with her for safe keeping whilst
   the Denikin _régime_ had been operative in the town. Also,
   it seems that though Madame Dombrovskaya had confessed to this
   “crime,” the Che-Ka had been informed that she had by her
   jewellery which another relative, a general, had deposited in
   her keeping: wherefore on receipt of this fresh information, she
   was ordered to be tortured until she should reveal where the
   jewellery might be. For a beginning she was raped and outraged
   generally--the raping taking place in order of seniority of
   torturers, with a man called Friedmann raping her first,
   and the others in regular sequence. And, that done, she was
   questioned further as to the whereabouts of the jewellery,
   and further tortured by having incisions made into her body,
   and her finger tips nipped with pliers and pincers. Until at
   last, in her agony, with the blood pouring from her wounds,
   she confessed that the jewels were hidden in an outbuilding of
   her house. The same evening (the date being November 6) she
   was shot, and when she had been dead about an hour, one of the
   Che-Ka’s employees searched the outbuilding indicated, and
   duly found hidden there--a plain gold brooch and a few rings!
   Again, in a certain Caucasian village the usual instrument of
   torture was an iron “glove,” a solid, glove-shaped piece of
   metal studded on the outside with nails, and able, when slipped
   onto the torturer’s right hand, to inflict blows causing
   not only terrible pain through their mere weight, but also
   suppuration through the multiplicity of the nail wounds which
   they produced. This torture was applied to, amongst others, a
   citizen named Leliavin, a man from whom the Che-Ka desired to
   obtain information as to the whereabouts of a hoard of Tsarist
   gold coins which he was reported to have got concealed. As for
   the town of Armavir, the local Che-Ka’s instrument of torture
   was the “wreath,” an ordinary leathern strap into one end of
   which an iron nut was let, and into the other end a screw, so
   that, the strap having been fixed around the victim’s head, the
   nut and the screw could be drawn together until the extreme
   compression of the scalp caused indescribable pain.[188]

In Piatigorsk the head of the local Che-Ka’s “operative department”
used to accompany “questionings” with strokes from a rubber whip--as
many as twenty strokes at a time. Once, also, the fellow ordered some
nurses who had rendered first aid to some wounded Cossacks to be given
fifteen lashes apiece.[189] It was the practice of this Che-Ka, too,
to thrust pins under prisoners’ finger-nails. In general, it conducted
its “inquiries” on a basis of flagellation with whips and ramrods
and clenched fists. We have evidence also that similar treatment
was accorded to Admiral Miazgovsky at Nikolaev in 1919; whilst the
_Dielo_ once published a statement as to how a citizen of Lougansk
had been tortured by having ice-cold water poured over his naked body,
and his finger-nails wrenched backward with steel pliers, and his body
pricked all over with needles, and slashed with razors.[190] And on
another occasion a correspondent of the same journal[191] wrote with
regard to Simferopol: “The Che-Ka there has invented new forms of
torture by injecting into the rectum enemas charged with powdered
glass, and holding lighted candles beneath the generative organs.” In
Tsaritsin the victims were variously laid upon a heated grid, thrashed
with iron rods or metal-tipped flails of rubber, or subjected to
twistings of the arms until the bones were broken.[192]

  [Illustration: An inscription written by a prisoner on a cell
  wall in Kiev.

    [_See page 168._]

A whole chapter in Averbuch’s book is devoted to the tortures
practised in Odessa, with the Che-Ka’s system of fetters, confinement
in pitch-dark cells, castigation with rods a centimetre thick and
cat-o’-nine-tails of plaited leather, crushings of hands with
pincers, and suspensions by the neck. And amplification of Averbuch’s
descriptions is to be found in the materials collected by the Denikin
Commission, which detail two cases of mock shooting. In the first case
the victim was thrust into a crate which already contained a dead body,
and shot at so that only one ear was singed--then removed until his
tormentors should see fit to repeat the torture; and in the second case
the proceedings consisted of forcing the victim to dig what he believed
to be his own grave in a condemned cell which had had scratched across
one of its walls: “Twenty-seven bodies lie buried here.” This second
case, of course, was designed to intimidate only; much as when, in a
third case, a man was nightly awakened by the jailor, led out into the
courtyard, and, on the jailor being bidden to “take him back again,
and let him live through the rest of the night,” restored to his cell.
Also, in Odessa members of the Che-Ka used to visit the cells several
times a day, and say mockingly: “By to-night you will have become
something different.”[193]

In 1919, when an important trial of political prisoners was proceeding
in Moscow, armed guards were posted over the prisoners whilst they
were in the cells, and the cells would be periodically visited by
female Communists, who said to the guards: “These prisoners are spies.
Shoot them at once if they attempt to escape.” But most abominable of
all were the doings of the female president of the Che-Ka of Penza, a
woman called Boche, in the year 1918. They grew so bad that at last the
central authorities had to insist upon her retirement. And during the
winter of 1920 it was the practice of the twenty-year-old male head
of the Che-Ka of Vologda to seat himself on a chair beside the frozen
river, have a pile of sacks prepared, send to the gaol for the captives
due for the day’s “questioning,” and, having caused the wretches to be
thrust into the sacks, keep them immersed in a hole in the ice whilst
he subjected them to examination. But at length his case, like the case
of the woman Boche, attracted the notice of the central authorities,
and, on his being medically examined, he was found to be insane.

In Tiumen the chief mode of torture was to beat the prisoners with
rubber rods.[194] And of the Urals Che-Ka’s methods we can form an idea
when we read, from the pen of a Madame Froumkina:

   Meder was brought into the shed and compelled to kneel down
   beside one of the walls. Shots then were fired at him--to his
   right first of all, and then to his left. And then Goldin, the
   “people’s prosecutor,” said: “Unless you surrender to us your
   son, you will be shot. But we shall not shoot you at once. We
   shall do so only when we have broken your arms and legs.” And
   the next day this was done.

  [Illustration: Saenko, commandant of the Che-Ka of Kharkov, a
  notorious torturer and executioner.

    [_See page 166._]

In the prison of Novocherkassk a “people’s prosecutor” once thrust two
revolvers into a victim’s mouth in such a manner as to hitch the
sights upon the victim’s teeth, and bring away both them and portions
of the gum bones.[195]

Next, consider the execution of General Roussky and his companions, as
detailed in the materials collected by the Denikin Commission:

   The executioners forced their victims to kneel down and stretch
   out their necks. Then they slashed at the necks with swords,
   but in some cases, through inexpertness, failed to deal a fatal
   blow at the first attempt, and had to deliver five or more blows
   before the hostage with whom they were dealing finally was
   slaughtered. It was with his own hand that Artabekov, the head
   of the Che-Ka, stabbed General Roussky. And some of the victims
   had their arms and legs cut off before finally having their
   necks severed.

And now the time has come for me to tell of the “heroic” deeds of
Saenko, head of the Che-Ka of Kharkov. This man first came into
prominence at the time when, in 1919, the city was occupied by the
Bolshevists before their subsequent evacuation of the same. Hundreds
of victims then passed through his maniacal, sadistic hands. An
eye-witness has related how, when first this witness entered the Che-Ka
cells, he was struck with the terrified aspect of the prisoners, and
enquired the cause of their fear. Said they: “Saenko has been here,
and taken away Syichev and Bielochkin for examination. And he has
promised that this evening he will come and see some more of us.” And,
sure enough, a few minutes later, the Syichev in question, a boy of
nineteen, re-entered the cells leaning upon a couple of Red Guards, and
looking like a ghost. His comrades cried, “What has been done to you?”
and he replied, “Oh, Saenko has been examining me.” His right eye was
one huge bruise, his right cheekbone seemed to have been laid open
with a revolver butt, four of his front teeth were missing, his neck
was covered with bruises, his left shoulder-blade had been gashed all
over, and on his back were thirty-seven contusions and abrasions. And
in this manner Saenko had been “examining” victims for five days past,
so that in the end one of the victims, the man Bielochkin, died of his
injuries in the prison infirmary. A favourite trick of Saenko’s was to
keep digging the point of a knife into the examinee’s body for about a
centimetre’s distance, and twisting it about. He would do this right in
front of the “people’s prosecutor” and the rest of the Che-Ka staff.

And to the foregoing the witness has added an account of the executions
which Saenko duly carried out, as threatened, on the evening of the day
mentioned.

   At nine o’clock he entered the cells with an Austrian
   staff-captain named Klochkovsky. Sodden with drink or drugs,
   he then ordered three prisoners named Pshenichny, Ovcherenko,
   and Bielonsov, to be taken out into the courtyard, and,
   having divested them of their clothing, fell, with “Comrade
   Klochkovsky,” to cutting and stabbing at their naked bodies from
   the lower portions upwards. Daggers were used for the purpose,
   and the stabbings made to ascend to the victims’ trunks only
   very gradually. And when he had completed the three executions
   he returned to the cells and, all covered with blood, said to
   the rest of the prisoners: “Do you see this blood? Well, that is
   the fate which befalls anyone who opposes me and the Workers’
   and Peasants’ Party.” And, that said, an employee of the Che-Ka
   seized hold of Syichev (the lad who had been so cruelly beaten
   that morning), dragged him out into the yard, and forced him
   to look at Pshenichny’s body. And because the body was still
   heaving the employee at length killed it outright with a
   revolver shot; after which he hit Syichev several times with a
   sword sheath, and drove him back into the cells.

An idea of the mental agonies suffered by prisoners at Kharkov can
be gained from inscriptions since found on the dungeon walls. Such
inscriptions are: “For four days past I have been flogged. I lost
consciousness, and then was forced to sign a ready-written protocol.
I signed it because I could bear the torture no longer”; and “I
have been given 800 strokes with a ramrod, until I am like a piece
of raw meat”; and “At seven o’clock on March 6 ---- was shot, aged
twenty-three”; and “What a chamber of suffering this cell is!”; and
“Abandon hope, all ye who enter here!” And we have further confirmation
of the horrors undergone in Kharkov’s “chambers of suffering” from
survivors’ stories, from experiences related by persons who contrived
to escape from the Che-Ka’s clutches. For the most part, that Che-Ka’s
“investigations” were conducted at night-time, and accompanied with
such threats of flogging and shooting that often enough victims
would “confess” to crimes which existed only in the imagination of
the Che-Ka’s agents. But should even such threats be unsuccessful,
“confessions” would be extorted with beatings with ramrods until the
victim lost consciousness. Two officials prominent in these doings
were an ex-hairdresser’s assistant named Miroshinchenko and an
eighteen-year-old youth named Iesel Mankin. Once the former threatened
a servant girl named Kanisheva with a revolver until she “confessed” to
having harboured some officers; and once the latter said to a victim
as he covered him with his weapon, “Your life will depend upon your
answering me correctly.” And in time the Che-Ka began to add moral
tortures to physical: executions began to be carried out in such close
proximity to the cells that the other prisoners could plainly hear the
rifle shots as they issued from the small, dark kitchen which Saenko
had converted into a torture and execution chamber. And when later,
in June of the year in question, Denikin’s searchers inspected the
room, they found there two _pood_-weights so tied together with
an _arshin_-long section of rubber piping as to form a kind of
flail, with the straw covering of the floor sodden with the blood of
the slaughtered, and the wall facing the door seamed and scarred with
bullet marks, and the other walls bespattered with blood and fragments
of scalp, and hair, and particles of brain, and the floor littered
with similar fragments. And when 107 corpses were disinterred in
the adjacent concentration camp the most horrible atrocities became
revealed--terrible traces of flogging, shattered ribs and leg bones,
fractured skulls, amputated hands and feet, heads attached to the
trunk only with a strip of cartilage, patches where the skin had been
burnt off with red-hot instruments, stripes branded upon the back, and
general mutilations.

   The first body to be exhumed was the body of Zhakobritsky, an
   ex-cornet of the 6th Hussars. He must have been cruelly beaten
   before death, for some of his ribs had been fractured, and there
   were thirteen scars on the body caused by pressure against some
   red-hot, circular implement. All the scars were on the front of
   the body save for a single stripe burnt upon the back. The skull
   of another corpse was found flattened into a single, smooth,
   round disk about a centimetre in thickness. Such expatulation
   of the head could have been caused only by enormous pressure
   between two flat objects. On a woman whose identity we could not
   establish we found seven stab and shot wounds. Also, manifestly
   she had been thrown into the grave before death.

And the Commission discovered corpses of persons who had been scalded
from head to foot with boiling liquid, and of persons who had been
slowly (beginning with wounds intended only to torture, not to prove
of a fatal character) _hacked_ to death.[196] And in every town
in the region where concealed hiding-places had been available were
corpses in a similar condition brought to light. Particularly was this
the case at Odessa, Nikolaev, and Tsaritsin. True, where some corpses
with fractured skulls were found in a quarry near the first-mentioned
place, the fractures may have been caused by a fall, and what seemed
external traces of torture may have been due to prolonged contact with
the soil, and the conclusions of the examining doctors may have been
made through inability to distinguish between ante-mortem changes and
post-mortem, between macerations and scald wounds, between testicles
swollen with decomposition and testicles ruptured before death; yet,
even so, testimony both oral and photographic goes to show that no
natural cause whatsoever could have caused the corpses to look as they
did when at length exhumation brought them to light. Again, granted
that some of the tales of physical tortures equal to those practised by
the Inquisition in Spain may have been exaggerations, our conscience
is not likely to feel relieved by knowing that tortures in Russia of
the twentieth century can be a degree, but only a degree, less cruel
than tortures in Spain of the centuries of the Inquisition; and though
one may draw a certain moral satisfaction from the circumstance that
the staff of the Anatomical Theatre to which the Che-Ka of Odessa
sent some of the corpses of its victims testified that none of those
corpses “bore traces of physical violence,” one will scarcely feel
satisfied that no tortures at all were practised in Odessa, or do more
than conclude that the number of cases in which torture was inflicted
may have been small in comparison with the huge total of victims, or
that, as luck would have it, no corpses of tortured had happened to be
sent to the Theatre concerned. Moreover, it may be added that in most
instances the evidence relating to torture that was given before the
Denikin Commission came from persons who might justifiably be supposed
to have been _pro-Bolshevist_ in their sympathies.

But to return to Saenko’s exploits in Kharkov. An ex-prisoner of
Kharkov, a Social Revolutionary, has written[197]:

   In proportion as Denikin’s forces drew nearer to the town, the
   bloodthirsty hysteria of the local Che-Ka increased. And it was
   then that the real “hero” made his appearance upon the scene.
   This was Saenko, a man originally a minor official, a member
   of the local revolutionary tribunal, but now notorious amongst
   his panic-stricken fellows, and one who held in his hand the
   lives of all the prisoners in the place. Nightly his motor-car
   would drive up to the prison to remove inmates. Usually he shot
   them with his own hand, and once he shot a patient suffering
   from typhus. A fellow small of stature, with the whites of his
   eyes gleaming prominently, and his features constantly on the
   twitch, this Saenko would brandish a revolver in his trembling
   hand, and rush about the building like a madman. At first he
   selected for his victims only persons who had actually been
   sentenced; but during the two days immediately preceding the
   evacuation he took to selecting his victims indiscriminately
   from the prisoners at large, and then and there driving them out
   into the yard, and hitting at them with the flat of his sword as
   they went. And on the last day of all (though by then the gaol
   had become strangely silent) the place resounded with volley and
   individual firing from early morning until late at night--the
   small prison-yard seeing slaughtered, on that day, 120 persons.

Such the narrative of one of the twenty or thirty prisoners who were
fortunate enough subsequently to be evacuated. And another ex-prisoner
has given us a description of the previous sorting-out--a terrible
process which lasted for three hours:

   The rest of us were made to wait in the office whilst the whole
   odious examination took place. An over-dressed youth entered
   the office from an adjoining room, a name was called out, and
   a party of Red Guards proceeded to the proper cell. As we
   waited we could picture to ourselves the dungeons and their two
   thousand half-alive, half-dead inmates stretched upon wretched
   bunks--tossing to and fro in agonised anticipation--tossing to
   and fro amid a silence of night broken only by gun-fire close
   to the town, and by single revolver shots from the horrible
   shambles where human beings were being done to death!...
   Presently a door could be heard opening in the corridor, and
   we knew that to a confused accompaniment of heavy footsteps,
   groundings of rifle-butts, and the rattle of a lock, someone
   was raising aloft a lantern, and someone else searching
   lists with a gnarled finger, and someone else--lying upon
   a bunk, and trembling with a trembling that convulsed both
   heart and brain.... “Is it I?”... A name would be called.
   Then slowly, very slowly, fear would temporarily release its
   grip--temporarily the heart would begin to beat more evenly....
   “Is it I?” No. Not, at all events, _yet_. Then the person
   summoned would begin to dress himself with fingers benumbed with
   terror, unequal to the task. Upon that a Red Guard would tell
   him to make haste. “Hurry up!” the Guard would repeat. “There is
   no time to waste.”... How many victims passed before us during
   those three hours I do not know, or should find it difficult
   to say. I only know that many, many, many did so pass before
   us--men more dead than alive, men walking with unseeing eyes.
   Nor did their “trial” take long. “Trial,” indeed! It consisted
   merely of the head of the tribunal (or his secretary, dressed in
   a smart tunic) looking at some lists and saying “Remove him.”
   Whereupon the condemned was led out of the office by another
   door.

And take this description of the horrible incidents of the Kharkov
prison evacuation, as given in the Denikin materials:

   Soon after midnight on June 9, the prisoners in the
   concentration camp in Chaikovskaya Street were awakened by a
   sound of shots within the prison, and long, as they listened,
   could hear firing, and footsteps of warders in the corridors,
   and snappings of bolts, and the heavy, lagging tread of
   condemned as they were taken from the cells, and Saenko and his
   assistants marching from door to door, and the officials calling
   out names, and “Come out, you!” and “Collect your things!” so
   loudly that they must have been audible even in the farthest
   dungeons.... And automatically, one after another, too weary in
   body and soul to protest, the condemned rose, and crept towards
   the doorway leading to the staircase of death. And presently,
   clad only in their shirts, or altogether naked, they knelt down
   before a large, newly-dug grave. And, lastly, Saenko, Edward,
   and Bondarenko moved from prisoner to prisoner, and methodically
   shot each of them through the back of the head, so that blood
   and brains came flying from the shattered skulls, and body after
   body sank forward upon their still warm predecessors.... The
   executions lasted for more than three hours, and over fifty
   persons were put to death. And next morning, when news of the
   executions reached the inhabitants, and friends and relatives of
   the deceased assembled in Chaikovskaya Street, and were standing
   there, suddenly the doors of the _kommandatur_ flew open,
   and there issued thence two shabbily dressed men, with Saenko
   and Ostapenko, armed with revolvers, behind them. And just as
   the two unknown men reached the half-way point of the plank
   spanning a large, open grave beside the prison wall, two shots
   caught them, and they sank forward.... Finally Saenko dispersed
   the crowd by having them beaten with rifle-butts--he himself
   shouting: “Do not be afraid that I am not going to bring the
   Red Terror to an end! I am going to bring it to an end _by
   shooting every one of you_.”

The same eye-witness[198] has described also the journey from Kharkov
to Moscow. And what he says confirms our information concerning Saenko,
since he relates how the latter shot further prisoners _en route_.
And confirmation is to be found also in the Denikin materials. Our
eye-witness says:

  [Illustration: Inscriptions written by prisoners on a cell
  wall in Kiev.

    [_See page 174._]

   Stories concerning Saenko are still current in Kharkov, and
   represent no more than the truth. Once I myself saw him shoot
   a sick prisoner on a stretcher; whilst on another occasion
   he killed a prisoner with a dagger in the presence of a comrade
   of ours, who subsequently told us of the deed. Also, once when
   one of a party of prisoners who were in his custody managed to
   escape, he atoned for that _contretemps_ by shooting the
   first upon whom his eye happened to alight. He was a man whose
   eyes were always bleary and inflamed, like the eyes of a man
   under the influence of either morphia or cocaine. And whenever
   he was in this state the symptoms of his sadism would become
   more than ever pronounced.

And Nilostonsky’s book, _Der Blutrausch des Bolschewismus_ (a
work based mostly upon the findings of the Röhrberg Commission, which
carried out its investigations immediately after the occupation of Kiev
by the Volunteer Army during the August of 1919), gives us an even more
harrowing picture:

   On the eve of the evacuation of Kiev every possible victim was
   murdered by the Che-Ka. During the night of August 26, 1919,
   at 5 Sadovaya Street, no fewer than 127 persons were done to
   death by the provincial Che-Ka, whilst (as there was little
   time to spare) 100 others were shot in the garden of the Che-Ka
   building proper, and seventy in the building in Elizabetinskaya
   Street, and as many more on the premises of the Chinese Che-Ka,
   and fifty-one railwaymen on the premises of the railway Che-Ka,
   and others in buildings belonging to the tribunals of Kiev.
   The primary reason for these butcheries was a desire to have
   no prisoners at all to remove, and the secondary reason a lust
   to wreak vengeance in return for Denikin’s successful advance.
   In one lot of Che-Ka buildings some prisoners were still found
   alive, since the Bolshevists had been in such a hurry as to be
   forced to abandon them. And terrible their condition was when
   found! They looked like corpses, and could scarcely move, but
   gazed at us with fixed, unseeing eyes.

And with that Nilostonsky goes on to describe the appearance of a
“human slaughter-house” (he asserts that that had come actually to
be the _official_ appellation of such places) when, later, the
Denikin Commission inspected one.

   The place had formerly been a garage, and then the provincial
   Che-Ka’s main slaughter-house. And the whole of it was coated
   with blood--blood ankle deep, coagulated with the heat of the
   atmosphere, and horribly mixed with human brains, chips of
   skull-bone, wisps of hair, and the like. Even the walls were
   bespattered with blood and similar fragments of brain and scalp,
   as well as riddled with thousands of bullet holes. In the
   centre was a drain about a quarter of a metre deep and wide,
   and about ten metres long. This led to the sanitary system of
   the neighbouring house, but was choked to the brim with blood.
   The horrible den contained 127 corpses, but the victims of the
   previous massacre had been hurriedly buried in the adjacent
   garden. What struck us most about the corpses was the shattering
   of their skulls, or the complete flattening out of those skulls,
   as though the victims had been brained with some such instrument
   as a heavy block. And there were corpses the heads of which were
   altogether missing. But in these cases the missing heads cannot
   possibly have been cut off. They must have been _wrenched_
   off. In the main, bodies were identifiable only if they still
   had left on them some such mark as a set of gold-mounted
   teeth--left, of course, only because the Bolshevists had not
   had time to extract it. And in every case the corpses were
   naked. Also, though it had been the Bolshevists’ rule to load
   their victims on to wagons and lorries as soon as massacred,
   and take them outside the town for burial, we found that a
   corner of the garden near the grave already described had in
   it another, older grave, and that this second grave contained
   eighty bodies which in every instance bore almost unimaginably
   horrible wounds and mutilations. In this grave we found corpses
   with, variously, entrails ripped out, no limbs remaining (as
   though the bodies had literally been chopped up), eyes gouged
   out, and heads and necks and faces and trunks all studded with
   stab wounds. Again, we found a body which had had a pointed
   stake driven through its chest, whilst in several cases the
   tongue was missing. And placed together in one corner of the
   grave we found a medley of detached arms and legs, as well as,
   near the garden fence, some corpses which bore no sign at all of
   death by violence. It was only a few days later that, on these
   unmarked bodies being subjected to post-mortem examination,
   our doctor discovered their mouths and throats and lungs to be
   choked with earth. Clearly the unfortunate wretches had been
   buried alive, and drawn the earth into their respiratory organs
   through their desperate efforts to breathe. And it was persons
   of all ages and of both sexes--old, and middle-aged, and women
   and children--that we found in the grave. One woman was lying
   tied with a rope to her daughter, a child of eight; and both
   bore shot wounds. Further, a grave in the yard of the building
   yielded the body of a Lieutenant Sorokin (accused of espionage
   on behalf of the Volunteer Army) and the cross on which he had
   been crucified a week before our arrival. Also, we found a chair
   like a dentist’s chair which still had attached to it straps
   for the binding of its tortured victims. And the whole of the
   concrete floor around the chair was smeared with blood, and the
   chair itself studded with clots of blood, and fragments of human
   skin, and bits of hairy scalp. And the same with the premises of
   the district Che-Ka, where, similarly, the floor was caked with
   blood and fragments of bone and brain. There, too, a conspicuous
   object was the wooden block upon which the victims had had to
   lay their heads for the purpose of being brained with a crowbar,
   with, in the floor beside it, a traphole filled to the brim with
   human brain-matter from the shattering of the skulls.

  [Illustration: A torture-chamber at Kiev, with “Death to the
  Bourgeoisie!” scrawled across a wall.

    [_See page 176._]

Again, here is a description of a form of torture which the Chinese
Che-Ka of Kiev employed:

   The person to be tortured was first of all tied to a wall or a
   stake. Then an iron tube a few inches in diameter was clamped to
   him by one of its ends, and a live rat inserted into the other
   end, and the end covered over with wire netting, and the tube
   held over a flame until the rat became so maddened by the heat
   as to attempt at all costs to escape by gnawing its way out
   through the human victim’s body. And so the torture would be
   continued for hours--sometimes all through the night into the
   following day, and in any event until the victim died. And the
   Commission found that the following form of torture also had
   been employed in Kiev. The person to be tortured had been buried
   to the neck in the ground, and left there until consciousness
   had failed, when he had been dug out again.

   And then he had been re-buried to the neck until once more
   unconsciousness had supervened. And so on, and so on,
   indefinitely. And inasmuch as the Bolshevists had been treating
   some victims in this manner just before they evacuated Kiev,
   they had, in the hurry of their departure, left some of the
   victims in _statu quo_--to be dug out, of course, by the
   Volunteers.

In fact, each Che-Ka seems to have had its speciality in torture.
Kharkov, for instance, under Saenko, went in primarily for scalpings
and hand flayings; and in Voronezh the person to be tortured was first
stripped naked, and then thrust into a nail-studded barrel, and rolled
about in it, or else branded on the forehead with a five-pointed star,
or, if a member of the clergy, “crowned” with barbed wire. As for the
Che-Kas of Tsaritsin and Kamishin, it was their custom to saw their
victims’ bones apart, whilst Poltava and Kremenchoug made it their
special rule to impale clergy (once, in the latter place, where a
ruffian named Grishka was in command, eighteen monks were transfixed in
a single day). Also, inhabitants have testified that Grishka would burn
at the stake any peasant who had been prominent in a rebellion, and sit
on a chair to enjoy the spectacle. The Che-Ka of Ekaterinoslav, again,
went in for crucifixion and death by stoning, and the Che-Ka of Odessa
for putting officers to death by chaining them to planks, and slowly,
very slowly, pushing them into furnaces, or else tearing their bodies
on a capstan wheel, or else immersing them in a boiler of water heated
to simmering point, and then flinging them into the sea, before finally
consigning them to the flames again.

  [Illustration: A corner of a coach-house on the premises of
  one of the Kievan Che-Kas where prisoners were shot. The
  floor is littered with chips of skull bone, clots of brain,
  etc.

    [_See page 178._]

In fact, the list of tortures is endless. Another Kievan method was
to thrust the living victim into a rough coffin already containing a
decomposing body, and to fire shots over him as he lay there, and then
inform him that he was going to be buried, and bury him (with the
decomposing body) for about half an hour, and, lastly, disinter him
again for further “questioning.” And, seeing that all this might be
repeated more than once, can we wonder that sometimes the victim lost
his reason?

Similarly, the well-known report of the Kievan Sisters of Mercy
mentions the local practice of locking up living prisoners with dead.
And the statement is confirmed by a Latvian lady who was imprisoned for
“espionage” in 1920, and has related that, after being flogged with a
whip, and having her finger-tips pounded with an iron implement, and
her head screwed into an iron circlet, she was pushed into a cellar.

   Very soon the dim light of the electric globe enabled me to
   realise that I was standing amongst corpses, and to recognise
   the corpse of an acquaintance of my own, of a lady who had been
   shot the previous day! And everything had blood upon it, so
   that all my garments became stained.... At last my surroundings
   horrified me to the point that I could feel cold sweat break
   out on my brow.... What happened next I do not know. I only
   know that when I regained consciousness I was back in my own
   cell.[199]

The following is an extract from a statement issued from the central
bureau of the Social Revolutionary Party:

   In Kerensk victims usually were tortured with subjection to
   sudden changes of temperature. First they were put into a
   steaming bathhouse, and then led forth, naked, into the snow.
   And at Alexievskoe and other villages in Voronezh Province the
   victims would similarly be taken naked into the winter-bound
   street, and soused with cold water until they became living
   statues of ice. And at Armavir the “death wreath” was the
   implement most used. That is to say, the victim would have his
   head encircled with a leather strap fitted at the ends with
   an iron nut and a screw, and the nut and the screw be joined
   together, and the head increasingly compressed. Lastly, the
   Che-Ka of a Caucasian _stanitya_ used an iron-studded
   “glove” that was made to be worn on the executioner’s hand.

In his book _Russia during Four Years of Revolution_ S. S. Maslov
writes:

   Possibly the reader may say that these instances of cruelty were
   isolated instances; but alas, and to humanity’s shame, they were
   not so. For example, the practice of transforming living persons
   into statues of ice was widespread in Orel Province whenever
   levyings of “extraordinary revolutionary tax” were toward; and
   once in the Malo-Archangel district the tax-gathering detachment
   placed a merchant named Yinshkevich upon a red-hot stove until
   his due was paid; and in Voronezh Province, in 1920, some
   peasants who were in arrears with their food-tax were subjected
   to the method of “persuasion” of being let down a well, immersed
   at the bottom of it, brought up, and once more plied with
   demands for payment of the tax in full.

In passing it may be said that this author did not go solely to
“counter-revolutionary” sources for his information, but collected
information also from fellow-prisoners of the Democratic and Socialist
Parties.

In the present supposedly civilised age one would rejoice to be able
to believe that some of these stories were exaggerations; but to do so
is difficult when whole companies of persons stand vouchers for them.
A trustworthy correspondent of the _Dni_ of May 13, 1923, writes
thus concerning Georgia and the Transcaucasian Che-Ka:

   The Che-Ka confines its prisoners in damp, deep, hidden dungeons
   for weeks at a time, and meanwhile leaves them practically
   without food, and practically even without water. And beds
   and tables and chairs are not to be found in those dungeons,
   but instead, the captives have to lie on a floor compounded
   of knee-deep mud and blood, and nightly to do battle with the
   rats. And if even those surroundings fail to affect a prisoner,
   he is taken downstairs to a lower, a wholly pitch-dark cellar
   of a kind to make the blood congeal in his veins and render
   him insensible with the cold. And then he is taken upstairs
   again, and once more told to inform against his associates and
   organisation. And if he should still prove recalcitrant he
   is a second time relegated to the cellar--and so on until he
   either dies or reveals the “information” required, no matter how
   improbable that “information” may be. And in other cases victims
   will be awakened by Che-Ka agents in the small hours of the
   morning, and taken into the courtyard, and subjected to a blank
   volley or two in imitation of a real execution, and lastly, half
   alive and half-dead, relegated to the cellar. Of late, too, much
   use has been made of the “wreath of death.” Rakaobadye, the
   Social Democrat, was subjected to the torture until he agreed to
   enter the Che-Ka’s service, but later regained his freedom, and
   told his comrades of his experiences.[200]

Sometimes denunciations of tortures inflicted during “investigations”
appeared even in the Soviet press itself. Especially was this the case
in the early days of Bolshevism, before the usurping Party’s members
had all ceased to be shocked by the fact that outrage and violence were
perpetrated in their “Socialist-run” prisons. In a letter “Do medieval
torture chambers still exist?” which was dispatched to the Muscovite
_Izvestia_ on January 26, 1919, by a Communist who had been
arrested, and temporarily interned, through an error, the writer stated:

   My arrest was accidental, and came about through the fact that I
   happened to be discovered in a house where (as I learnt later)
   counterfeit Kerensky notes had been manufactured. But, for all
   that, I had to spend ten days in prison before the authorities
   even questioned me, and meanwhile I suffered greatly in mind.

And, next, speaking of the “Investigatory Commission” attached to one
of the quarters of the city of Moscow, the writer said:

   Persons in that prison were flogged until their senses left
   them, and then, still unconscious, taken down to a cellar which
   had been the refrigerator chamber, and thenceforth beaten for
   eighteen hours out of the twenty-four. Things of the sort so
   impressed me that I nearly lost my reason.

Again, in the _Pravda_ of March, 1919, we are informed that the
Che-Ka of Vladimir kept a special den for “pricking prisoners’ heels
with needles,” and that when an imprisoned Communist appealed to public
opinion with the words, “One is as much afraid to live as to work, now
that even the most reputable of workers may at any time, if domiciled
in the provinces, find himself in the position in which I am now,” the
matter only attracted official attention because a Communist happened
to be concerned, whereas thousands of similar cases had already been
passed over in silence. “I blush for your torture chamber,” also wrote
L. Reisner to the Che-Ka of Petrograd in December 1918. But his words
were looked upon as “sentimentality,” and few protesting voices joined
in, and even they speedily gave way to the chorus. In February, 1919,
the _Pravda_ cited a case which it roundly declared to illustrate
the actual _advantages_ of mock shootings: the case being one of
a well-to-do peasant who had refused to meet a requisitional order for
20 _poods_-weight of grain by way of “extraordinary food tax,”
and had been imprisoned, and still refused to pay, and had then been
stood up against the local churchyard wall, and again refused to pay,
and, lastly, had had a shot fired about his ears, and--oh, miracle of
miracles!--at length agreed to pay what was owing.

An equally amazing item is to be found in the Che-Ka’s _Weekly_,--an
item which furnishes us with yet further historical proof of our point,
and was headed “Why does the Che-Ka hesitate?”

   Tell us [asked the signatories of the article--the head of
   the Che-Ka of Nolinsk, and others] why you did not subject
   that fellow Lockhart[201] to the most refined of all possible
   tortures, and thereby wrest from him the information which
   we require, and also the budget of valuable addresses which
   such an official always possesses? Why, we repeat, did you
   allow him to leave your premises without having been subjected
   to such tortures as would have made the blood of every
   counter-revolutionary in the land run cold?... Away with such
   shilly-shallying! When a dangerous rascal has been caught he
   should have all the information possible extracted from him, and
   then be dispatched to a better world.

This was an article in an official journal,[202] and that journal the
very journal which purported to be “imparting wise direction to the
activities of local Che-Kas, and propagating the ideas and methods
of warfare which the All-Russian Che-Ka itself employs”! However, at
the sixth Congress of Soviets the representatives of the All-Russian
Che-Ka assented to this by saying: “We recognise that it is time for
shilly-shallying and namby-pamby methods to be eliminated from our
dealings with the _bourgeoisie_ and the _bourgeoisie’s_ servants.”

Hence, from the moment when the Che-Ka’s slogan of “Show no mercy to
the _bourgeois_ rabble!” first rang out in the provinces that
slogan was bound to be interpreted by the provincial officials as at
once a call for and a sanction of cruelty, and to nullify in advance
the Che-Ka’s subsequent instructions that a watch be kept over the
“legality” of the proceedings of provincial executive committees.
And this was the more bound to be so because those instructions were
theoretical rather than practical.[203] For the provinces, of course,
took their cue from the centre, where, as British reports have stated,
a precedent for torture was set in the torturing of Kannegiesser, the
assassin of Uritsky. But is it, or is it not, the case that Madame
Kaplau, the assailant of Lenin, also was tortured? At all events,
rumours to that effect gained currency in Moscow; and though I cannot,
for my own part, feel sure on the point, I do know this much: that one
night whilst I was lying in the Butyrka, a night which I now believe to
have been the night immediately following the Lenin attempt, we could
hear that _someone_ was being tortured in the building, and long
lay listening to the sounds. Also, although, in those days, it was as
unusual for news of torturings to reach the public ear as it is now,
I did at least hear of the “safes trial” in August, 1920, and learn
about the details of seating the victims upon ice (and the rest) which
were laid before the Supreme Revolutionary Tribunal. And the picture
becomes more vivid still when we read of the great political trial in
Turkhestan in October, 1919, when the accused, to the number of twelve
or so, repudiated the evidence which they were alleged previously
to have given before the local Che-Ka, and pointed out that their
signatures to the “confessions” had been extorted through torture, and
thus caused the Tribunal to question the “special detachment” of the
Che-Ka which had inflicted the torture, and thereby to elicit the fact
that torture had been a regular item of that Che-Ka’s routine. “Upon
this,” a correspondent of the _Volya Rossii_[204] who was present
has said, “sobs and cries arose in the hall, and made the building
re-echo:” with the result that the judges disregarded the fact that the
counsel for the prosecution dubbed the protests “mere _bourgeois_
lamentations,” and uttered a formal condemnation of what had been done.

  [Illustration: Kharkov victims.

    [_See page 188._]

And only recently the _Izvestia_[205] of Moscow reported a session
of the provincial court of Omsk at which there were tried one Hermann,
commandant of the district militia at Sherbanov, a fellow militiaman of
his, and a Dr. Troitsky on a charge of having tortured prisoners during
examination by pouring hot sealing-wax upon the victims’ palms, arms,
necks, and scalps, and then tearing away the wax, and, with it, whole
patches of skin. “We cannot,” the President of the Court moralised,
“tolerate such methods of inquiry, for they are worthy, rather, of the
Spanish Inquisition.” Yet they were “methods of inquiry” which had
received practically the sanction of “law,” and we gain additional
information of value on the subject from the _Socialistichesky
Vestnik_. To that journal a correspondent wrote:

   Last spring persistent rumours and disclosures of certain
   occurrences caused the provincial court of Stavropol to
   appoint a special commission of enquiry into torturings said
   to have been inflicted by the local criminal investigation
   department.... The commission found that, in addition to
   floggings, suspensions, and other physical violence, the
   following means of torment had been employed. (_a_) First
   of all there had been confinement in “the hot cellar,” a dark,
   sunken cell three paces long, and oneand-a-half paces wide,
   with the floor of the cell cut into steps. For purposes of
   torment as many as eighteen persons at once had been placed
   in this cell, so that, there not being standing-room for them
   all, some of them had had to remain constantly supported upon
   their companions’ shoulders, whilst the atmosphere had been
   such that a lamp would not burn in it, nor matches strike.
   Yet the prisoners had been left there for from forty-eight to
   seventy-two hours, and, meanwhile, given neither food nor water,
   nor yet permission to leave the cell for natural purposes. And
   even women, as well as men, had been incarcerated there--a
   case in point being a certain Madame Weitzmann. (_b_)
   Secondly, there had been confinement in “the cold cellar,” a
   vault communicating with the shaft of a disused icehouse. In
   this case prisoners had been wholly divested of their clothing,
   and lowered into the shaft of the icehouse on a sliding ladder;
   after which the ladder had been withdrawn, and cold water poured
   upon the prisoners. And this torture had been inflicted even
   during seasons of severe frost, and in some cases included
   pourings of as many as eight bucketfuls of water upon a single
   prisoner.... (_c_) Thirdly, there had been measurement
   [compression] of the skull.

Also, it appeared that this criminal investigation department had
been shooting prisoners for alleged attempts to escape, and, in the
April of 1922, used the pretext for putting to death, in particular,
a certain Mastriukov. In fact, when the commission of inquiry issued
its findings they were findings based upon testimony both of victims
and of eye-witnesses, upon discoveries made by qualified medical men,
upon results of post-mortem examinations, and upon confessions of
Che-Ka employees, the actual inflicters of the tortures--the plea of
these last being that they had acted only on the express orders of a
certain Grigorovich who was head of the local C.I.D., head of the local
executive committee, and head of the local provincial committee of
the Communist Party. Also, they said, they had received instructions
from Povetsky, Grigorovich’s assistant, and from Topishev, judicial
adviser to the C.I.D., and carried out the tortures _with these
two officials’ personal help_. Yet, though the commission ordered
the persons inculpated to be arrested and proceeded against, their
arrest was found to be impracticable owing to the fact that a certain
Chernobrovy, head of the local O.G.P.U., concealed them for a while
on premises attached to his official quarters, and then produced in
their justification a secret circular issued by the Central Che-Ka
itself which laid it down that if, during a process of “investigation”
of prisoners, or a preliminary enquiry with regard to prisoners, the
latter should resist circumstantial evidence, confrontation, and
“threats,” and refuse to confess to their imputed crimes, “the old and
proven remedy” should be applied to them. The origin of the circular
had, apparently, been as follows. During the summer of 1921 Voul, a
notorious “people’s prosecutor” attached to the Che-Ka of Moscow, had
been accused of employing inquisitional torture and violence, and,
upon that, had threatened to send in his resignation on the ground
that, should torture be debarred him, he would not be responsible for
preventing any further increase of “banditism” in Moscow: and this
threat had so frightened Menzhinsky that the latter had forthwith
accorded Voul licence to pursue his inquisitional methods as before,
and issued the foregoing “old and proven remedy” circular. Hence the
usual result happened, and none of the Stavropol officials who had
employed torture were arrested--the only persons to be arrested being
persons who had displayed an altogether uncalled-for amount of zeal and
initiative in probing Stavropol’s criminal-investigatory mysteries! And
we have detailed confirmation of this from a letter published in No. 1
of the journal _Pouti Revolutsyi_ (“Roads to Revolution”), one of
the Left Social Revolutionary Party’s journals.

Akin to the Stavropol business was a Turkhestan affair. In Turkhestan
the chief inflicter of torture was, for a while, an ex-circus clown
named Drozhin, a member of, and an executioner employed by, the local
Che-Ka. In time, however, this man was dismissed from his post on a
torture charge--only to be reappointed, on the strength of his record
as a “questioner,” to the post of local political commissary.[206]
And how we can imagine the exploits of the ex-circus clown in his new
rôle! Not that we know very much about his exploits in that particular
quarter of the world. What we do know about him is his career in a
kindred sphere at the other end of Russia, at Archangel. I have before
quoted a report in _The Che-Ka_ dealing with the concentration
camp at Kholmogory; and although I am not personally aware of the
identity of the author of the report, of the man who, in the face of
every possible danger and difficulty, travelled to the far North to
collect for himself authentic information concerning horrors which had
reached our ears even in Moscow, it was in Moscow that subsequently he
sought for means of assistance for the unfortunate prisoners in the
“Camp of Death,” and I was present when a paper was read on his behalf.
The paper proved to be even more terrible than his report had been: so
much so that we sat petrified, and realised at once that no possible
means of help was conceivable. And if I cite a few details from the
paper, they will help the reader to realise what life conditions were
in that inferno of a camp.

  [Illustration: Human “gloves,” flayings of human hands,
  found in a torture chamber at Kharkov after the Bolshevists’
  departure.

    [_See page 196._]

   So long as the abominably cruel Bakhoulis was commandant of the
   place, persons were shot in large numbers for purely trivial
   offences. Truly detestable are the tales told of him! Amongst
   other things, he made it his practice to divide his prisoners
   into groups of ten, and punish a whole group if any one of
   its members committed an offence. Once a member of a group
   escaped, and could not be found; whereupon the other nine
   were shot forthwith; and when the actual offender himself was
   caught he also received a sentence of death, and was led to the
   side of a ready-dug grave, and cursed at for a while by the
   commandant, and, lastly, hit over the head in such a manner as
   to fall, half-stunned, into the grave, and be buried alive.
   This incident I had from one of the camp guards themselves.
   Later, when Bakhoulis had been transferred to the command of the
   camp at Portaminsk, the most northerly camp of all (situated
   about a hundred versts north of Archangel), he continued his
   Kholmogory practices there, and caused the prisoners to be fed
   upon dried fish alone (so that they never saw bread) and, in
   general, gave full rein to his cruelty. In particular it is said
   that of 200 prisoners whom he removed thither from Kholmogory
   very few survived. I found the very name of Portaminsk to
   inspire captives with fear, so much had the name come to mean
   practically a death sentence. Yet the conditions of Portaminsk
   differed little from those obtaining at Kholmogory.[207]

Further details as to life in the Portaminsk disused Monastery reach us
in a private letter secretly conveyed to Petrograd.[208]

   Once, as we were starting work at six o’clock in the morning,
   and had not yet left the courtyard, one of the prisoners, a man
   recently recovered from typhus, and therefore still weak from
   the attack, fainted away: whereupon the commandant declared him
   not to be genuinely ill, and, to punish him for “malingering,”
   had him stripped stark naked, thrust into an icy-cold cell, and
   pelted with snow. Later the man died of the chill then caught.

Also the writer records how a sick man who failed to keep up with a
prison convoy proceeding from one village to another was shot before
his comrades’ very eyes. And another eye-witness has written:

   The following may give you an idea of the abominations committed
   here. Whilst some prisoners were digging sand for building
   purposes in front of the commandant’s house he noticed that
   they sat down for a rest. Accordingly, without moving from his
   place at the window, he drew his revolver, fired, and killed
   and wounded several of the party. Upon that the prisoners went
   on hunger strike; and on this coming to the ears of Moscow, a
   commission of enquiry was dispatched to Portaminsk, and the
   commandant removed. But the new commandant, a sailor from the
   “Gangut,” is just as cruel as his predecessor, and haphazard
   shootings of prisoners by guards before their comrades’ eyes are
   as common as ever.

The mere fact that in six months, during the years 1921 and 1922, 442
prisoners out of 1200 died should show us what were the conditions of
confinement in the North.

At Kholmogory prisoners would be thrown into a pitch-dark cell, or
confined in buildings known respectively as “the cold tower” and “the
white house”--the latter an isolated edifice the one small room of
which had no lavatory attached, and at times would be made to hold as
many as forty persons. Typhus patients confined there had to spend the
ten days before the “crisis” of the malady without any sort of medical
attention, and it was quite a common thing for prisoners to lose their
reason whilst in the building.

And since we in Moscow could gain only fragmentary news of such
happenings, and were ourselves in the power of officials who stood
indemnified against punishment for their acts, how could we voice a
protest with safety, even if it had been possible for us to voice
one? More than once during my time in the Butyrka Gaol I have known
prisoners whom I had seen undergoing ill-treatment whilst under
examination subsequently beseech me to keep silence on the subject. The
prison doctors themselves were forbidden to disclose that floggings
of prisoners were being practised, and once when a Dr. Sheglov gave
some Socialists a certificate that they had been subjected to physical
outrage he was sent into exile at Archangel, and allotted for his
portion of hard labour the task of clearing away sanitary refuse. Of
floggings outside the prison we did hear news, whilst also we heard of
a Social Democrat named Treigav being thrust into a cell which measured
three paces by two, and made to share it with a Chinese lunatic who had
homicidal mania. These and other instances of the sort are to be found
detailed in Nos. 1 and 14 of _Revolutsionnaya Rossia_. Again,
a letter secretly conveyed to us from a Left Social Revolutionary
named Shebalin told how he had been tortured (in Petrograd) by having
his arms and legs beaten with a revolver butt, his eye-sockets and
testicles prodded and compressed until he had swooned with the agony,
and his body flogged in such a manner as to leave no weals or blood,
but cause the blood of the flagellation to pour from his throat
alone.[209] And similar to his statements concerning compression of
the testicles was evidence given by Sinovary before the tribunal at
Lausanne. Besides, I myself knew Shebalin, who for six months had been
my fellow-prisoner in the Butyrka, and therefore can testify that he
was a man incapable of telling a lie, or even of exaggerating.

   I can assure you (he wrote), that this letter is being sent
   to you from a torture establishment the _régime_ and the
   resources of which outdo even those of the ancient “Bastilles
   of Russia,” the Fortress of Schlüsselburg and the Fortress of
   Petropavlovsk--in both of which I have been imprisoned for
   offending the Imperial Crown.

Also, the letter mentioned certain cunningly devised cells which had
just been contrived on the Gorokhovaya Street premises of the Petrograd
Che-Ka--little cramped, icy-cold rooms walled with double linings of
cork so as to prevent all sounds whatsoever from reaching the outside
world. And there, our informant said, prisoners were “questioned” by
being frozen and burnt and otherwise tortured--usually for between five
and ten days at a stretch, or even for a month.[210] And in a book
written abroad, but based primarily upon materials which the author
had brought with him from Russia, S. S. Maslov has stated that it was
a common, almost a universal, thing for prisoners to be kicked and
beaten with rifle and revolver butts all over their bodies. Also, he
cites an instance of barbarism which is the more characteristic of the
Bolshevist “justice,” whose principles are so enthusiastically extolled
in the Soviet press as “tending less to punish than to reform” in that
the instance had no sort of relation to politics.

   In Moscow, during the May of 1920, some juvenile pickpockets of
   from eleven to fifteen years of age were arrested, thrown into
   a cellar on the Che-Ka’s premises, and kept separate from the
   rest of the prisoners. For the Che-Ka had decided to put these
   children to an official use, and obtain, through them, the names
   of pickpockets with whom the children had associated in the
   past. Yet, though the authorities cajoled and threatened, the
   children persisted in saying that they knew nothing whatsoever
   on the subject, and all inquiries proved fruitless. Next,
   employees of the Che-Ka entered the cell, and beat the children
   with their fists, and, as the victims fell under the blows,
   stamped upon them with their heels. And then the children did
   promise to inform against their late companions, but, never
   having known those companions’ real names, had to be driven
   about the streets in motor-cars and tram-cars, or else taken to
   the railway stations, on the chance that, _en route_, they
   might be able to point out one or more of the culprits wanted.
   And though on the first day the children persistently avoided
   denunciation of any former comrades, they were so cruelly
   beaten for this when they returned to the Che-Ka building in
   the evening, and every evening afterwards, that at last they
   did begin to betray old associates, and then, through fear of
   further floggings, even to inform against _perfectly innocent
   persons_, persons whom they had never known at all. And
   when this had been going on for three weeks or so, orders were
   received for the children to be transferred from the premises
   of the Che-Ka to the Butyrka Gaol: by which time the children
   were emaciated, bruised all over, clad in rags, stamped with
   fear until they had come to look like little animals constantly
   confronting death, given to trembling, and apt to moan and weep
   even during their sleep at night. Then, after two or three weeks
   in the Butyrka Gaol, orders came for them to be restored to the
   Che-Ka premises: and I have since been told by prisoners who
   had often and long been confined in gaol that they had never
   before in their lives--no, not even during their imprisonment
   in Siberia--heard such terrible cries as those children uttered
   when they realised that they were going to be taken to the
   Che-Ka’s cellars again. Indeed, my informants said, they had
   never before felt such burning hatred of their oppressors as
   when their tear-dimmed vision beheld those young creatures’
   suffering, and saw their young forms being marched away to the
   yard in a frenzy of weeping.

And only recently I heard that at Irkutsk an old revolutionary named
Kulikovsky had been done to death during examination by an agent of the
O.G.P.U. And I have since read in the journal _Dni_ the details
of the occurrence: how that when Kulikovsky refused to reply to his
torturer’s questions the latter battered him with a revolver-butt
until, with skull fractured, the old man fell and died.


           _The Amount of Licence accorded to Executioners_

I have said that Saenko was a sadist, and described some of his doings.
And from writings by the Socialist Karelin we obtain also items
concerning Saenko’s chief assistant, the sailor Edward, a fellow who
would fall to friendly talk and jest with a group of prisoners, and
then suddenly draw his revolver and shoot one of the wretches through
the back of the neck.

And from a writer named Averbuch, a man well acquainted with affairs in
Odessa, we hear of the abominable doings of Kalinchenko, the head of
the Che-Ka of that city. To his fantastic whims and crazy dispensation
of “justice” many stories are due. For example, once he celebrated
his nameday by sending to the local prison for “three of the fattest
_bourgeois_ to be obtained,” and, in his drunken frenzy, shooting
them then and there. And Averbuch also has written:

   Once when I called at the Café Astra (a place frequented
   almost exclusively by Bolshevist officials) I heard from Vaska
   the executioner’s own lips the story of his shooting of two
   _bourgeois_. Yes, he described to me their agonies of
   mind before death, their kissings of his hands and feet, their
   beggings for mercy. And he added: “After all, I have only done
   my duty as a revolutionary.”

At Odessa, too, there was an executioner named Johnson, a man sent
thither from Moscow. And of him Averbuch has written[211]:

   Before long the fellow’s name became a synonym for everything
   that was cruel and vile. For only he, only this Johnson, only
   this negro executioner, could skin a victim before killing him,
   or cut off a prisoner’s limbs, one by one, during the ordeal of
   examination.

Yet _was_ Johnson the only ruffian who could do such things? At
a Bolshevist exhibition held in Moscow during the years 1920–21 one
of the exhibits was a pair of “gloves” which had been ripped from
the human hand; and though the Bolshevists represented this pair to
be an example of atrocities committed by the Whites, rumours as to
Saenko taking “gloves” from victims at Kharkov had reached Moscow much
earlier than that, and “gloves” of the sort had actually been found in
the basement of the Che-Ka’s premises, whilst Anarchists subsequently
brought from Kharkov to the Butyrka had unanimously testified to
perpetrations of the abomination in question. Yet Lounacharsky, a
member of the Party thus exhibiting Saenko’s “gloves” as a sample of
cruelty committed by the opposite side,[212] had said at a session
of the Soviet held on December 4, 1918: “Although we are accused
of a Hottentot standard of morality, we are not going to admit the
impeachment”!

With Johnson was associated a young woman executioner named Vera
Grebenninkova (or “Dora”). This female’s talent for barbarism rivalled
that of the negro himself, and amongst other stories of her ferocity
we may include the item that she would tear out victims’ hair by the
handful before doing the same with them limb by limb--cutting off ears,
dislocating jaws, and the like. Her activities may be summed up in the
fact that during her two and a half months with the Odessan Che-Ka she
shot over 700 persons--a third of the whole tale![213]

In Kiev it was the practice to make the condemned prostrate themselves
amongst the curdled blood on the floor before being shot through the
back of the head, or brained. And in certain cases they were even made
to prostrate themselves upon victims shot a moment or two earlier, or
were taken out into the garden for the purpose of a “human hunt” of the
kind related by the Kievan Sisters of Mercy. “Mikhailov, the spruce,
immaculate chief of the Che-Ka, had a particular love for stripping
prisoners naked, and then chivying them about the Che-Ka garden with a
brandished revolver.”[214]

There is a similar reminiscence recorded by the French authoress,
Odette Kun, a self-styled Communist whom untoward circumstances caused
to be confined in Che-Ka cells at Sebastopol, Simferopol, Kharkov, and
Moscow. In one passage this writer describes a Petrograd hunt of women
prisoners which she had had related to her by an actual eye-witness of
the “sport.”[215] It seems that in 1920 her informant had, with twenty
other women, been incarcerated for “counter-revolutionary activity.”

   One night a band of soldiers arrived at the building, and drove
   some of my companions out into the yard; and the next moment,
   when a chorus of almost inhuman cries reached our ears, and we
   looked through a window into the courtyard, we saw that the
   women had been stripped of every shred of clothing, and were
   being bundled into a wagon. Later, we learnt that they were
   taken out into the country, and told to run for their lives,
   with a promise that the first who reached a given goal should
   have her life spared. Needless to say, all of them were killed.

S. N. Volkonsky’s memoirs, again, state that in Briansk it was the
practice to shoot prisoners in the back as soon as ever an examination
was concluded[216]; also, that in Siberia prisoners were brained with
an iron “rattle.” And a woman has related:

   Just under our window I saw an ex-agent of the _Okhrana_
   (the old secret political police force) being killed in the
   Che-Ka’s courtyard. He was killed with a pole or a rifle-butt.
   It took over an hour to finish him off, and all the time he was
   beseeching the men for mercy.

At Ekaterinoslav, too, a fellow called Valiavko who shot
“counter-revolutionaries” by the hundred would release from ten to
fifteen prisoners in a small garden around which he had had a special
fence constructed, and then enter with two or three friends, and fall
to shooting at the “game.”[217] In the same city “Comrade” Trepelov,
head of the Che-Ka, would select victims for execution merely by the
process of marking names on the lists whose appearance displeased
him, and so, with a “_Raz_.”[218] in thick red pencil, sign the
victims’ death-warrant. Another device of his was to pencil the lists
in such a manner as to render exact determination of which names were
meant impossible. Also, when the local prison was being evacuated he
saved time by having the whole of his listfuls of persons (fifty in
all) shot indiscriminately.

In the _Revolutsionnoyé Dielo_ (“The Revolutionary Cause”)[219] of
Petrograd we find the following details of how sixty persons were shot
after the Tagantsev trial:

   The shootings took place at a station on the Irinovskaya
   Railway, where the prisoners were led out at dawn, and told to
   dig their own graves. Then, when the graves were half dug,
   they were told to remove their clothing.... From all sides came
   groans and cries for mercy, but the victims nevertheless were
   pushed into the holes, and fired upon--one lot being pushed upon
   the top of the previous lot, and shot even as the latter had
   been shot, until all the graves had become filled up with dead
   and groaning.

The executioners of Moscow did their daily work in dungeons fitted with
asphalt floors and gutters and trap-falls to carry off the blood. We
find a good description of the ruffians in an article entitled “The
Ship of Death,” and included in the collection _The Che-Ka_. The
three executioners most prominent in Moscow were men named Emelianov,
Pankratov, and Zhoukov--all of them registered members of the Communist
Party, and therefore persons accustomed to live on the fat of the land.
Like all other executioners, too, they were paid by piece rate, and
received their victims’ clothes and jewellery for their perquisites.
Hence many of them amassed perfect fortunes from gold-mounted teeth
torn out, and pectoral crosses filched.

An eye-witness has stated in the journal _Echo_ of Kovno that at
one time shootings in the cellars of Nos. 13 and 14 Bretenka Street,
Moscow, were carried out by so poising a rifle on a stand at the nearer
end of the basement as to point towards the precise place where the
head of a victim would naturally come, and that if the victim was too
short to reach the place, steps were placed beneath his feet.[220]

Again, S. S. Maslov speaks of a woman executioner whom he frequently
saw during the year 1919. Every two or three days this woman would make
her appearance in the central prison hospital with a cigarette between
her teeth, a whip in her hand, and an unsheathed revolver at her waist.
And as she traversed the wards whence the next batch of victims was
about to be removed for execution, she would revile and flog like
dogs any patients who were so benumbed with terror as to be slow in
collecting their belongings, or who sobbed too audibly as they bade
their comrades farewell. Quite a young woman she was--not more than
twenty or so. Nor was she the only female executioner in Moscow.

And from the same Maslov, who, as ex-member of the Constituent Assembly
for Vologda Province, was well acquainted with events in that region,
we have a description of a non-professional female executioner named
Rebekah Plastinina-Maisel who was a surgeon’s assistant in a small
town in Tver Province, shot, single-handed, over 100 victims. Of this
harpy and her second husband, the notorious Kedrov, a woman named E. D.
Kouskova who then was living as an exile at Vologda has stated that the
pair would question prisoners from their travelling saloon at railway
stations, and then and there shoot the wretches as soon as Rebekah had
finished belabouring them, and shouting at them, and attacking them
with her fists as ever and anon she cried hysterically “To be shot!
Put them up against the wall!” And, adds Maslov, “I myself know of at
least ten cases in which women executioners amused themselves for a
while with ‘_potting_’ holes in their victims’ heads.” And from
a correspondent of the journal _Golos Rossii_ (“The Voice of
Russia”)[221] we have a description of similar activities in Archangel
during the spring and summer of 1920, with, for “heroine” again, the
same Rebekah Plastinina-Maisel.[222]

   In Archangel (says the correspondent), after the mock funeral
   procession of empty red coffins, Rebekah fell to wreaking
   vengeance upon her old party foes. Indeed, she became a maniac
   upon whose head there must have fallen the curses of hundreds of
   mothers and wives, for her malice surpassed even the malice of
   her male colleagues on the All-Russian Che-Ka. To begin with,
   she repaid petty insults once shown her by her first husband’s
   family by having that family crucified _en masse_.... So
   cruel, mad, and hysterical she was that also she invented a
   story that once some White officers had tied her to a horse’s
   tail, and started off the animal at a gallop. And she came to
   believe this self-imagined legend so firmly that, as soon as
   she reached Solovetsky, she took over from her husband the post
   of director of atrocities in that establishment, whilst later
   she had the victims whom Eydouk’s commission had arrested and
   dispatched to Moscow returned thence, forwarded by steamer to
   Kholmogory (that graveyard of the flower of Russia’s youth!),
   stripped, loaded on to barges, shot, and thrown into the sea. To
   the end of the summer the town groaned under the burden of her
   terrorism.

And in another communication to the same journal the correspondent
adds: “In Archangel alone this Rebekah Plastinina-Maisel killed
eighty-seven officers and thirty-three citizens with her own hand. And
on another occasion she with her own hand scuttled a barge laden with
500 refugees and Miller soldiers.”[223]

Take also the following thumbnail sketch by an eye-witness who was
present at the shooting of fifty-two persons in a single evening:

   The chief executioner, a Lettish woman with a face so brutalised
   as to have earned for her, amongst the prisoners, the sobriquet
   of “The Pug,” was a female sadist. Always she wore breeches; and
   always she carried two revolvers at her belt. But subsequently
   this same “Comrade Louba” (she hailed, I believe, from Baku) was
   herself shot for stealing Government property.[224]

Another such woman was the female chief of the Che-Ka of Ounech, who,
a brute beast rather than a human being, and a fit match for the
Lettish hag, never stirred a step without revolvers and a goodly stock
of cartridges in her leathern waist-belt. Once a refugee just come
from Russia said of her to me: “The inhabitants of Ounech speak of her
literally with bated breath.” May history preserve her name for the
benefit of future generations!

And the town of Rybinsk too had its beast-woman, a creature named Zina.
And Ekaterinoslav, Sebastopol and other places similarly evolved female
monstrosities.[225]

For the rest, human nerves are fallible, and even Bolshevist
executioners can weary of “a task for the people’s benefit.” Hence, in
many cases it was by ruffians sunken in intoxication, in the requisite
condition of “irresponsibility” for slaughtering their fellows, that
massacres were carried out. Frequently I myself, whilst in the Butyrka
Gaol, could see that its most hardened administrative officials, from
the Commandant downwards, had indulged in cocaine or some other drug
before the functionary whom we called the “Commissary of Death” was
due to call at the gaol for his victims, and they would have to be
collected from the cells by the officials. “In almost every cupboard,”
says Nilostousky concerning the Che-Kas in Kiev, “and, for that matter,
in almost every drawer, we found empty cocaine bottles in piles.” Thus
drugged, of course, executioners would lose the last semblance of
humanity, and a trustworthy witness has given us a particularly good
instance of this, as related to that witness by a high official of the
All-Russian Che-Ka[226]:

   Once (the informant said), the chief executioner of Moscow, a
   man named Maga, a fellow who had shot thousands with his own
   hand (and the informant gave the almost fantastic estimate of
   11,000!), completed the shooting of fifteen or twenty victims by
   throwing himself also upon the director of the special branch,
   Popov, who had attended the batch of executions merely for the
   pleasure of the spectacle. Maga’s eyes were bloodshot, and his
   frame bespattered with blood and brains. Indeed, he looked mad
   and horrible. Fortunately, though Popov lost his head, and
   ran for his life, and a scuffle followed, some other Che-Ka
   officials came to the rescue, and overpowered Maga.

Yet even drugging did not always enable executioners’ minds to stand
the strain. In the report of the Kievan Sisters of Mercy to which I
have more than once referred we read that sometimes Avdokhin, head of
the principal Kievan Che-Ka, so felt the nerve-tension that actually he
would go and pour out his troubles to the Sisters! “I am ill, Sisters,”
he would say. “My head is burning, and I cannot sleep. All night the
dead men keep torturing me.” And says another of the Sisters:

   Never can I think of the faces of Terekhov, and Nikiforov, and
   Ougarov, and Abnaver, and Gousig and other members of those
   Che-Kas without feeling more than ever convinced that they are
   abnormal, sadists, cocaine fiends, men who have lost the last
   semblance of humanity.

At all events, it stands beyond doubt that for a while the lunatic
asylums of Russia registered large numbers of cases of a disease
which became known as “executioner’s dementia,” owing to its tendency
to render its subjects a prey to real or imaginary remorse for
bloodshed done, and to the most harrowing hallucinations. Similarly,
eye-witnesses have told of Bolshevist sailors suddenly being seized
with paroxysms in public places, and a Muscovite correspondent of
the _Dni_ once wrote: “The State Political Department has been
trying to dispose of these madmen by shooting them--a resource which
alone has enabled more than one such sufferer to find release from his
terrible, haunting nightmares.”

Also, there were executioners evincing the clearest possible symptoms
of mental degeneracy. Well do I remember a boy executioner who, aged
only fourteen, shared my imprisonment in the Butyrka. So intellectually
deficient was this lad, and so insensible of the enormity of what he
had done, that he would boast of his exploits to his fellow prisoners,
and relate them in the fullest detail. And when, during the January
of 1922, a female “people’s prosecutor” of one of the Che-Kas of Kiev
(Remover, a Hungarian), was arrested on a charge of having, without
authority, shot a batch of eighty prisoners, _most of whom were young
men_, she was found to be sexually deranged, and to have shot not
only persons actually suspected, but also witnesses who unfortunately
had excited her diseased craving during the time that they had been
testifying before the Che-Ka. Lastly, a medical man has described for
us a woman commissary named Nesterenko who would compel Red Guards to
violate helpless women and girls--yes, and young children--in her very
presence.[227]

Again, one needs but scan the records of the Denikin Commission to see
that in dozens of cases higher officials, functionaries who in no way
stood charged with the actual performance of executions, killed victims
with their own hands. An example is Vichmann of Odessa, who had six
executioners at his disposal (one of them, by the way, officiated under
the pseudonym of “Amour”!) yet would go into the cells, and slaughter
prisoners for his personal pleasure. And Atarbekov of Piatigorsk is
known to have stabbed victims with a dagger, and Novar of Odessa to
have killed a man named Grigoriev and his twelve-year-old son before
witnesses, and another Che-Ka official to have had a weakness for
“making his victim kneel down in front of him, and compressing the
unfortunate man’s head between his knees, and shooting him through the
back of the neck.”[228] Such instances, in fact, are endless.

Also, so common, in Russia, did death become that, as previously
mentioned, a special phraseology of cynicism crept into the official
press when detailing lists of shootings: examples being seen when
victims were said to have been “paid over,” or to have been “given
a change,” or to have been “sent to meet their father,” or to have
been “dispatched to Doukhonin’s headquarters,” and when Voul of
Moscow adopted the practice of writing that he had “played the guitar
upon” them, or “sealed” them, and when Piatigorsk journalists took
to speaking of “giving” victims “the natsokal” (an onomatopœic word
based upon the sound of a revolver trigger snapping), and of “sending”
them “to the Mashouk to sniff violets.” Lastly, once the Commandant of
the Che-Ka of Petrograd himself was heard shouting to his wife over
the telephone: “To-day I am to take some _woodcocks_ over to
Kronstadt.”[229]

An equal amount of brutality and cynicism marked the actual carrying
out of the executions. In Odessa, when the death sentence had been
pronounced upon an accused, the executioners stripped him naked, hung
a numbered tab about his neck for identification purposes whenever the
moment for slaughter should arrive, and forced him to sign a paper
acknowledging that he had himself heard his doom proclaimed. It was
in Odessa, too, that the cells of the condemned would be visited by
officials who mockingly charged the condemned to supply biographical
details for their own obituary notices! And a similar instance of
mocking condemned prisoners is described by Madame Vyroubova--a party
of sailors under an ex-lawyer named Levitsky, in this case, driving
round and round a prison with songs, accordion music, and shouts of
“Hi, you _bourgeois_! We are chanting your requiem!”[230]

But Petrograd, rather, went in for scrupulous observance of “legality”
in the carrying out of executions. It even set aside a room specially
for the purpose of informing prisoners of their fate: with the result
that the room came to be known as “The Chamber of Departures.” True,
the _Pravda_ once took it upon itself to ridicule an English press
assertion that military bands were wont to play during the progress
of executions; yet this is no more than what actually happened on an
occasion during the Terror of September, 1918, when Moscow shot some
ex-Tsarist Ministers and others. In passing, it should be said that at
that period all Muscovite executions were carried out by Red Guards
on the Khodynka Plain, but later some Chinese replaced those Guards,
and later, again, a special corps of paid executioners, assisted by,
when necessary, amateurs. Again, witnesses examined by the Denikin
Commission testified that both in Nikolaev and in Saratov ordinary
criminals were set to execute their political fellows, and conceded
their own lives as a reward, whilst in far Turkhestan judges themselves
would act as executioners, and the custom seems still to obtain. Of
course, it is a debatable question whether the person who has passed a
death sentence ought not also to carry out that sentence; but, however
that may be, there lies at our disposal a statement that as late as
in 1923 a Judge V--always killed his own condemned, and as soon as he
had sentenced them caused them to be divested of their clothing in an
adjoining room, and shot. And of the Che-Ka of Odessa it is said that
in 1923 it devised, for execution purposes, a dark, narrow passage-way
which had a gaping cavity in the flooring at its further end, and an
embrasure in each of the flanking walls, so that as the condemned man
walked unawares along the passage way he fell into the pit, and could
be fired upon from the embrasures without the executioners having even
seen his face.

For only one more description of the kind need I make room--a
description published in the fourth issue of the suppressed Left
Social Revolutionary _Bulletin_,[231] and telling of shootings
perpetrated by the Muscovite Che-Ka at the period when the “rights” of
provincial Che-Kas and revolutionary tribunals were under discussion.
But, as a description, it is the more valuable in that it was obtained
from an actual onlooker at what was done.

   Nearly every night a certain number of prisoners are removed
   from the cells for “dispatch to Irkutsk,” as our modern
   _oprichniki_ now express it. Formerly the condemned were
   taken out to the Khodynsky Plain for execution, but since then
   their destination has become, in the first instance, Number 11,
   Varsonofievsky Pereonlok, and then Number 7, where, in batches
   of thirty, or twelve, or eight, or four, as the case may be,
   they are led to a room on the fourth floor to be stripped to
   their shirts, and then marched downstairs again and, half-naked
   as they are, stationed against stacks of fuel at the end of a
   snow-covered yard, and shot through the back of the head. And
   if any shot does not prove fatal, and a victim falls with life
   still left in him, he receives a whole volley, or else some of
   the executioners run and jump upon his chest, and stamp upon it,
   and rain blows upon his head. It was thus that on the night of
   March 10–11 a Madame Olekhovskaya was shot for an offence for
   which a sentence even of a day’s imprisonment would have been
   absurd. And it proved so difficult to dispatch her that, even
   when her head and bosom had been struck with seven bullets, her
   body still was quivering: whereupon Koudravtsev, an ex-Tsarist
   officer employee of the Che-Ka (and therefore a man fired with
   all the zeal of the Communist convert), ran and seized the
   woman by the throat, tore from her her blouse, and twisted and
   kneaded the vertebræ of her neck until life had fled. Her age
   was nineteen only.... Recently, seeing that the snow in that
   courtyard had become red and brown with the blood with which
   everything else in the yard is bespattered, the Che-Ka decided
   that the snow had better be melted away; and as there was plenty
   of fuel ready, large bonfires were lighted not only in the yard
   but also in the street outside it. Unfortunately, as the snow
   dissolved, it did so in a blood-red, curdled stream, and ran
   out of the yard and formed pools in the street, and had to have
   improvised, for the removal of its damning traces, a trapfall.
   Yes, mingled with that dark, accusing, terrible stuff there was
   blood come from the hearts of people recently as alive as the
   executioners themselves!

Arrogantly the Bolshevists proclaim that “we have no guillotine.” Ah,
I know better. I know that, to an accompaniment of motor engines kept
running to drown the sound of the shots, executions still are taking
place in secret dungeons and basements.

And it was not only by night that shootings took place. There was a
small square in front of an Archangel factory, where they took place
by daylight, “where crowds of children from the neighbourhood could
collect to witness them.”[232] And similarly in Odessa were people
executed by daylight. And the same in Mogilev, and before the very eyes
of their relatives.

   Every evening between five and seven o’clock a motor-lorry
   would halt before the premises of the revolutionary tribunal of
   the Sixteenth Army; and when there had sprung into it a dozen
   executioners provided with a perfect armament of weapons and a
   couple of spades, the persons about to die also would be loaded
   into the vehicle, and it would be driven away. And when, an hour
   later, the lorry returned, the executioners would drag thence
   sackfuls of boots and clothing which the deceased had recently
   been wearing. And all this was done exclusively in the day time
   (the clocks were advanced three hours for the purpose), and in
   the presence of the victim’s relatives and friends--men, women,
   and children.[233]

But the conditions under which the late Tsar and his family were
murdered at Ekaterinburg constitute the episode which is bound to
transcend any other such episode in striking disgust to the heart of
any person not either dead to human sentiment or drunken with political
fanaticism: the episode of the night when a Tsar, a Tsarina, and their
children were taken into a cellar, and killed before each other’s eyes.
Subsequently a Red Guard named Medviedev, a witness of the executions,
stated to the Commission of Enquiry that was held during the February
of 1919 that the victims made their preparations slowly, as though they
guessed what was in store for them. All history contains no parallel
to the murders wrought at Ekaterinburg during the night of July 16–17,
1918.[234]


                            _The Condemned_

We know that in a past age persons ascended the scaffold singing
the Marseillaise. Similarly, when, in Odessa, the Left Social
Revolutionaries sentenced to execution had been lashed together in
pairs and loaded on to a lorry, they sang _their_ Marseillaise,
even when the weight of thirty-five corpses had been heaped upon
them. But, above all, it was within the prison gates of Russia that
death came to seem an everyday incident. In _The Che-Ka_ we find
described the emotions of a prisoner when first he found himself in a
condemned cell.

   A strong _posse_ of Red Guards brought us to this horrible
   dungeon at seven o’clock in the evening: yet hardly had we
   realised our surroundings before the bolts of the iron door
   rattled, and the door itself creaked upon its hinges, and the
   commandant entered with a bevy of warders. “How many?” he
   inquired. “Sixty-seven.” “Sixty-seven, when a grave has been
   dug for ninety?” And the commandant seemed puzzled, but, still
   more, supine and _ennuyé_. And we? We just sat benumbed.
   Already death seemed to be breathing upon us. We sat like men
   paralysed. “Of course, though!” cried the commandant presently,
   “I had forgotten that there are thirty prisoners to come from
   the special branch.”... And so there began horrible, infinitely
   long hours of waiting for death. By some miracle a priest
   imprisoned with us had contrived to retain his pectoral cross;
   and now he produced this, fell upon his knees, and began to
   pray. Yes, and a Communist prisoner followed his example. Yet
   all the while that sobs could be heard within there were making
   themselves heard, without, the sounds of a hackneyed waltz on
   a cracked piano, and of gay folk-songs. Ah, how those songs
   tore at our hearts! The sounds were coming from what had been
   the prison chapel, where some young Communists were holding a
   musical practice! Thus closely had the irony of fate caused life
   and death to stand intertwined![235]

Waiting at death’s door to the sounds of a cracked piano!--It is to
Nilostonsky’s book that we owe this description of a condemned cell,
whilst also we know that in many such cells and cellars permanent
darkness reigned, and that from fifteen to twenty persons would be
confined in a place 4 _arshini_ (9½ feet) long by 2 _arshini_
wide, and that amongst those people there would be both women and old
men, and that, as none of them were allowed ever to leave the cell,
natural functions had to be performed on the spot. And in Petrograd
condemned prisoners were kept like this for as long as thirty-six
hours after sentence of death had been pronounced, with neither food
nor water conceded them, nor permission to leave the cell for a single
moment.

   And think of the mental torture endured by anyone who, like
   myself, has had to watch victims preparing to be shot. In
   particular I remember an evening in the July of 1920 when I was
   lying in the Butyrka prison. That evening, as a “privileged”
   captive, I was sitting alone in the prison yard when the
   following experience befell me, an experience which still
   leaves me doubtful as to whether I was most horrified or most
   awed, but not at all doubtful as to the fact that the unnatural
   contrast which the experience presented stabbed my senses like
   the point of a needle. It happened that from the portion of
   the prison building reserved exclusively for Communist inmates
   there was issuing a boisterous revel of piano music and gipsy
   songs and a telling of tales, for there was in progress one of
   the entertainments, with special artists engaged, which the
   administration periodically arranged for the amusement of the
   “privileged offenders.” But suddenly, as the sounds of song and
   piano were echoing over the prison yard, and I was listening
   to them in silence, I happened to glance towards the window
   of the “Chamber of Souls,” and saw behind the bars a face--a
   face convulsed with agony, a face pressed hungrily forward to
   inhale the free air. And I recognised it as the face of a victim
   who was to be shot that night, and remembered that several
   other such victims, over twenty of them, were awaiting their
   turn to die.... Later that night all were fetched away by the
   “Commissary of Death.”... What happened after the vision I
   scarcely remember, but I know that never afterwards did I feel
   inclined to enter the prison yard save when other prisoners
   were present. Often since then have I thought of the lines from
   Korolenko’s _An Incident of the Past_--lines supposed
   to have been written by a prisoner when a death sentence was
   about to be carried out within the prison’s walls. “... The
   place is silent with a silence that is the silence of death,
   and therefore a silence which, for all our usedness to the
   valuelessness of life in Russia, none would willingly break....”

Next let me quote a description of a certain incident in Mogilev. My
source for it is a correspondent of the _Posledniya Novosty_.[236]


   On the eve of the session of the Gomel circuit court we saw
   it announced on the street corners that the court was going
   publicly to try some deserters from the Red Army; and later,
   when the trial opened in the local theatre, I attended it. There
   I saw the three men who were supposed to be sitting in judgment
   upon the accused (of whom there were about a hundred) do no
   more than shout at them for a while, and then sentence them to
   death.... As I passed out of the building through the foyer I
   saw people calmly buying tickets for the theatrical performance
   of the coming evening!

And the condemned in general? Well, most of them went to the slaughter
silently, and without protest or resistance, after submitting to be
pinioned with barbed wire.

   If (wrote Sister Medviedeva in the Kievan report)[237] you could
   see our condemned being taken to execution, you would see that
   they are practically dead already. But the few who either resist
   or make abject, useless petition to the executioners are beaten
   and kicked before being dragged down to the basement where
   slaughter awaits them.

And take another reminiscence of Kiev, as related by Madame Kourakina:

   We stood horror-stricken, and our very hearts seemed to stop,
   when night fell, and some men arrived to fetch away the
   condemned. The room lay hushed in a silence as of the grave.
   Yet the unfortunates knew how to die: they went to their doom
   without a sound, with truly amazing calmness. Only the pallor
   of their faces and the abstraction of their gaze showed that
   already they had ceased to belong to this present existence. Yet
   a few poor creatures did rebel against the thought of death: and
   it was these who produced upon me the most harrowing impression
   of all as horribly, to the last moment, they struggled against
   the guards’ violence, and clutched at bunks and corners and
   doors, and wept and shrieked in the frenzy of their terror. Yet
   the guards only laughed at them, saying: “So you don’t want to
   be put to the wall, eh? Yet to the wall you must go.”

Apparently, those of the condemned who committed suicide before
execution did so less through fear of death itself than through fear
of death through official slaughter. For example, I remember a Tartar
in the Butyrka who went to immense pains to cut his throat with a
fragment of glass rather than be executed. And suicides included many
cases of self-incineration, as mentioned both in _The Che-Ka_ and
in the materials amassed by the Denikin Commission. But always the
executioners tried to restore the suicides to life. And why so? Because
always they wished to put an end to the unfortunates with their own
hands--it was against the Communists’ rule to let a single victim, when
sentenced, escape “revolutionary justice.” There are many staggering
instances of such insistence upon fulfilment of “justice” included in
the data compiled by the Denikin Commission, and I will cite one of
them. Once when some bodies of persons who had been executed were being
driven to the Odessa mortuary, the driver noticed a woman victim’s
eyelids flutter, and pointed the fact out to the mortuary attendant.
And, sure enough, the woman had no sooner been carried into the
mortuary than she regained her senses sufficiently to cry out (though
still half-dazed, and for the reason, as a witness has asserted, that
she had caught sight of her dead husband near her): “I am cold!” and
“Where is my cross?” And though the attendant besought her to be quiet,
she persisted until some executioners heard her, and came and gave her
the _coup-de-grâce_. And by another deponent it has been related
that when a man was already in his coffin he regained consciousness,
and promptly was finished off. And there is on record a case where, on
the lid of a coffin slowly opening and emitting a cry of “My comrades,
I am still alive!” a telephone message was sent to the Che-Ka, and
elicited the reply, “Settle him with a brick,” whilst a further appeal
to the head of the Che-Ka himself (Vichmann) called forth the jest: “We
are to requisition the best surgeon in Odessa, I suppose?” and finally
a Che-Ka employee had to be dispatched to the scene, to shoot the
victim a second time with a revolver.

As regards relatives seeking information concerning the fate of
imprisoned kinsfolk, I myself know how often the Che-Ka of Moscow got
rid of such inquirers by giving them permits to see captives whom the
Che-Ka knew already to be lying in the Lefortovsky Mortuary. And even
women and children attending with parcels for prisoners would be met
with the answer: “No person of that name is confined in this prison,”
or with the enigmatical statement that “that person has been removed to
another place in the city.”

Finally, in S. M. Oustinov’s reminiscences we came upon the following
horrible, yet apposite, picture: “In the main street a barefooted,
bedraggled woman was whirling madly to and fro before the advancing
troops. The previous night, before leaving the town, the Bolshevists
had shot her husband.”


                    _Bolshevist Treatment of Women_

As one reads accounts of Bolshevist outrages upon women one scarcely
wonders that these outrages should have provoked a desire for revenge.
Take the following description of sufferings endured by women in the
concentration camp at Kholmogory:

   The authorities’ recruiting of their cooks and laundresses and
   other serving-women is done exclusively from the ranks of the
   female prisoners. And for the most part they select gently
   nurtured women. Also, the staff (especially a man called Okren)
   compel such girl prisoners as take their fancy to come and
   visit them by night, on the plea that there is domestic work
   requiring to be done, but, in reality, to use these girls as
   their mistresses. And the terrified victims cannot refuse, but
   must bear such insults in silence. Once a woman prisoner did
   voice her disgust (this was during the days when Bakhoulis was
   in command) but was shot on the spot; and when, on another
   occasion, an ex-girl student was sent for by the assistant
   commandant at one o’clock in the morning, and at first refused
   to answer the summons, her comrades actually besought her to
   go, lest all of them should be made to suffer for her refusal.
   In the same way, whenever women prisoners were taken to the
   bathhouse, they would find Red Guards in wait for them, both
   there and in the retiring-rooms.[238]

Like things obtained under the special branch of the Kuban region.
And outstanding cases elsewhere are those of an ex-school teacher,
a Madame Dombrovskaya, who was raped before being shot, and of a
young woman who, sentenced to death by the Che-Ka of Kislovodsk for
“speculative trading,” was subsequently violated by the head of the
“counter-espionage department” before being killed with his sword, and
having foul sport made of her naked, dismembered body.

Akin is a witness’s statement that, before the wife and daughter of
General Ch---- were executed near Chernigov, the daughter, aged twenty,
was raped: the facts being related to the witness by the chauffeurs who
drove the party to the scene of execution. And another statement says:

   Some women were writhing hysterically on the floor amongst
   a group of executioners as, with drunken laughter and lewd,
   filthy jests, they kept tearing open the women’s clothing on the
   pretext of “searches.” All of a sudden the senior warder (one of
   the regular prison staff, not a regular Che-Ka employee) cried
   in a voice tremulous as with apprehension: “Don’t touch the
   women! Such fellows as you are not to be trusted with women when
   they are going to be shot.”

Such, if you please, a description of an ordinary execution night
(the date was November 17, 1919), at Saratov! _Revolutsionnaya
Rossia_[239] also gives details of rapings. And only recently a
woman exile wrote to the Berlin-published journal _Anarkhichesky
Vestnik_[240] an account of her experiences in the Vologda transport
prison:

   Before the wardress left us she warned us to be on our guard,
   since infallibly, when night fell, either the superintendent
   or the director would enter “with the usual intentions.” The
   procedure, she said, was so stereotyped that very few women
   passed through the prison without something of the sort being
   done to them, whilst, owing to most of the officials being
   syphilitic, the women so treated in most cases caught the
   disease.... We found that we had not received the warning for
   nothing.

I myself can remember a woman prisoner being violated in the top
storey of the men’s solitary confinement building in Moscow (the then
prison of the Muscovite Special Branch, an institution notorious for
the severity of its _régime_) and the Red Guard concerned in the
affair excusing himself on the ground that the woman had given herself
to him for half a pound of bread. And this is not impossible. For half
a pound of foul, black, prison bread! Yes. What further comment is
necessary?

Before the Lausanne Tribunal the witness Sinovary told of a multitude
of Petrograd rapings. And the following extract enables us to read of
what was done in that way by the Che-Ka of the Kuban region:

   Over that Cossack village Saraev held such unlimited sway as
   to possess power of life and death over every inhabitant, and
   be able to carry out what confiscations and requisitions and
   shootings he liked. Yet, though exhausted with sensual pleasures
   already, he still desired to gratify his animal instincts, and
   never let a pretty woman come under his notice without outraging
   her. His method of procedure was equally simple, primitive,
   lawless, and cruel. As soon as he coveted a female victim he
   would begin by arresting her nearest male relative--brother,
   husband, father, or what not, or all of them together--and
   sentencing them to death. And, upon that, petitions would be
   presented, and intercession made, by influential inhabitants and
   Saraev would avail himself of the fact to confront the woman
   with the ultimatum that, unless she became his mistress, her
   relatives would become lost to her. Whereupon, forced to choose
   between the two evils, the woman, naturally, selected, in most
   cases, the alternative of degradation; whilst, for his part,
   Saraev would, so long as she continued in that degradation, hold
   up the accused man’s trial. And the terror-stricken population
   dared not make the slightest protest, but had to remain deprived
   of the elementary right of every population, the right of
   defending its own interests.

In another Cossack village a Madame Pashkovskaya, the wife of a
Cossack officer, found favour in the eyes of the head of the local
executive committee, and upon that there began a persecution of
her husband, and the head of the committee even went so far as to
requisition a portion of the husband’s house for his own residence.
Lastly, since the object of his attentions failed to be affected even
by the factor of propinquity, the head of the committee removed the
husband, the obstacle, by having him imprisoned as “an ex-officer and
counter-revolutionary,” and, finally, shot.

Again, once a Che-Ka inquisitor said to a prisoner of his, a
Madame G----: “You are very pretty, and your husband is unworthy
of you.” Then, as though it had been an afterthought, he added: “I
have a great mind to release you, and to shoot your husband as a
counter-revolutionary. But no--I will release both him and you if you
will become my mistress as soon as ever I have set you free.” And
though, almost beside herself with agitation, Madame G---- consulted
a fellow prisoner on the point, and was advised to save her husband
at all costs, and allowed the inquisitor to begin visiting her, her
husband was shot as though no agreement at all had been made!

Again, a Madame M----, an ex-officer’s wife, was imprisoned by a
special branch, and told by the inquisitor concerned that, provided she
became his mistress, she should be released; whereupon she agreed, and
was released, and the inquisitor took up his abode in her house. Yet
later she confessed to a friend:

   I detest the man, but what can I do against him with my husband
   away, and no one else in the house but my three small children?
   All that I can say for myself is that at least I feel secure in
   so far as that I no longer have reason to fear inquisitional
   searches, or to live in daily dread of having my house entered,
   and myself dragged before the Che-Ka again.

And a witness whom I have already quoted in connection with events in
the Crimea told the Lausanne Tribunal that each of the sailors active
in that region possessed four or five mistresses, and that in most
cases the poor women were wives of massacred or escaped officers, since
rejection of the sailors’ overtures meant execution, and only a few
stronger-minded ladies were able to muster up sufficient courage to
solve the problem by suicide.

   Intoxicated with blood, the sailors ran amok, seized the
   execution lists, and, in haphazard fashion, put crosses against
   any name which offended them by its appearance. And into their
   midnight orgies they impressed even Sisters of Mercy, the wives
   of imprisoned or escaped officers, and women hostages. And
   before the night was over all against whose names they had put
   crosses had been shot.

Again, a witness testified before the Denikin Commission that
licentious orgies had been carried out _systematically_ by the
Che-Ka and tribunal of Nikolaev, and included even women who had
come to beg for relatives’ release, with that inclusion as the price
of their relatives’ freedom. And from Sister Medviedeva the same
Commission heard a Kievan incident of still greater shamelessness:

   Not an employee of the Che-Ka lacked a certain number of
   women. In fact, such fellows could cast the eye of lust upon
   _every_ woman, and the state of things was absolutely
   disgusting. Sorin, in particular, loved lustful orgies, and on
   Easter Eve the large hall which used to belong to Demechenko
   witnessed the following. Two ladies entered the hall to present
   a petition on a prisoner’s behalf; and just as they did so,
   some curtains were drawn aside, and disclosed three nude women
   playing upon a piano; and it was in these women’s presence that
   the ladies had to proffer Sorin their petition. They themselves
   told me of the occurrence later.

Naturally, in face of such an order of life in Russia, the “fortnights
for inculcating respect for women” that were advocated by the
_Prabochnaya Gazeta_ and the _Proletarskaya Pravda_[241]
proved a foregone conclusion, and there set in a system of
“communisation of women,” and of “days of free love,” which became an
established, undeniable manifestation of the true meaning of Bolshevist
tyranny, even though both Bolshevist and non-Bolshevist journals have
attempted to ridicule the idea that the system ever existed as a fact.
The existence of it stands corroborated by a host of documents.


                     “_Squeezing the Bourgeoisie_”

   The Terror meant murder and bloodshed and capital punishment.
   And it meant still more, for at its disposal it had means
   of affecting contemporary thought and imagination that went
   yet deeper. And those means were as endless, and as diverse,
   of form as always is the case when tyranny and outrage are
   expressing themselves. But, above all, the Terror meant capital
   punishment--capital punishment everywhere, and at every step, in
   every nook and cranny.

Thus wrote, in _The Moral Aspect of the Revolution_, the Herr
Steinberg who helped to bring about the October upheaval, and at first
was for building a social system which he has since declared to “have
for its bloody crown, for its tragic apotheosis, the death penalty,”
and to be “daily and persistently killing the people’s soul.” Well,
he had better have written the words in Petrograd in 1917 than in
Berlin in 1923, for since 1917 the Bolshevist tyranny has daily been
setting human life at nought, and stifling free speech, and cramping
the popular soul with the heavy fetters of a censorship, and slaying
Russia’s best writers and publicists.

But I must draw the reader’s attention to the incomparably clumsy and
senseless form of popular terrorisation which, known as “squeezing the
_bourgeoisie_,” was a resource practised upon the educated classes
everywhere, but more especially in the south. The procedure was that
special days would be set apart for carrying out wholesale domiciliary
searches which stripped the inhabitants of the bulk of their clothing,
linen, and other articles, and left them, by way of “rations,” merely
a shirt apiece, a couple of handkerchiefs, and so forth. Let us take a
description of a particular “squeezing day” which, in 1921, was carried
out in Ekaterinodar on the anniversary of the Paris Commune[242]:

   At nightfall, that day, all houses inhabited by persons unlucky
   enough to have been “gentry” or merchants or leading citizens
   or lawyers or officers before the Revolution, and to be doctors
   or professors or engineers (in short, _bourgeois_) at the
   present time, were invaded by Red Guards and Bolshevists armed
   to the teeth, who made careful search everywhere, and removed
   all money and other valuables, dragged the houses’ occupiers
   outside in their indoor clothes, and, without regard for age
   or sex, or even for state of health (so that persons suffering
   from typhus were taken), loaded the lot on to wagons, and
   dispatched them to destinations elsewhere--half of them to a
   local concentration camp, and the other half to Petrovsk for
   forced labour in the Caspian fisheries. And this atrocious
   deportation of families by the hundred went on for a day and
   a half, accompanied with confiscation of the property of the
   deported, and distribution of the same amongst the local
   workers--though, as a matter of fact, we do not know how far
   it really reached those workers; we only know that at least it
   reached the market-place, and, in many cases, was bought back by
   its owners from the speculators who had since purchased it. Thus
   it became quite a common thing to see one’s clothes figuring
   on commissaries and their wives and relatives, and during the
   first year of the Bolshevist usurpation the system gathered to
   itself a secondary system of arbitrary “contributions” which in
   time attained almost fantastical dimensions. Yet to decline to
   pay those “contributions” meant arrest and imprisonment as a
   hostage, and then, not infrequently, death.[243]

Perhaps a speech delivered by the notorious Bolshevist leader Mouraviev
at a forced meeting of _bourgeois_ held after the Bolshevists’
seizure of Odessa in 1918 will best illustrate what the term
“contributions” or “mites given for the revolutionary cause” really
meant. Said Mouraviev:

   I have reached the hall late, and the enemy is knocking at the
   gates of the city already. And, perhaps you _bourgeois_
   like the sound of that? However, do not rejoice too soon, for
   if I should have to surrender Odessa to the enemy, I intend to
   leave you neither your houses nor your lives. So look here. What
   you have to do is that within three days you must pay up to me
   ten million roubles. And if you don’t, then woe betide you, for
   I shall drown every man of you with a stone about his neck, and
   deport his family.

On the same lines as the foregoing was a “day of peaceful protest”
which the Bolshevists of Odessa announced for May 13, 1919, just a
year after the above speech by Mouraviev. And for the purposes of the
day these Bolshevists formed as many as sixty gangs charged to relieve
Odessa’s propertied classes of all “redundant” food and footwear and
outer and under clothing and money: after which they broadcast threats
that anyone who failed to observe the decreed day, as ordained by the
local “council of workers’ deputies,” would be imprisoned, and anyone
who actively opposed the decree shot. Also, the committee drew up an
“Instruction” which set forth in minute detail the articles to be
confiscated, but at least left to each inhabitant three shirts, three
pairs of under-pants, and three pairs of socks. Which last provision
had the effect of inspiring Pieshekhonov, our informant, to say that
the devil is not always as black as he is painted. Pieshekhonov then
continues:

   Unfortunately, on the arrival of the day the citizens gave way
   to panic, and ran hither and thither in terror and perplexity
   as to where they should hide their valuables. I, for my part,
   could only smile at the idea of thinking that anyone could rob
   several hundreds of thousands of persons in a single day, and
   so thoroughly as to include even money concealed in nooks and
   corners. “No!” I said to myself. “One of two things will happen.
   Either the Bolshevist bands will be held up as soon as ever they
   enter the first houses, or a Bolshevist organised robbery will
   become a popular uncontrolled brigandage, and the Bolshevists
   at length find themselves forced to restrain the latter.” And
   this duly happened--the Bolshevist bands being held up on their
   first entry into houses and--well, and the unexpected happening
   in the circumstance that it was precisely in the localities
   inhabited by the working-folk that those bands met with the most
   abuse. In fact, it was not long before sounds of firing began
   to be heard there, and in the end the Bolshevists altogether
   had to abandon their “day of peaceful protest” or they would
   have found themselves confronted with an armed rebellion not
   so much of the _bourgeoisie_ as of the proletariat. True,
   later (in 1920), the Bolshevists of Odessa did succeed, I
   believe, in a “confiscation of all surpluses”; but by that time
   I had left the place, and cannot say how the confiscation was
   effected, save by, probably, allowing a large number of persons
   to evade the affair altogether. And a Kharkov confiscation of
   surpluses during the same year came to an equally unsatisfactory
   conclusion, for, though on the first night, the Bolshevists took
   care to search strictly on the system of house by house, on the
   following night they were foolish enough to visit only houses
   previously selected--the more prosperous residences--and so to
   draw protests from influential inhabitants, with complaints of
   unauthorised robbery, which eventually compelled the searches to
   be stopped. As for my own experience in Kharkov, it was that the
   searchers never reached the house in which I was.

   The chief reason for the Bolshevists’ failure in Odessa [wrote
   Margoulies] was that they committed the gigantic tactical error
   of not previously exempting from search all houses belonging
   to the industrial workers and the petty officials. For failure
   to do so brought it about that, as soon as ever news of the
   impending “peaceful protest” reached the town, there set
   in a panic not so much of the _bourgeoisie_ as of the
   proletariat, and a stoppage of work at most of the factories
   in order that the hands might hasten home and safeguard their
   property from the illegality that was supposed to be threatening
   even the goods of Communists. Whence some of the scenes were
   indescribable as the requisitionary detachments (mostly youths
   and young women of questionable character) were assailed with
   curses and abuse, and in some cases even with physical violence
   and sousings with boiling water: until, the popular passions
   having become thoroughly aroused, no course was left save
   reluctantly to relinquish the scheme before isolated cases
   of protest should coalesce into a popular upheaval, and, as
   early as one o’clock in the afternoon (that is to say, four
   hours only after the “peaceful protest” had been begun), to
   circulate an urgent message that the domiciliary visitations
   must cease, and, next day, to issue an address on the subject to
   the workers. Said the address: “We feel not a little hurt that
   yesterday the workers should seem to have taken the part of the
   _bourgeoisie_. As a matter of fact, it was impossible for
   us to charge our instructions with an order that searches should
   not be carried out in the working-class districts, for in that
   case the _bourgeoisie_ would have resorted thither in large
   numbers for concealment of all the stolen wealth which they have
   been hoarding.” But the appeal concluded: “The misunderstanding
   which has happened is the more regrettable in that it is bound
   to act as a setback to what constitutes a primary factor in the
   workers’ cause.”

A month earlier a similar demand had been made upon Odessa, but in this
case for a definite “contribution” of 500,000,000 roubles. And both in
Odessa and elsewhere evictions were carried out at twenty-four hours’
notice, whilst in Vladikavkaz women found walking out of doors were
then and there sent to menial work in the hospitals, and in Sebastopol
and other towns of the Crimea members of the _bourgeoisie_ were
seized and put to hard labour. “All members of the male sex found
wearing starched collars, and all members of the female sex found
wearing hats, shall be apportioned tasks of severity.” Such persons
were arrested just as they were, conveyed forthwith to the outskirts
of the town, and set to trench-digging. And in time casual street
seizure of the kind was improved upon with nocturnal house-to-house
collection, and dispatch of the captured _bourgeois_ to militia
camps. There, the next morning, the men were, regardless of age, sorted
into batches of ten, and set to loading railway wagons and digging
trenches--tasks which such of them as had never before done manual
labour found come none too easy, and admit of but slow performance,
and so bring down upon the performers both the taskmaster’s tongue
and the taskmaster’s lash. And meanwhile the womenfolk amongst the
captured _bourgeoisie_ were set to clear and scour out Red Guard
barrack-rooms, commissaries’ houses, and Communist establishments
generally. And one Easter Sunday a party of young girls in Sebastopol
were unexpectedly commandeered for menial tasks in public for the sole
purpose of making a spectacle of them; after being ordered to assemble
at given points, they were sent to scrub out and dust and scavenger Red
Guard barrack-rooms that were, it need hardly be said, plunged in an
extremity of filth. And not only had these gently nurtured girls (who
were, for the most part, only of school age) to perform their tasks in
ordinary (non-working) clothes, but also, being forbidden to bring with
them any of the cleaning implements necessary for such work, had, at
the point of commissaries’ revolvers, and threatened with the lash, to
scrape out barrack lavatories with their bare fingers![244]

Kiev, too, had its “week for confiscation of surpluses.” And the manner
in which that “week” was carried out makes it more than ever certain
that Steinberg was right when, in his book, he asserted that no system
at all governed Bolshevist requisitions and confiscations, so that, as
always happens in such cases, spoliation aimed at the well-fed and the
leisured missed a large number of them, and hit, for the most part, the
underfed and the overworked.

In Vladikavkaz an Order promulgated on April 9, 1918, said that “all
members of the _bourgeoisie_ shall assemble at the Winter Theatre
at 8 P.M. to-night (no matter whether they have paid their
contributions or not) and be shot in case of failure to comply with
this Order.” Also, it might be well to quote the following conversation
between Peters and some Communist journalists, as reported in the
Kievan _Izvestia_.

   Let me remind you [said Peters to the journalists] how the
   workers of Petrograd responded to my appeal for voluntary
   searchers of _bourgeoisie_ dwellings, and the searches came
   to be participated in by 20,000 workers (men and women alike),
   with sailors and Red Guards. Never could the thoroughness with
   which those volunteers executed their task be sufficiently
   praised! And what was the result? That the searches brought to
   light 2,000 bombs, 3,000 prismatic binoculars, 30,000 compasses,
   and many other articles of military equipment, and that for
   the first time we were enabled to get upon the track of the
   counter-revolutionary organisations which subsequently were
   discovered to have sprung up in every part of Russia. But here,
   in Kiev, unfortunately, popular discipline of the kind does not
   exist; marauders and speculators are allowed to inflate prices,
   and to conceal the food needed of the city.

   Only yesterday some searchers in our employ unearthed fresh
   stocks of provisions, so that there confronts me the necessity
   of subjecting the holders of those stocks to the supreme
   punitive measure for having failed to comply with my Order
   concerning Registration of Supplies.

And in the same issue of the Kievan _Izvestia_ there stood
published the names of the 127 stockholders in question--as shot.




                              CHAPTER VII

                        EXILE AND IMPRISONMENT


We have seen to a certain extent how some of the prisons and
concentration camps of Soviet Russia became filled to overflowing
with hostages and others. And the life-conditions in those places
were the same as the life-conditions in other like establishments
for confinement. “We were not treated like this even in the mines of
Siberia under the Tsarist _régime_,” wrote Madame Spiridonova.
For example, it was quite a common thing for commandants of prisons
and concentration camps to specialise in contrivance of humiliations
for their victims--male prisoners being compelled to bury executed
comrades, and female prisoners to wash cells clear of the blood after
executions, and to scrape plasterings of human brain--including,
sometimes, brain dashed from the heads of their own beloved ones--from
cell walls. And universally prisoners were outraged by being made to
empty lavatories _with their bare hands_--some ladies of Odessa,
in particular, being allotted lavatory work of the kind, and, when
nausea overcame them, beaten with rifle butts, whilst even General
Roussky was not spared the indignity. Also, political prisoners were
lodged in contagious disease cantonments, and, in Theodosia, male
members of the _bourgeoisie_ made to sweep the streets in silk
hats specially requisitioned for the purpose, and, in Piatigorsk, made
to sweep the streets, and then given the command, “Back, now, to your
kennels, you dirty dogs!”[245]

Another practice was unexpectedly to carry out nocturnal searchings of,
or nocturnal musterings of, prisoners, and to transfer the latter from
upper to basement cells, and keep them there for a day or so before
transferring them back again. These transferences were frequent in
Moscow, as I myself had reason to know; and in Odessa they were more
frequent still. In all cases they constituted a peculiarly futile,
senseless expedient for breaking down prisoners’ _morale_.

But concentration camps were _par excellence_ Bolshevist
establishments designed for (to quote a protest addressed to the
All-Russian Central Executive Committee by a group of Social
Revolutionary internees) “the wreaking of a barbarous vengeance, and
the breeding of epidemics likely, it is hoped, to remove victims
wholesale.” Already I have cited statistics of mortality relating to
the Kholmogory camp. At Archangel, in 1922, out of 5000 Kronstadt
rebels, 1500 alone survived the year.

Certain Bolshevist prisons bear the inscription “Soviet House of
_Detention_.” “Detention”! Why, detention in those establishments
is worse than incarceration in the old Tsarist penal institutions.
For at least the latter maintained no rules against exercise and
reading; neither had they iron shutters so masking the windows as to
make absolute darkness a permanent condition within them. Indeed, the
cells of the Che-Ka prison in Gorokhovaya Street (Petrograd) have been
described as “wooden coffins,” for they were absolutely windowless, and
measured only 7 feet by 3½ feet, and were made to hold eighty-four
souls in thirteen of their number on a ground space formerly occupied
only by three.[246]

  [Illustration: Fuchs, a “public prosecutor” for the Che-Ka of
  Kharkov.

    [_See page 222._]

At Kiev there was a cell made out of a converted wall cranny which,
according to our Sisters of Mercy, was nevertheless made to hold
three prisoners--an old man, his daughter, and the daughter’s officer
husband. And in 1922 a woman member of the Social Revolutionary Party
(Madame Samorodova) had to spend a month in a vault, a subterranean
dungeon, which had no window at all, and in which day and night were
the same. And some comrades of hers were made to await their trial in
Baku in “odoriferous, windowless, lightless caverns where industrial
workers lay crowded with professional men,” and near which a lad of
sixteen had to spend twenty-four hours in a cell heaped with naphtha
refuse, and strewn with nails and splinters of glass.[247]

Also, whereas the Tsarist penal establishments allowed prisoners
adequate food, what is the case now? In 1918 it was the custom for
prisoners in Moscow to receive, for their daily ration, an eighth of
a pound of bread[248] only, and a little rotten potato and cabbage.
And though, later, the ration became increased to half a pound of
bread, a peasant prisoner still is found writing: “All that we receive
is a pound of bread to last us three days, with cabbage soup that
is not soup at all, but slop, and destitute of salt.” And in the
_Revolutsionnoyé Dielo_ of February 1922 we read, _à propos_
of some 2000 peasants from Tambov (including women and children):
“Wandering about this prison [the Vyborg Prison at Petrograd] are
horrible shadows rather than human beings. All day long the place
resounds with moans of people dying of hunger at the rate of many
daily.” Nor for months at a time were prisoners allowed to receive
food parcels from their relatives, as a form of punishment universally
employed for extorting additional evidence.[249] And the result of all
this was such a mortality from malnutrition that 75 per cent. of the
total of prison hospital deaths can be ascribed to this cause, and even
an _official_ document reproduced by the Bolshevist press had to
admit that the governor of the Taganka Prison had declared 40 per cent.
of the mortality in his establishment to have come of the malnutrition
factor.[250] At the same time, we must concede that these revelations,
added to certain personal enquiries, did succeed in making a temporary
impression upon the more “sentimental” members of the Bolshevist Party.
In particular, a certain Diakonov contributed to the _Izvestia_ an
article which, headed “A Cemetery of Still Living Bodies,” described
some of the cells attached to the inquisitorial department of the
Taganka Gaol, and declared these cells to be choked with fever patients
with temperatures ranging from 38° to 40° C., and with influenza and
typhus sufferers as well. And the poor wretches, the article said,
had in many cases been ill for a week or more without anyone so much
as thinking of seeing to their removal to hospital; whilst, though
the temperature in the cells stood as low as 7° or 5°, or even 3° C.,
all that patients had for covering was a thin blanket--nor even that
in some instances, but only a few wisps of clothing. Nor were sheets
or pillows provided: the patients just were lying on the dirty floor,
or else on what looked like empty mattress covers.[251] And not for
months past, at least two months, could the prisoners’ linen have been
washed, whilst the prisoners themselves had emaciated features, almost
transparent frames, and eyes like the eyes of people at death’s door.
If, said the article, even a single attendant had been present to wait
upon the invalids (who numbered about a hundred), things might have
been different; whereas no orderly at all was present.


   The doctor who accompanied me around the prison had been in the
   State prison service for twenty years, and officiated under more
   than one _régime_. Amongst other things, he told me that
   the deaths from inanition had been very numerous of late, and
   that daily typhus and influenza were reaping their toll.... In
   every corridor, and in every cell, of the “solitary confinement”
   portion did I see the same filth, the same emaciated
   countenances, the same hungry and imploring eyes, the same thin
   hands stretched out to us through the bars. For in that place
   there were over a thousand victims moaning, and begging to be
   released, and crying out that they had been in prison for two or
   three months without inquiry made, or even for a year.... That
   visit has haunted me ever since like a nightmare: and, now that
   I have adduced the facts, let those of my fellowmen who still
   have left to them a shred of sympathy and understanding try to
   imagine for themselves what mental and physical tortures are
   implied by such an abode of horror. For even the worst crime
   conceivable would be purged if a person had to spend a month
   within those massive walls, and behind those iron bars: whereas
   within those massive walls and behind those iron bars there
   are persons _guiltless of any crime at all_. Once more I
   ask, what worse, what more absolute, torture could be imagined
   than to be thrown into a cage for months, and deprived of
   warmth and air and rest and ability to move about, and fed only
   at rare intervals, and, until death at length gives release,
   undergo a living death through vermin? Frankly, such a system
   is a disgrace to our Communist Republic, an infamy no longer
   to be tolerated. Governors, justices, commissaries, officials,
   Communists of the ranks, do you hear what I say? Then hasten to
   repair the evil, and do not wait until further bloody tragedies
   have resulted. Yes, I say! Open up those graves in which still
   living human beings lie buried. Or, if official routine cannot
   be hastened otherwise, let a general amnesty be declared. For
   not even the release of prisoners by the hundred would injure us
   as the existence of the dungeons which I have described is doing
   daily. Communism and the Revolution need no bolstering up with
   creation of “houses of the dead.” Other means of defending the
   Revolution exist.

In the Crimea, in 1921, a well-known man of letters, a man advanced
in years, was thrown into a dungeon for six days in company with so
many prisoners, male and female, that none of them could ever lie
down. Yet one day still more prisoners arrived; after which even
_standing room_ became impossible until a certain proportion of
the inmates had been removed and shot. And during the first few days
of the captives’ confinement they were given not a scrap of food--the
supposition being, apparently, that all were due for execution. Only
cold water was issued, and that but once a day. Nor, later, were any
food parcels allowed, and any relatives who arrived with them were
dispersed with blank volley-firing.

Before me lies a memorandum addressed by the Political Branch of the
Red Cross to the Praesidium of the All-Russian Central Executive
Committee in 1922. It begins with the words:

   We, the Political Branch of the Red Cross, consider it our duty
   to draw the attention of the Praesidium to the aggravation of
   the position of political prisoners in Russia which is purposely
   being effected. Beyond doubt the conditions of such prisoners’
   confinement are approximating once more to those which obtained
   during the early and the most acute days of the civil conflict.

Below, also, follows a description of what exile could be like from the
pen of a Madame R. M. Youdovicha, a Muscovite lady who was banished
to the Northern Dvinsk region during the autumn of 1921. Relating her
journeyings from local prison to local prison, she says:

   It was late at night when we reached the transport prison
   at Vologda, and the staff met us with obscene abuse before
   stripping us of most of our belongings, down to the few spoons
   and cups which seemed to us so precious in our desperate,
   helpless flight. For myself, I felt so indignant that I
   protested. But of course this proved useless. And when we
   were herded to the cells, and I reached the door of the
   female ward, I fairly gasped, for there are no words really
   capable of describing the horrors of a place where, in almost
   total darkness, thirty-five or forty half-dead and half-alive
   creatures were crawling about over a mass of filthy, disgusting
   mud between walls all plastered over with excretions and
   other nastinesses. And morning brought yet another horror in
   the shape of the food, when we prisoners had served to us
   some fish in a state of putrefaction, and nothing else--not
   even gruel was issued, since the authorities appropriated all
   cereals for themselves. You see, this prison of Vologda was a
   central prison, and therefore exiles passed through it in a
   continuous stream, and from every quarter of Russia. Hence the
   confusion was incredible, and no one made it his business to
   see what went on in the kitchens, where the utensils were never
   washed, and the dirt and the food all were cooked together, and
   worms allowed to choke up the boilers and their foul, greasy,
   permanently simmering mess of “soup.” And, after Vologda,
   Viatka, where conditions struck me as a little better than
   in the former place, for the cells were a trifle larger, and
   perhaps a trifle less filthy. Yet when I asked whether I could
   wash myself my companions simply pointed towards the general
   ward, and said that I “had better go and see.” In that ward I
   found about forty women. Yet amongst them all I was the only
   political internee. Nine collapsible bunks, the bare wood of
   which was destitute of mattresses or pillows, had stretched
   upon them some corpse-like female figures. And other such
   figures were scattered about the floor--all in mere tatters
   of garments, if not practically nude. And I scarcely needed to
   be told that the prison’s cement floors were seldom washed. In
   fact, never have I spent a night of horror to equal that first
   night of mine at Viatka, for, in addition, the room swarmed with
   vermin, and constantly my companions kept moaning and tossing
   in their sleep, or begging for water, since the majority of
   them were sickening for fever. And, sure enough, when morning
   arrived seventeen of them were found to have developed typhus.
   Yet, when the rest of us asked that they should be removed to
   hospital, our petition proved useless. And at eight o’clock our
   breakfast of “soup” was brought. Nor have I ever seen anything
   to resemble it, since it consisted of putrid chunks of horse
   head, some scraps of horsehair and hide, some rags, and morsels
   of a sort of jelly-like substance, all floating about together
   in a dark-coloured, evil-smelling liquid. And with it went some
   unpeeled potatoes. Yet upon this horrible concoction the women
   threw themselves with a perfectly animal avidity, and, gulping
   it down, proceeded to fight even for the potato skins before,
   within a few minutes, in not a few cases, vomiting. And so the
   day dragged on, and in time was replaced with the horrors of the
   night.

The same writer mentions that, as she had begun to feel ill just
before she left Moscow, she had notified the authorities to that
effect, and added: “Seeing, also, that I have been deprived of my
clothes, I am less than ever in a condition to proceed northward,” but
that it had been replied: “Nevertheless you will proceed as bidden.”
Indeed, such deportation without warning, without any time to collect
effects, became the general rule and use for the special humiliation
of political exiles. Thus, on the night of October 19, 1920, a party
of _bourgeois_ who had been seized and allotted hard labour
were haled from the Ivanovsky camp near Moscow, and dispatched for
Ekaterinburg. The consignment included certain Socialists known to
every educated soul in Russia, and I will cite a few details of the
journey as jotted down by one of those who had to make it:

   Amongst the ninety-six persons who were taken from the camp
   were persons of sixty and seventy, and invalids at that; yet
   their appeals to be left behind proved useless. Many, indeed
   most of us, had no warm clothing, and though the weather had
   hitherto been comparatively warm, it happened, as luck would
   have it, that that day had brought us the first big snow-fall
   of the season. Moreover, many had merely _lapti_[252] for
   footwear, and no private stock of provisions for the journey,
   whilst, finally, we had to do our packing so hurriedly as to
   leave behind not a few of our most cherished possessions. The
   affair began at about eight, or half-past eight, o’clock in the
   evening, when we were told to go into an ice-cold, glass-covered
   gallery and wait. We waited for over an hour. Then, everything
   that we were taking with us having been carefully inspected,
   we were led into a courtyard where the roll was called several
   times over, and so, under a strong escort of “Home Defence
   Force” men, to the Northern Railway goods station--the guards
   constantly abusing us _en route_, and telling us to mend
   our pace, despite that many of us were elderly, and carrying
   baggage at that. Past midnight it was when we reached the
   station, but no train was ready, nor any responsible authority
   to receive and dispatch the prisoners. So in that windswept
   spot, and exposed to from ten to fifteen degrees of frost and
   a snowstorm, we waited for three and a half hours. Meanwhile,
   at about one o’clock in the morning, or a little later, we were
   joined by about thirty other prisoners from the Andronievsky
   camp: and as soon as they halted near us we were surprised to
   recognise amongst them men who had only a few weeks ago been
   transferred from our own camp to the Andronievsky, on the
   strength of a tale that they were going to be sent home again!
   Moreover, even in our own contingent of ninety-six there were
   from thirty to thirty-five Poles who ought, of course, to have
   been treated as prisoners of war rather than as they were being
   treated now. However, at about half-past three the entraining
   did begin. Yet, seeing that it was not until nine or ten o’clock
   that the train started, why should we have been compelled so
   to hurry our packing overnight, and then to wait on the cold
   railway line for so many hours? The rolling-stock consisted
   of sixty compartments, for it was not only we ourselves (the
   prisoners from the Ivanovsky and the Andronievsky camps) that
   were travelling, but also a hundred prisoners from the camp
   at Ordin, some scores from the camps at Novo-Peskovsk and
   Pokrovsk, five hundred students for the “political course for
   Red commanders” (these were ex-White officers from Kolchak’s
   and Denikin’s armies), and four hundred and fifty candidates
   for the same course. In fact, the total train load amounted to
   1400 or 1500 souls. And _en route_, and when we had reached
   Ekaterinburg, we learnt the following concerning the students
   and the candidates. The former, we learnt, were ex-White
   officers who had already been theoretically admitted to posts
   in the Red Army, but had first to be put through a short term
   of “political study,” lasting six weeks, and including lectures
   from leading members of the Communist Party on the tenets of
   Soviet rule and Communism. And since the students now being
   sent with us to Ekaterinburg had almost completed their course,
   they would, within a few days, be given positions in the Soviet
   forces. Hitherto they had not been treated as prisoners, but
   allowed to live together in the old Alexandrovskoyé Military
   School at Moscow, and then, on the 18th--rather, during the
   early hours of the 19th--of the month, transferred, without
   reason given, to the Kozhukhovsky camp (which stood twelve or
   fifteen versts from Moscow), and now, during the night of the
   20th, were travelling with ourselves to Ekaterinburg. And as
   for the candidates, they had been summoned to Moscow, for the
   course, from various provincial camps, and, whilst in Moscow,
   awaiting their turn for the curriculum (which turn would arrive
   only when the full students had completed theirs), had had no
   restriction placed upon their movements, but had been living,
   some of them in different Muscovite hostels, and the rest in
   private houses, with merely a common obligation to answer
   a daily roll-call. But on the night of which I am speaking
   (October 20) the section living in private houses had no sooner
   presented itself for roll-call than, just as it was, and without
   any warm clothes, and without even permission to go and bid
   farewell to its comrades in the hostels, it had been dispatched
   _en route_ for the railway station, and there, as we have
   seen, entrained for Ekaterinburg.... The train in which we
   travelled lacked any heating apparatus; nor was the food issued
   to us prisoners out of keeping with that and the journey’s many
   other lackings.

Probably no one who is not familiar with political life in Russia
to-day would easily believe that Bolshevists could imprison
three-year-old children and folk of over ninety. Yet I remember an
eighty-year-old “spy” being set to share my captivity in the Butyrka,
and men, women, and children being taken from their homes _en
masse_. And it is not only that the prisons of contemporary Russia
are made places of horror for their inmates. They are made places of
horror also for those inmates’ relatives. For it is only by chance
that those relatives ever hear of their beloved ones’ fate, or parents
come to know whether their sons are alive or dead. In fact, relatives
are not allowed even the last consolation of all. They are not allowed
to accord their dear ones decent burial. Again, I can adduce a case
in Moscow in 1920 where the Che-Ka informed the parents of a lad of
sixteen that their son had been arrested and tried in company with
other members of a tennis club, and shot on _December 4_--whereas
subsequently it transpired that the lad had not been shot until _the
22nd_; the false information being given to the parents merely to
prevent any possibility of their being able to present an appeal for
their son, and so, according to Latzis, to waste the Che-Ka’s time. And
in the already quoted memorandum issued by the Political Branch of the
Red Cross we read:

   In 1921 the relatives of four hundred persons whom the Secret
   Branch arrested during the night of April 14 were unable, for
   three weeks, to find out where their kinsfolk were. Consequently
   they could not supply them with necessaries and food.

In Latzis’ statistical articles he cites, as a proof of the “humane
procedure of the Soviet Power,” the fact that during the years 1918 and
1919 the Central Che-Ka “arrested only 128,000 persons throughout the
vast area of Soviet Russia,” and adds: “Is _that_ the ‘unbridled
tyranny’ to which certain of our citizens never lose a chance of
referring?” Well, if we remember that, according to official statements
published for the year 1918, the then holding capacity of Russia’s
prisons amounted only to 36,000, Latzis’ figures will seem to us
sufficiently large![253]

Also, Latzis stated in his articles that “during the years 1918 and
1919 over half the detained regained their liberty.”

   But perhaps we shall be asked why so many innocent persons were
   detained at all? The reason is that if a whole institution,
   if a whole unit becomes involved in a conspiracy, the only
   way to prevent the guilty few from escaping is to arrest the
   institution or the unit as a whole. Then, when one has made
   careful enquiry, and sifted the innocent from the guilty, one
   can, with prudence, liberate the former.

What a Bolshevist method of detecting the guilty! And inviolability of
the person? Well, to a Bolshevist inviolability of the person is “so
much _bourgeois_ prejudice.”

Rakovsky also once declared that people were arrested in Soviet Russia
only if they had committed a crime. But the facts belie him. And so did
the Red Cross memorandum which I have quoted:

   The decree issued by the Praesidium of the All-Russian Central
   Executive Committee on February 1, 1919, that invariably any
   prosecuting counsel of the All-Russian Che-Ka should complete
   his investigations within a month of those investigations’
   inception, is not being carried out.

And so it has always been. On October 29, 1919, Peters declared that,
of the 2000 persons arrested to date, every one had been examined,
whereas, as a matter of fact, these persons had been lying in prison
for months without any investigation--the Che-Ka having altogether
failed to unravel its own prison-administrative tangle. And what
obtained in 1919 was obtaining as late as in 1922, after the Che-Kas
had taken on the guise of the State Political Department, and is
obtaining now, even though an official decree of the All-Russian
Central Executive Committee has ordained that all prisoners be
questioned within forty-eight hours of their arrest, and informed of
the accusation preferred against them within a fortnight, and have
their examination complete within two months--after which they must
either be released or brought to trial; and that, for a prisoner to
be detained for over two months, a special petition must be presented
to the Supreme Judicial Authority. As though anyone would believe in
such a “Habeas Corpus Act”! “Let no exceptions be made to this decree.”
Well, none possibly could be made!

Recently the tenth Congress of Soviets was furnished by the
Commissariats of the Interior and Justice with figures representing
that on December 1, 1922, the number of political offenders dwelling
in exile was 10,638, and of political offenders dwelling in prisons
48,819. And those figures applied to Central Russia alone!

On July 1, 1923, there were prisoners in gaol, said the registers
of the State Political Department, to the number of 72,685, with
two-thirds of them political prisoners.[254]

Also, comparing these returns with the statistics of prison deaths for
1918 already cited, the social composition of the Soviet’s captives
seems to have altered little in five years, for we see that peasants
and industrial workers still form some forty per cent. of the total,
with the Supreme Revolutionary Tribunal itself giving the social
proportions for 1923 as “Intellectuals 34 per cent., peasants 29,
_bourgeois_ 26, and industrial workers 11.”[255] In fact, never
has it been the case that the Red Terror was directed exclusively
against one class alone, since in Russia, as everywhere else, terrorism
has to fight all classes with the one weapon of tyranny.

As regards exile, a phenomenal number of persons have been deported
since 1921,[256] and every one of the old _régime’s_ destinations
for exiles has been restored for the purpose--Turkhestan, the Roumanian
frontier, Solovetsky Island, and the rest. “In the remote North, in
famine-stricken Turkhestan, and in dreary villages and townships in
the centre there are living persons who have been wrested from their
dear ones, and are without food, without the rudimentary amenities
of civilisation, and under the shadow of death.” The words are from
the “Appeal” issued by the Berlin Society for the Aid of Political
Prisoners and Exiles in Russia.

  [Illustration: Corpses. Che-Ka of Zhitomir, 1919.

    [_See page 248._]

Already I have spoken of the Portaminsk camp on the shores of the
Arctic Ocean as a place whither exiles have been in process of being
dispatched from Moscow since the close of last year (1922). And _à
propos_, I may quote the following concerning the camp’s life
conditions[257]:

   In this camp, which is centred around an old monastery that is
   rapidly falling into decay, there is neither cooking nor heating
   apparatus, and scarcely any drinking water. Also, the food is
   insufficient, and no system of medical attendance existent.
   Lastly, twice a year the roads leading to the place become
   flooded, and meanwhile the camp is, for long, weary weeks, cut
   off from the outer world, and the exiles deprived of touch with
   their fellows.

But apparently the horrors of Portaminsk have not proved sufficient for
the authorities, for during the past year Solovetsky also has become a
principal place of banishment. The spot where, at this moment, over 200
prisoners are living in abject misery has been pictured as follows:

   One _desiatina_ (2·7 acres) of land is all that is allotted
   to the prisoners, and they are never allowed to leave it;
   the guards have orders to shoot without challenge any person
   attempting to do so. And as soon as navigation ceases the
   island becomes completely cut off from everywhere. And in this
   place the cruelty which universally distinguishes Communist
   rule has created conditions under which prisoners have to live
   condemned to a fate, physical and moral, which has not its equal
   in history--no, not even in the tragic history of the mines of
   Siberia.

Further details concerning Solovetsky are given by the writer of a
letter published in No. 31 of _Revolutsionnaya Rossia_. The letter
runs:

   One main thing which distinguishes this place of exile from the
   mines of Siberia of Tsarist days lies in the fact that every
   official in the place, from the highest to the lowest (the
   commander alone excepted), is an ex-criminal of the ordinary
   type, himself engaged in serving a term of detention. And this
   choice body of officials consists mostly of Che-Ka employees
   who have been convicted of peculation or extortion or assault
   or some other offence against the ordinary penal code. But,
   removed from all social and legal control as they are here,
   these “trusted workers of the State” can do what they like,
   and hold at their mercy the entire establishment. For the
   prisoners have no power of complaint--they have, as a matter
   of fact, no right of complaint, but must walk hungry and naked
   and barefooted at their guardians’ will, and work for fourteen
   hours out of the twenty-four, and be punished (even for the
   most trivial offences) with the cudgel or the lash, and thrust
   into cells known as “stone pockets,” and exposed, without food
   or shelter, to attacks of mosquitoes in the open.... And at the
   further end of the island lies the Savatievsky Hermitage, where
   the Socialists are imprisoned, and which, like the Solovetsky
   camp, occupies about a _desiatina_ of land and the corner
   of a lake. All around it is barbed wire. An edifice normally
   made to accommodate at the most seventy persons, it has living
   in it two hundred Socialists of all shades of opinion, and a
   few Anarchists. The only privilege possessed by its inmates is
   that, so long as they keep to their compound, they can do what
   they like in it--they can starve in it, they can fall ill in it,
   they can die or go mad in it, without the least obstacle being
   placed in their way by the administration, which would not for a
   moment think of interfering with matters so purely personal and
   private. And whenever they seek an interview with the commandant
   he replies to them with sheer effrontery.... What affects the
   prisoners most is not the actual conditions of the place, but
   the knowledge that always, for eight months of the year, life
   will have to be dragged out in complete isolation from the rest
   of the world.... Prisoners falling dangerously ill, or losing
   their reason, are given no medical attendance, but must go on
   living with the rest in the cramped, noisy cells.... Seldom
   is it that letters dispatched from the island reach their
   destination....

Six weeks only have passed since the book from which this quotation
is taken was published; yet already the horrors which it describes
are coming to be known in the world--already we keep hearing of
cases of suicide on the island, and learning even from official
_communiqués_ of mass floggings which not infrequently end
in death. Only on February 10 of the present year (1924) did the
thirty-fourth issue of the _Izvestia_ print a “Report on Recent
Events in Solovetsky,” which included the following:

   At six o’clock on the evening of December 19, there occurred
   in the compound of the Savatievsky Hermitage (which forms part
   of the Solovetsky camp) a most regrettable incident, in that
   a number of prisoners came into collision with the Red Guard
   detachment which has charge of the establishment.

This has been the fate of the Socialists on the island. So what of
the other political prisoners there? We receive the answer from a
correspondent of the _Socialistichesky Vestnik_:

   In addition to the concentration camp for Socialists, there
   exists, on Solovetsky, a special prison called “the Kremlin”
   which stands away from where the Socialists are confined, and
   is a world to itself, since it has congregated in it, firstly,
   felons pure and simple, men saturated with the old habits and
   morals of the criminal sphere; secondly, “economists,” or
   men convicted of financial offences, acceptance of bribes,
   peculation, and the like; and thirdly, a few political
   prisoners, consisting mostly of ecclesiastics and convicted
   “counter-revolutionaries.” And there is no describing the
   horrors of the Kremlin’s _régime_. True, the cells stand
   always unlocked, but merciless floggings take place there, for
   prisoners are beaten even for the slightest mistake in a task
   (the warders and the foreman of working parties alike walk
   about with sticks), and altogether punished in ways which are
   worthy only of the Inquisition. For example, in summer prisoners
   are stripped naked, and left exposed in the open until their
   bodies have become half-devoured with mosquitoes. Or else they
   are thrown, for seven days at a time, into pitch-dark dungeons
   too cramped to admit of their inmates lying down. And in
   winter time they are thrown into a tower whose inner walls are
   permanently coated with ice. And always the food is horrible,
   for the officials filch the prisoners’ rations. And the women
   prisoners’ position is worse still; they are still more helpless
   than the men, and can win respect neither by origin, nor by
   upbringing, nor by habits, but lie completely in the power of
   the authorities, and at any time may have their “services”
   demanded, and made to barter away their virtue for a bread
   ration: so that in only too many cases they become infected
   with one or another form of venereal disease. And at all times
   they are liable to tuberculosis and scurvy. Thus the camp is
   a community of slaves in the worst sense of the term, for it
   lacks all vestige of prisoners’ rights, and has to live under
   conditions all tending to a detestable system of starvation,
   torture, outrage, and assault. In fact, it is a system which
   would disgrace the Bolshevists even if they were applying it to
   the worst of criminals: whereas those to whom they are applying
   it are merely worsted political foes, but no more. Hence, to
   compel victims like these to drag out their lives under such
   conditions constitutes an iniquity which no words can adequately
   brand.

Yet Che-Kas have had the impudence to affect to censure Tsarist
officialdom for its ill-treatment of political prisoners, though they
themselves are a hundred times worse!

At Solovetsky, again, we meet with the “stone pockets,” or dens which
are said to have been contrived during the reign of Ivan the Terrible.
Into these dens prisoners would be thrown for a week or a fortnight
at a time, although the cavities were wholly unlighted, and of such a
shape as to compel their occupants to remain permanently in a crawling
position.[258] Facts of the sort compare badly even with some of the
features of the Turkish atrocities of 1876. Yet Pascal, the French
Communist, could write in a pamphlet:

   The so-called Russian Terror ... never began, and has never,
   to my French mind, been a Terror at all. Hence I laugh when
   I hear the Che-Ka called “horrible,” for I myself have had
   opportunities of observing its discretion and leniency--almost
   its good-nature!




                             CHAPTER VIII

            “THE PRIDE AND THE JOY OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY”

   How naturally instinct leads the dregs of all political parties
   and all shades of political opinion to gravitate to, and hang
   about, the Tuileries!--HERZEN, 1850.


Once Zinoviev said: “The Che-Ka is the pride and the joy of the
Communist Party”: but though commendation is a matter of personal
opinion, I myself believe that Latzis came nearer to the truth when he
said: “The Che-Ka is at least the best that Soviet institutions can
evolve,”--and thereby pronounced the death warrant of Sovietism.

One of the prime causes of the degeneration of Che-Ka activity into
tyranny and violence was the quality of the Che-Ka _personnel_.
Political fanaticism alone will not explain the horrors which I have
described. It is only sadists and madmen, it is only social elements
which life has rejected, and greed of gain and lust of power have
attracted, that can engage in bloodshed on such a colossal scale. Yet
the mentality even of a healthy-minded individual would have broken
down amid the atmosphere of orgy which has prevailed in Russia for five
years past: and therefore a type study of the sort of functionary who
figured on, and was employed by, Che-Kas is bound to offer both the
alienist and the historian a most interesting field of investigation.
Yes, only a sadist could find pleasure in such bloody work, or in
singing the praises of such work as once the author of some doggerel
verses called “The Che-Ka’s Smile” sang them in Tiflis when he declared
that:

    “No richer joy, no sweeter sound, exists
    Than sound of life cut short, and bones a-crack.
    My eyes grow dim, my heart cries breathlessly:
    ‘Away! Against the wall! And shoot!’”

For we all know how cruelty may mate with sensuality, and an Eidouk
show himself equally capable of writing hysterical rubbish and of
slaying his fellows for a “revolutionary cause.” And we know that from
the first the Che-Kas were forced to draw their staffs mainly from the
criminal population, and that Dzherzhinsky’s memorandum of February
17, 1922, saying that “the punitive apparatus of a revolutionary
authority should be constituted of an institute of revolutionary judges
and prosecutors chosen by the people, and vested with an integrity of
crystal spotlessness (seeing that they are the functionaries in whose
hands the supreme authority is to repose),” was setting forth, in this
connection, things as they ought to have been rather than things as
they were. Yet the memorandum continues:

   In point of fact, the _personnel_ of our Che-Kas is a
   _personnel_ chosen with great care from amongst tested
   members of the Communist Party. Hence that _personnel_
   consists of individuals incorruptible of idea, and
   irreproachable of antecedent. Only by employing such persons
   could our Che-Kas hope to perform the duties which the
   revolutionary proletariat has entrusted to their charge.

Well, even if we take it as a fact that there was a single word of
truth in this, the atmosphere of tyranny which soon spread over the
country would still have ended by demoralising not only any “institute
of judges” of the kind mentioned, but also every decent element
amongst the population. Nay, Latzis, the Che-Ka’s own statistician,
himself had to admit that constant changes of Che-Ka employees were
found necessary.

   However honest a Che-Ka employee may be, and however
   crystal-pure his heart, the conditions of Che-Ka work are such
   as in time to affect his nervous system, and to atrophise his
   ethical sense. Indeed, many a young Communist has thereby been
   prevented from forming his character, and set upon the road of
   moral deterioration.

One such young Communist, an ex-plumber in the employ of the Che-Ka of
Yaroslav as a “people’s prosecutor,” began his work well, but, later,
took to liquor. And he had a friend who played the accordion, and the
pair would drink in company. And it was mostly when he was drunk that
he did his questioning of prisoners, whilst his accordion-playing
friend sat by him to keep up his spirits. Yet so illiterate was this
ex-plumber “people’s prosecutor” that he could not even inscribe his
sentences of death, but had to scrawl across the paper, “To be put out
as a White.”

The All-Russian Che-Ka held its sessions in Moscow, and constituted
a state within a state, and could requisition blocks (indeed, scores
of blocks) of buildings for its exclusive use, and maintain its
own tailor’s establishment, laundry, restaurant, toilet saloon,
boot-maker’s shop, locksmith’s forge, larders, and cellars--the latter,
of course, well stocked with the best of “confiscated” food and wine.
And it was not only actual members of the Che-Ka that could make use
of these amenities without incurring an obligation to render account.
The Che-Ka’s employees could do the same. Hence, when everyone else
was going hungry the Che-Ka member or employee would be receiving
his ration of sugar and butter and flour and the rest, whilst every
theatre in the place had to send the Che-Ka free tickets for every
performance. And practically the same obtained in the provinces,
where everywhere we see the local Che-Ka occupying the most desirable
premises. When a body of that sort was instituted at Sebastopol it, as
a matter of course, took possession of Kist’s Hotel, whilst, as regards
Odessa, the local Che-Ka built a whole settlement for its own benefit,
and speedily caused to spring up there every species of establishment
likely to conduce to the comfort of a “citizen,” from a barber’s shop
to a cinema palace. The Che-Ka of Zhitomir, again, had its own dramatic
society.[259] And though a correspondent wrote to the _Obstchoyé
Dielo_ that “the drunken sailor and the small boy with belt and
huge revolver, our two hitherto types of Che-Ka employee, are becoming
things of the past, and replaced with people’s prosecutors of urbane
address and legal, or budding legal, origin,” the change seemed the
more revolting, so terribly did the sleek, flashy aspect of the fellows
who now held power of life and death over their fellow men clash with
the universal popular impoverishment.

“The name of our Che-Ka must not only become famous. It must also
become, and remain, innocent of spot.” How was this going to be
achieved when Moscow alone contained twenty thousand Che-Ka agents
drawing special rations, and organised into a host of cliques? As
early as the year 1919 the All-Russian Che-Ka had come to have 2000
persons on its personal staff, with three-fourths of them natives of
Latvia. Indeed, Letts, from the beginning, obtained, and retained, a
special position in this regard, and would be engaged by Che-Kas in
batches of whole families, and render those Che-Kas faithful service.
Thus our modern Letts might be likened to the ancient mercenaries.
So much was this the case that the Muscovite Che-Ka came to be known
as “the Lettish Colony.” _A propos_ of the attraction which the
institutions of Moscow had for Latvia’s population, the _Bulletin_
of the Left Social Revolutionary Party remarked: “Letts flock to the
Extraordinary Commission of Moscow as folk emigrate to America, and for
the same reason--to make their fortunes.” And the fact that very few
Letts knew a single word of Russian was in no way held to disqualify
those immigrants from being entrusted with inquisitions and domiciliary
searches, or even with the filling in of returns. Whence arose amusing
anecdotes not wholly amusing to the victims.

The truth is that, on the Bolshevists sending out a call for
“idealists,” there looked up to them mostly the scum of the population,
until Krylenko himself had to admit that “into the Che-Kas there have
crept criminal elements.” For that matter, could it reasonably be
expected that an ex-circus clown and an ex-brothel keeper should remain
the only officiants of their kind?[260] And though it may not have been
the invariable rule that Che-Ka employees were criminals (for example,
Douzirev, the Grand Duke Vladimir’s ex-coachman, who took service
under the Che-Ka of Odessa, may conceivably have been an otherwise
respectable man) the fact remains that, as time went on, persons of the
thief-murderer-swindler type insinuated themselves in large numbers
into the best posts, and there exist scores of instances to that
effect. Some of these instances are to be found in _The Che-Ka_.
For example, once it was found that the headquarters of a gang of
burglars which had been operating in the town of Ekaterinodar was the
residence of the local “people’s prosecutor,” and that a certain Albert
who had been in the employ of the local Che-Ka’s detective department,
and sent to the University of Kuban at the expense of the League of
Communist Youth, had been the gang’s principal leader. And there are
instances of the same kind in the materials collected by the Denikin
Commission, so that they constitute a perfect picture gallery of past
and present malefactors. Nay, it fell to the lot of the Muscovite
Che-Ka itself to discover that certain of its principals were not
unconnected with cases of “banditism” which occurred; whilst in 1919
an employee of the Odessan Che-Ka revealed the fact that “criminals
amongst us have been forging orders for carrying out domiciliary
searches, and extracting money from victims, and robbing them,” whilst
the victims in question had actually been employees of the Che-Ka’s
own “operative department”! In fact (partially, perhaps, owing to
the southerliness of its climate) Odessa furnished more instances of
“banditism” on the part of Soviet-commissioned officials than any other
locality in Russia; and once a local lawyer, when questioned on the
point by Denikin’s Commission, replied:

   In this part of the world it has never taken long for our
   criminal elements to become adapted to Soviet rule, for they
   seem to have a natural affinity for it. Recently there arose
   a rumour that “Comrade Michael,” the secretary of our Che-Ka,
   was none other than the notorious thief known as “Mishka[261]
   the little Japanese”; and though the authorities straightway
   published an official _démenti_ of the rumour (they did
   so in No. 47 of the _Izvestia_), to say that “Mishka, the
   little Japanese” had no connection whatsoever with the Che-Ka’s
   secretary, no more than a few days had passed before there
   was published in the papers (the _Communist_, I think,
   was one of them) a letter from Michael Vinitsky (“Mishka the
   Little Japanese”) himself, to say that, whatever else he might
   have been in the past, he had been a lifelong protagonist of
   Communist ideals, and _robbed only the bourgeois_. And
   with that “Comrade Michael” (Vinitsky) launched himself upon
   a Communistic career in earnest, and transformed his band of
   ex-thieves and burglars into a “Fifty-Fourth Soviet Regiment,”
   and created himself the regiment’s commanding officer, and,
   when the general mobilisation of local Communists took place,
   co-opted to the post of the regiment’s political commissary the
   “Comrade Feldmann” who, throughout, had been the life and soul
   of the Che-Ka’s executive committee.[262]

Again, an ex-burglar of Odessa, one Kotovsky,[263] was appointed to
the command of a Red Division.[264] Yet at least this fellow displayed
a certain amount of decency in his new post, whereas, as a rule, his
kind soon harked back to their original bestiality, and, sometimes, to
their original job. Thus a certain Ossip Letny acted for a while as
administrative chief at Tsaritsin, but left that post in order again
to head a band which carried out countless robberies and murders.
And in January 1921 one Khadzhi-Elias, president of a revolutionary
tribunal, had to be shot for having taken part in an organisation
for perpetrating extortion and theft under cover of the phrase
“Warfare against Counter-Revolution,” even though up to the time of
his detection he had been allowed to conduct trials solely according
to his “revolutionary sense,” and to pass sentences of death on his
own responsibility, and to carry them out with his own hand. The
number of killings which he is said thus to have perpetrated is truly
appalling.[265]

On one occasion the Che-Ka’s _Weekly_ asserted that “the late
_bourgeois_ dispensation had for its principal adjuncts corruption
and forgery.” Would the journal repeat the statement, now that the
Soviet Government has had actually to organise “weeks for combating
bribery”?

Then, to touch briefly upon the trial of a man called Kossarev. This
man had been a member of the Committee of Inspection and Control, a
body formed to review the “legality” or otherwise of decrees issued
by the provincial Che-Kas. Yet now, when arraigned before the Supreme
Revolutionary Tribunal on a charge of having substituted a car-load of
firewood for a car-load of frozen meat, he was found to have served a
previous sentence of ten years in the Siberian mines for having robbed
and murdered an old woman! And in 1922, when the Revolutionary Tribunal
of Moscow tried a certain Taraboukin, an ex-bandit, and the president
of one of the provincial tribunals, for extortion, it found that he
and a friend had once murdered a jeweller, and stolen twenty million
roubles-worth of stock!

Thus the Bolshevists could be ruthless towards their own agents: but
they were so only when those agents had been _too_ brazen in
their robbing or accepting of bribes. Wherefore cases of the sort
formed the exception rather than the rule. As a rule, an official
could commit an offence with impunity, for always it was found that,
though appeals might be presented for “extinction of the rascals who
are wrecking our Soviet system” (an appeal of the sort being presented
by, in particular, Zachs, whilst serving as Dzherzhinsky’s temporary
substitute on the Muscovite Che-Ka),[266] it had to be realised that
those “rascals” had become indispensable to the system. Indeed, I could
cite many cases where officials were charged with offences, sentenced
to death, released, and given superior posts.

The Head of the Petrograd Che-Ka once proudly told a meeting of
Che-Kas of the Northern Region that was held during the October of
1918 that “My Che-ka looks with disapproval upon the methods of the
old Secret Police, and particularly disapproves of the employment of
_agents-provocateurs_”: whereas the truth is that, beginning with
the case of the Mr. Lockhart whom Peters invited to attend a fictitious
meeting of a fictitious “Committee of White Guards” (later even the
_Pravda_ admitted that it had been a fictitious committee), the
working of the Che-Ka’s “punitive apparatus” was carried on exclusively
by means of an officially (and clumsily) organised and sanctioned
and operated system of _provocation_. Thus, the fifth paragraph
of a secret Order issued by the Special Branch over Dzherzhinsky’s
signature on December 5, 1920, recommended that, “for the detection
of foreign agencies in our territories, there be organised pretended
White Guard associations.” And this circular would seem to have been
present to Latzis’ mind when he inspired a special Kievan piece of
political _provocation_ which was worked by pseudo “Chilean” and
“Brazilian” “Consuls” (who, in reality, of course, were employees of
the provincial Che-Ka), and adopted for its plan of operations offers
to help refugees to escape abroad, and those refugees’ subsequent
betrayal as “counter-revolutionaries.” The upshot was that in due
course the _Krasny Mech_, or “Red Sword” (the organ of the
Political Department of the All-Ukrainian Che-Ka) published (on August
18, 1918) a statement that a huge counter-revolutionary conspiracy had
been brought to light under “Count Albert Petrovich Pirro, Brazilian
Minister to the Ukrainian Soviet Government,” and that this “Count
Pirro” and four confederates had been shot, and that investigations
with regard to certain others connected with the affair were now in
progress. Well, certainly a lady of the name of Poplavskaya _was_
shot at that period, for having “prepared to travel to France and
warn M. Clemenceau of an impending visit of Communists for secret
propaganda”; but we know that no “Count Pirro,” as such, can have been
put to death, for the reason that the “Count” was none other than
an _agent provocateur_ employed by the Che-Ka--though to this
day the precise identity of the Che-Ka employee who impersonated the
pseudo-diplomatist has been kept a secret.

Again, in 1920 some foreign-published Russian journals issued accounts
of Odessan doings of a “Baroness Stern,” who resembled “Count Pirro”
in so far as that her proceedings at least smacked of Bolshevist
_provocation_. For no sooner had she landed at Odessa from
Constantinople than local Bolshevist leaders hastened to fête her as
a zealous Communist, and to cause her every utterance to be quoted
in the press, even in the _Izvestia_ itself. Then she disclosed
to the German Consular Agent her “real mission.” She had come from
Germany, she said, on behalf of the International Red Cross, and was
charged to help any German subjects in Russia towards repatriation if
they wished, _and to supply any Russian subjects who might desire to
join the party with false passports_. _Only_, the lady said,
those Russian subjects must first hand over to her their valuables,
lest those valuables should be confiscated, _en route_, by the
Bolshevists. And, for the rest, the day for departure having been
appointed, the Che-Ka stepped in, and arrested all those who had
accepted the fictitious offers of help.

And another counterpart of our “Count Pirro” was a “Representative of
the Danish and Swedish Red Crosses” who took such an interest in White
Guard activities as a hobby that he tried to get into communication
with certain persons known to myself, and did succeed in doing so as
regards such of them as were simple enough to let themselves be landed
in the gentleman’s toils.

Also a trial of refugees at Anapa was engineered by
_agents-provocateurs_ in the employment of the Che-Ka of Vladikavkaz.
First that Che-Ka induced refugees to attempt to escape from Anapa
to Batoum; and then it caused them to be arrested and shot by the
district Che-Ka of Ter. The procedure was the usual one. The first
party of refugees (twelve of them) was taken in hand by a “Colonel
Baron Zussermann,” and accorded, in the half-way town of Vladikavkaz,
a hospitable official welcome, with good quarters and entertainment,
and, after supper, a visit to the town’s theatres and cinema palaces.
The only unfortunate circumstance was that the refugees were unaware
that the address of “Colonel Baron Zussermann” was also the address
of the head of the local Che-Ka. And when a still larger party (of
about a hundred) was organised the tragi-comedy ended in the usual
shootings.[267]

In the _Posledniya Novosty_ of February 7, 1922, we find a description
of the method by which, in 1921, certain places near the Bessarabian
frontier caught _bourgeois_ and White Guards when trying to escape
abroad. The affair would begin by certain “relatives” of the fugitive
sending him a “trustworthy person” with a commission to see to the
fugitive’s safe-conduct out of Russia; but always it would come about
that, whether by accident or otherwise, both the “trustworthy person”
and the “letter of recommendation” fell, _en route_, into the hands
of the Roumanian Che-Ka; whereupon that Che-Ka would send another
“trustworthy person” with another “letter of recommendation,” and that
person would call upon the refugee concerned, and, after arranging for
his journey, and obtaining sufficient evidence against him, carry out
the usual arrest.

It has been stated,[268] too, that the commissary attached to the
medical mission that was tried in Moscow during the summer of 1920, and
shot under heart-rending circumstances, was not a commissary at all,
but an _agent-provocateur_. And certainly the so-called Evstafievskaya
Street conspiracy of Odessa in 1921 was organised by the keeper of
the local Che-Ka prison,[269] and the Tagantsev trial in Petrograd by
a sailor named Pankov. And beyond a doubt _provocation_ was employed
in the affair of the Petrograd co-operative employees, and again in
the huge pro-Polish conspiracy that was unearthed in Smolensk in
1921, when over 1500 persons were arrested. Also, eye-witnesses have
stated in connection with the rising in the Ishona region in 1921 that
_agents-provocateurs_ figured in officers’ uniforms at the sessions of
the Omsk Che-Ka, and that a similar ruse was used to foment the Saratov
rising of Social Revolutionaries and Menshevists in March of the same
year.[270] In this regard, a peculiarly instructive case is the case
of the Anarchists Lev Cherny, Fanny Baron, and others, who, in 1921,
were shot for alleged forgings of Soviet notes. In their pamphlet
concerning the trial the Anarchists of Berlin wrote:

   There can be no doubt that our murdered comrades had no
   connection whatsoever with the criminal offence whose imputation
   brought about their execution. Nor can there be any doubt that
   the idea of issuing the forged notes emanated from the Muscovite
   Che-Ka itself. In fact, the method of working the affair was
   that two agents of the Che-Ka (Steiner, _alias_ Kamenny, and a
   chauffeur) first attached themselves to a group of _genuine_
   forgers, and then scraped acquaintance with our Anarchist
   comrades in order that, to betray them, they might see to the
   forging of the notes, and to the notes’ utterance--the whole
   being done with the knowledge of, and by the instructions of,
   the Che-Ka of Moscow.

To realise how likely this hypothesis is we need only recall the
telegram with regard to Anarchists sent to Rakovsky.

And a correspondent wrote to the _Obstchoyé Dielo_:

   Here, in Odessa, the provincial Che-Ka has formed a new
   department, a statistical branch acting for the Commissariat
   of Public Health, the real purpose of which is to organise
   espionage abroad, and to suppress “military counter-revolution”
   at home. The new departure has been officially inaugurated
   in Konelsky’s old villa in Fontannaya Street, and has had
   placed at its head the notorious Zakovsky--a Lett, a member
   of the All-Russian Che-Ka, and a member of the praesidium of
   the provincial Che-Ka; whilst the highly responsible post of
   Ukrainian Resident on behalf of Bessarabia and Galicia and
   Poland has been given to Mikhailovsky, an employee whom the
   Muscovite Che-Ka dispatched to Odessa to act as local “Special
   Agent” in company with his mistress, Ksenia Vladimirovna
   Mikhailovskaya (_née_ von Gerngross), a colonel’s daughter,
   and rejoicing also in the nicknames of “Lialka” and “Adochka.”
   And, with her paramour, this woman (as “Assistant Ukrainian
   Resident on behalf of etc., etc.,” and “Member of the Military
   Espionage Section in the All-Russian Registration Department”)
   controls a whole network of secret service, a network covering
   both Bessarabia and the Polish frontier region, and (like her
   _souteneur_ and her employees) lives well, denies herself
   nothing, and justifies her existence by instigating occasional
   “conspiracies against the Soviet Government.” Lately, for
   example, she and hers professed to have discovered a “White
   Guard espionage system.” But they themselves had organised the
   system, for “Adochka” is pretty enough to be able to scrape
   acquaintanceships with officers, and to tell them (quite
   innocently) that an “officers’ association” exists for their
   benefit, and to prove her assertion by letting her victims read
   a forged “secret appeal for a combination of forces against
   Bolshevism, to the end that that tottering and detested Power
   may fall,” and to back up that “appeal” with a reference to
   Wrangel’s advance from Roumania. It need hardly be said that the
   place where the “appeal” is typed is the new statistical branch
   of the Commissariat of Public Health. However, if any officer
   persists in being stupid enough to distrust such “proof,”
   “Adochka” then tenders him a sum of money purporting to emanate
   from a mysterious “organisation for assisting officers in
   distress”--which may or may not induce him to set his remaining
   doubts at rest, and to depart and tell his friends about the
   equally illegal and fictitious “organisation” referred to, and
   to form a group of persons willing to join that “organisation,”
   or at least to further its aims. Well, if the officer does that,
   then the desired end has been achieved, and, for its completion,
   the detestable piece of treachery needs but the appearance of
   employees sent by the Che-Ka, some arrests, and some shootings.

For a while, also, the All-Russian Che-Ka maintained a staff of
prostitutes for _provocation_ purposes. And in the same connection
it utilised even children of from twelve to fourteen years of age,
and rewarded them with money and presents and sweets. Again, it would
permit prisoners (hundreds of cases of this occurred) to purchase their
lives by entering the Che-Ka’s secret service. The tragedies that
resulted from this practice! Once a young lady who accepted service
of the kind, to save her father from being shot, fell a prey to such
consequent remorse as to burn herself alive. And one of a famous series
of essays, entitled “Russia of To-Day,” which appeared in the London
_Times_ tells of the self-hanging of a woman who had laid false
information.[271] Particularly extensive was the _provocation_
directed against the lower strata of the population; wherefore the
“Workers’ Opposition” within the Communist Party spoke no more than
the truth when it said that to Russia’s labouring classes Communist
_nuclei_ were known as “Communist bloodhound-kennels.” “Brood
hens,” _agents-provocateurs_, swarmed also in the prisons, where
they procured countless trials for accepting bribes, and for forgery
and theft, and countless death sentences--for which last they were
paid at a percentage rate, whilst, should the case happen to include
peculation, the “people’s prosecutor” concerned received 10 per cent.
of the sum alleged, as a reward for his share in having “discovered”
the crime. I myself had personal knowledge of such a “discovery.”
In the instance referred to, two “people’s prosecutors” attended an
entertainment given by a Mr. R. and his wife, and induced them to
become confidential. Then they arrested them. And when the wife sent
word of the occurrence to a lawyer friend of her husband’s, and the
lawyer approached the praesidium of the Che-Ka, he, to his surprise,
found himself added as a third prisoner, on the charge that he had
dared to address the Che-Ka without previously obtaining permission. In
the end he was exiled to Novospassk.

And, according to _The Che-Ka_, it was quite a common thing for
Che-Ka employees purposely to carry out domiciliary searches, and
mass arrests and ambushes, as a means of supplying themselves with
additional stocks of the amenities of life: so that on December 9,
1919, the Soviet of Moscow itself had to admit in its press that “it
has been found that houses used by our agents for organising ambushes
never fail to be left stripped to the basement.” For, as I have already
shown, these Che-Ka staffs were, for the most part, mere gangs of
thieves. Yet whenever gangs of the sort were seen to be in danger of
exposure they found powerful defenders in the real instigators of the
crimes, in the leading officials of the local Che-Ka. On September
22, 1918, Peters wrote in No. 2 of the _Weekly_: “Recently
certain enemies of the Soviet Government have been spreading tales
that Communists are guilty of bribes-taking, corruption, and false
witness. But do not let this depress us. True, a few cases of abuse
in this way may have occurred; yet all that that means is that the
New Man has not yet had time to acquire the legal sense.” Then Peters
added: “Besides, we may rest assured that all such calumnies are but
slanderous lies of _bourgeois_ production.” And this a lesser
light capped with the self-satisfied words: “Charges of the sort are
only a proof of our strength, for we are both clever and practical, and
have no need to grease the palms of persons weaker than ourselves.”
Yet why should Mr. Alston have written to Lord Curzon: “Frequently
arrested persons have to bail themselves out several times over, under
a threat of death,” or the Che-Kas of Kuban and Odessa have organised a
regular industry of throwing persons into gaol, and reaping a monetary
harvest from their release?[272] Nor did Moscow form any exception to
the rule of corruption, and the Che-Ka of Tiraspol systematically
smuggled refugees across the frontier, and the same was done by other
Che-Kas conveniently near the boundary line. In this connection the
_Posledniya Novosty_ of February 7, 1922, declared the Roumanian
Che-Ka to be taking the lead in such doings, and went on:

   In every small town and village on the Dnieper a swarm of
   “bookers” exist who, for a fee, will convey fugitives over to
   Bessarabia “as safely as though on a dreadnought”....[273] And,
   for the most part, the employees of the local Che-Ka do their
   own touting work, and do it very well.... The next event is
   that, just when the refugee is about to start for the river
   landing-stage, there materialises an unexpected hold-up, and he
   finds himself and his property under duress. And, inasmuch as
   that property is usually made up of gold and foreign currency,
   it can be made to furnish circumstantial evidence of “a
   contemplated act of treason,” and so to furnish also a ground
   for bargaining. Then, at long last, the victim is allowed to
   proceed upon his way.... In fact, every Ukrainian town of any
   size has its own small frontier place whence passage abroad can
   be effected as from a private “window upon Europe.”

But sometimes that “window” would be closed for a while. Early in 1920
the small frontier towns of Podolia were very popular resorts for
Odessa and Kiev; but when spring arrived the whole population of the
Dnieperian region was shocked to hear that eighty decomposed bodies
had been found in a cave near Kamenka, one of the small Podolian towns
concerned, which proved to be bodies of refugees who, supposedly, had
long ago reached Bessarabia in safety. However, in localities where
Che-Kas were chronically poor, and, therefore, chronically desirous
of obtaining rich clients, the journey to foreign climes presented no
difficulties at all; though in winter-time the Che-Ka of Tiraspol
would control the traffic by nocturnal holdings-up of persons who
attempted to cross the river on the ice without first having paid the
Che-Ka its prescribed fee of from 4000 to 5000 Romanov roubles. And any
refugee so caught was then led naked through the streets, and beaten
with sticks and whips, to “harden him against freezing on the ice when
next he crossed.” And in Tiraspol also _provocation_ flourished.

On February 16, 1923, the _Posledniya Novosty_ reported that a
leading member of a commission which had been appointed to enquire
into the working of the O.G.P.U. had committed suicide on the Nikitsky
Boulevard, and left for discovery on his body a letter addressed to the
Praesidium of the Central Committee. The letter said:

   My comrades, although the State Political Department was
   designed as our principal institution for safeguarding what the
   working classes have won, and Comrade Unschicht has shown it to
   need greatly strengthening if its position is ever to become
   consolidated, merely a glance at the manner of its working has,
   joined with a brief perusal of the documents concerned, forced
   me to the conclusion that forthwith I must rid myself of the
   horrors and the iniquities which, practised in the name of the
   great principles of Communism, have involuntarily been connived
   at by myself as a responsible member of the Communist Party,
   and that only my death can atone for the mistake which I have
   committed. But first I would send you a request that you recover
   your senses before it is too late, and cease to disgrace our
   great teacher Marx, and to alienate the Russian people from
   Socialism.

And there had been yet earlier cases of prickings of Bolshevist
conscience, especially before the mentality of the Bolshevist
_intelligentsia_ had wholly assimilated the brutality of Che-Ka
work, and whilst yet persons “with weak nerves and effeminate bodies”
(to quote Peters) were finding the sense of moral responsibility for
the bloodshed perpetrated under the auspices of the Communist Party,
and under those of the proletariat as a whole, too heavy a burden. At
all events, up to the beginning of 1919 letters to that effect kept
reaching the official press, and we find Petrovsky himself admitting
that if Che-Kas persisted in their policy of converting themselves into
independent State units, the end could only be a “demoralisation of the
State’s constructive labours.”

And when the Grand Dukes Nicholas, George, Dmitry, and Paul were shot
argumentation as to the advisability, or otherwise, of curbing the
Che-Kas broke out with greater virulence than ever in the Bolshevist
press. Yet though, eventually, _theoretical_ reforms were
introduced, the Terror continued its way unchecked, and we need but
recall the words of Moroz,[274] that “there is not a sphere of life
which the Che-Ka does not watch,” to realise that the moral and mental
conditions of Bolshevist Russia have never changed.

Take, for example, the type of _agent-provocateur_ or “Government
worker” whom Dzerzhinsky’s circular encouraged, and largely enabled, to
make good his footing in the State. “Life here is terrible,” wrote a
Pskov correspondent to the _Roussky Courier_ in May 1921:

   Spies swarm like ants; they are to be found in every house and
   every tenement and every street. Not a dwelling does not harbour
   Communists engaged in watching the occupants. It is as though
   we were living in a prison. Each man is afraid of the other,
   and brother looks askance at brother. The place is an accursed
   hotbed of espionage.

And in 1922 an official document entitled “Duties of Secret Agents for
January” enjoined that during that month:

   All agents shall (1) keep under observation managements of
   factories, and educated workers in the same, and make sure of
   those persons’ political opinions, and report any agitation
   or propaganda against the Soviet Power in which such persons
   may engage; (2) investigate any gathering purporting to have
   been organised for amusement (card-playing and the like) only,
   but in reality for other ends, and, if possible, join in such
   gathering, and report to the authorities its real purpose and
   aims, and the names and surnames and addresses of all present;
   (3) keep under surveillance all educated employees of Soviet
   institutions, and note their conversation, and discover their
   political views, and where they spend their leisure, and, in
   short, communicate to the authorities any suspicious details;
   (4) attend all intimate or family gatherings of an educated
   class, discover their trend of opinion, and learn who have been
   their organisers, and why they have been organised at all; (5)
   watch for the holding of any communication between educated
   persons and the _intelligentsia_ of a given district and
   persons at home or abroad, and report upon the same, accurately
   and fully.[275]

On the sixth anniversary of the Che-Ka’s sanguinary inception Zinoviev
wrote:

   When the People entrusted the sword to the All-Russia
   Extraordinary Commission, it was to worthy hands that the People
   entrusted that weapon. And now the letters O.G.P.U. have become
   as terrifying to our enemies as were once the letters V.C.K.
   They are known all the world over.

And certainly this last is true.

When, in Tsarist times, the old “Third Department” was renamed “The
Department of State Police,” the act of renaming it was declared to
be an insult to the intelligence of the Russian community. Yet what
else can be said of a “reform” which has done no more than convert
the letters “V.C.K.” into the letters “O.G.P.U.,” and achieved results
brilliant to none save those who possess the mentality of a Zinoviev?
Long ago the Russian masses translated the initials “V.C.K.” into the
phrase “_Vsiem Cheloviekam Konetz!_” (“An End to All Men!”): and
though yet it remains to be seen how popular humour will interpret the
initials “O.G.P.U.,”[276] for the present the rest of the world regards
them as standing for an institution alien to democracy, and in no way
sanctioning the dictum of Anatole France that “revolutions are bound to
demand an irrational toll of victims.”

Once the Muscovite _Pravda_[277] quoted a promise on Trotsky’s
part that “if we are forced to depart hence, we shall make the whole
world hear it when we slam the door behind us, and leave to our
successors only ruins and the silence of a cemetery.”

That silence is reigning in Russia now. And in “The Ship of Death” we
find written:

   Reason totters with the effort to understand; eyes grow dim as
   they gaze upon things which the scores of generations before us
   never saw or knew, and the generations after us will scarcely
   be able to imagine even with the aid of history books. For
   death, once so mysterious to us, once altogether beyond our
   understanding, has now lost its terrors, and become, rather,
   life. No longer the pungent odour of human blood, saturating
   the air with its heavy vapour, unnerves us. We have ceased to
   tremble on beholding endless strings of human beings being led
   to execution, now that we have seen infants shot and writhing
   in our streets, and cold, mutilated corpses of men and women,
   victims of an insane terrorism, lying piled in heaps. Moreover,
   not once, but many times, have we ourselves stood on the
   Dividing Line. Hence we know those spectacles as a native knows
   the footways of his familiar town, and listen to the sound of
   shots as we would to human voices. Yet, just because triumphant
   Death is for ever facing us is the land become silent, and
   its crushed soul sending forth not even the elemental cry of
   anguish and despair. Physically that land has lived through
   never-to-be-forgotten years of civil strife, but spiritually
   it is worn-out, fettered, and extinct--a mere dumb Russia of
   tortures and executions.

Yet though the living may be dumb, it is not so with the dead. They are
crying aloud to us from the ravine of Saratov, from the dungeons of
Kharkov and Khuban, and from the “camp of death” at Kholmogory.

For never can the dead be put to silence!


                                THE END




                             BIBLIOGRAPHY

            _Of Works used by the Author up to March 1924_


                     I. PUBLISHED IN SOVIET RUSSIA

   1. M. Y. LATZIS. _Two Years of Warfare Conducted upon the
   Inner Front._ (A Survey of the activities of the All-Russian
   Extraordinary Commission during two years of its struggle with
   counter-revolution.) The State Publishing Dept. Moscow. 1920.

   2. “THE RED BOOK” OF THE ALL-RUSSIAN EXTRAORDINARY COMMISSION.
   Moscow. 1919.

   3. “THE WEEKLY” OF THE ALL-RUSSIAN EXTRAORDINARY COMMISSION.
   Nos. 1–6. Moscow. 1918.

   4. “THE RED SWORD.” The official organ of the Ukrainian
   Extraordinary Commission. Kieff. 1918.

   5. THE OFFICIAL ORGANS OF THE SOVIET AUTHORITIES. The _Izvestia_
   of the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission (Moscow); the
   provincial _Izvestia_ (Kharkoff, Kieff, Odessa, Tambov,
   Voronezh, Riazan, Stavropol, Saratov, etc.).

   6. COMMUNIST NEWSPAPERS. _Pravda_ (Moscow and Petrograd), _The
   Red Newspaper_ (Petrograd), _The Northern Commune_ (Petrograd),
   and others.

   7. “CIVIL WAR.” Materials for a history of the Red Army.
   Published by the Supreme Military Council. Moscow. 1923.

   8. “THE PROLETARIAN REVOLUTION.” A historical review dealing
   with the history of the Communist Party.

   9. TROTZKI. _Terrorism and Communism._ Moscow. 1920.

   10. “THE NEW LIFE.” Journal edited by M. Gorki. Petrograd. 1918.

   11. “BULLETINS OF THE CENTRAL COMMITTEE OF THE PARTY OF LEFT
   SOCIAL REVOLUTIONARIES (INTERNATIONALISTS).” Published illicitly
   in Moscow in 1919.

   12. “THE INFORMATION SHEET.” Illicit publication of the Union of
   Regeneration. Moscow. 1918.

   13. “THE BANNER OF LABOUR.” Illicit publication of the Party of
   Left Social Revolutionaries. Moscow. 1920.

   14. “THE REVOLUTIONARY CAUSE.” Illicit publication of the Party
   of Social Revolutionaries. Petrograd. 1922.

   15. PROCLAMATIONS. Issued by the Social Revolutionary and Social
   Democratic Parties; by the Anarchists and by the so-called
   “Labour Opposition” within the Communist Party, 1919–1923.


                         II. PUBLISHED ABROAD

   16. SUMMARY OF MATERIALS COLLECTED BY THE SPECIAL COMMISSION OF
   INQUIRY INTO THE OUTRAGES COMMITTED BY THE BOLSHEVISTS. This
   Commission was attached to the Supreme Commander of the Armed
   Forces of the South of Russia. Vols. I.-III. Rostov-on-Don. 1919.

   17. A. LOCKERMANN. _74 Days of Soviet Rule._ Published by the
   Don Committee of the Party of Social Democrats. Rostov-on-Don.
   1918.

   18. AVERBUCH. _The Extraordinary Commission of Odessa._
   Kishinev. 1920.

   19. “THE CHE-KA.” Materials dealing with the activities of the
   Extraordinary Commission. Published by the Central Bureau of the
   Social Revolutionary Party. Berlin. 1922.

   20. “THE KREMLIN BEHIND PRISON BARS.” Published by the Party of
   Left Social Revolutionaries. “Skify,” Berlin. 1922.

   21. “THE PERSECUTION OF ANARCHISTS IN SOVIET RUSSIA.” Published
   by a group of Russian Anarchists in Germany. Berlin. 1922.

   22. O. CHERNOVA-KOLBASSINA. _Reminiscences of Soviet Prisons._
   Published by the Social Revolutionaries in Paris. 1921.

   23. N. DAVYDOVA. _Six Months in Prison._ Berlin. 1923.

   24. “THE 12 CONDEMNED TO DEATH.” (The trial of the Social
   Revolutionaries in Moscow.) Berlin. 1922.

   25. V. AICH. _The City which was Wiped Out._ (The tragedy of
   Novo-Nikolaevsk on the Amur.) Vladivostok. 1920.

   26. VL. MARGOULIES. _Years of Fire._ Berlin. 1923.

   27. T. VAISHER. _Things Seen and Suffered in Soviet Russia._
   Berlin. 1923.

   28. I. OSSIPOV. _The Drive._ Przemysl. 1922.

   29. M. S. MARGOULIES. _A Year of Intervention._ Vol. II.
   Published by Grzebina. Berlin. 1922.

   30. MARTOV. _Down with Capital Punishment._ Published by the
   _Socialistichesky Vestnik_. Berlin. 1923.

   31. N. VORONOVICH. _The Green Book._ (A history of the peasant
   movement in the Black Sea Province.) Prague. 1921.

   32. STEINBERG. _The Moral Aspect of the Revolution._ Berlin.
   1923.

   33. M. GORKI. _About the Russian Peasantry._ Published by
   Ladyzhnikov. Berlin. 1922.

   34. A. PESHEKHONOV. _The Reason why I did not Emigrate._
   Published by the _Obelisk_. Berlin. 1923.

   35. VISHNIAK. _The Black Year._ Published by Povolotzki. Paris.
   1922.

   36. VL. KOROLENKO. _Letters to Lunacharsky._ Published by
   “Zadruga,” Berlin. 1922.

   37. DENIKIN, A. I. _Essays upon the Russian Revolution._ Vol.
   III. “Slovo,” Berlin. 1924.

   38. MASLOV, O. _Russia after Four Years of Revolution._
   Published by the “Russian Press,” Paris. 1922.

   39. USTONOV. _Memoirs of a Chief of the Anti-Bolshevist
   Intelligence Department, 1915–1920._ Published by Maier, Berlin.
   1923.

   40. “MEMORANDUM DES PRISONS SOVIETIQUES.” Comité Executif de la
   Conférence des Membres de l’Assemblée Constit. de Russie. Paris.
   1921.

   41. “MEMORANDUM PRESENTÉ PAR LES DÉLÉGATS DU PARTI
   SOCIALISTES-RÉVOLUTION AU CONGRÈS DES TROIS UNIONS INTERNAT.”
   Berlin. 1922.

   42. “CONFERENCE DES MEMBRES DE L’ASSEMBLÉE CONSTIT. DE RUSSIE.”
   Paris. 1921.

   43. “CHRONIK DER VERFOLGUNGEN IN SOWJET RUSSLAND.” (Ein
   unperiodisches Bulletin der Hilfsvereins für politische
   Gefargene und Verbannte in Russland.) Berlin. 1923.

   44. ARTICLES PUBLISHED IN RUSSIAN JOURNALS ABROAD:

      (_a_) _Archives of the Russian Revolution._ (Edited by
      Essen.) Berlin.

      (_b_) _In Strange Lands._ (Edited by Melgunov and
      Miakotin.) Berlin-Prague.

      (_c_) _Contemporary Notes._ (Edited by Avksentieff and
      Rudnef and others.) Paris.

      (_d_) _Russian Thought._ (Edited by Struve.) Prague.

      (_e_) _Russian History_ (the organ of Monarchists in
      Paris).

      (_f_) _The Historian and Contemporary._ Berlin.

      (_g_) _The Ways of the Revolution_ (organ of the Left
      Social Revolutionaries). “Skify,” Berlin.

      (_i_) _The Will of Russia._ (Lebedeff and others.) Prague.

      (_k_) _The Dawn_ (organ of the Social Democrats). Berlin.

      (_l_) _The News of the Russian National Committee._ Paris.

      (_m_) _The Kossack’s Thoughts._ Sofia.

      (_n_) _The Socialist News_ (organ of the Social
      Democrats). Berlin.

      (_o_) _Revolutionary Russia_ (organ of the Social
      Revolutionary Party). Prague.

      (_p_) _The Banner of Strife_ (organ of the Left Social
      Revolutionaries). Berlin.

      (_q_) _The Anarchist News._

      (_r_) _Peasant Russia._ (Argunoff.) Berlin and Prague.

                 45. ARTICLES PUBLISHED IN NEWSPAPERS:

      (_a_) _The Latest News._ (Professor Miliukoff.) Paris.

      (_b_) _The Helm._ (Gessen.) Berlin.

      (_c_) _To-day._ Riga.

      (_d_) _Freedom._ (Philosophov and Artzibanstiev.) Warsaw.

      (_e_) _Days._ (Kerensky.) Berlin.

      (_f_) _The New Russian Word._ New York.

      (_g_) _The Common Cause, 1920–1922._ (Burtzeff.) Paris.

      (_i_) _La Cause Commune._ (Burtzeff.) Paris.

      (_k_) _New Times._ (Suvorin.) Belgrade.

      (_l_) _The Voice of Russia, 1920–1922_ (the organ of
      Social Revolutionaries). Berlin.

      (_m_) _The Ukrainian Tribune._ 1923. Warsaw.

      (_n_) _Russia To-day._ (_The Times._)


                         III. FOREIGN SOURCES

   46. “A COLLECTION OF REPORTS ON BOLSHEVISM IN RUSSIA.” (Abridged
   Edition of Parliamentary Paper, Russia, No. 1.) 1919.

   47. “INTERIM REPORT OF THE COMMITTEE TO COLLECT INFORMATION ON
   RUSSIA.” 1920.

   48. “REPORT OF THE COMMITTEE TO COLLECT INFORMATION ON RUSSIA.”
   1921.

   49. NILOSTONSKY. _Der Blutrausch des Bolschewismus._ Neudeutsch.
   Verlag, Berlin. 1920.

   50. A. NIEMANN. _Fünf Monate Obrigkeit von Unten._ _Der Firn_,
   Berlin. 1920.

   51. MINK. _Rote Russland Not._ Verlag Gesellschaft, Berlin. 1920.

   52. STRATZ. _Drei Monate als Geisel für Radek._ Berlin. 1920.

   53. A. AXELROD. _Das Wirtschaftliche Erzebuiss des Bolschewismus
   in Russland._ Zürich. 1920.

   54. E. KÖHRER. _Das Wahre Gesicht des Bolschewismus_ (Bilder aus
   den Baltischen Provinzen, 1918–1919). Berlin.

   55. E. KÖHRER. _Unter der Herrschaft des Bolschewismus._ _Der
   Firn_, Berlin. 1920.

   56. K. KAUTSKY. _Terrorism and Communism._ Ladyzhnikoff, Berlin.
   1920.

   57. E. HERRIOT. _La Russie Nouvelle._ Paris. 1923.

   58. O. KEUN. _Sous Lenine._ Paris. 1922.

   59. S. VOLSKY. _Dans le Royaume de la famine et de la haine._
   Paris. 1920.

   60. A. MAZON. _Prisons Russes._ Paris. 1919.

   61. ARTICLES published in _Vorwaerts_, _Humanité_, _Le Peuple_,
   _Pravo Lidu_; Professor Sarolea’s articles in the _Scotsman_.


                         IV. UNPUBLISHED WORKS

   62. “ARCHIVES OF THE SPECIAL COMMISSION OF INQUIRY INTO THE
   OUTRAGES COMMITTED BY THE BOLSHEVISTS.” (Protocols of meetings
   of the Extraordinary Commission; statements made by victims;
   descriptions of places where shootings had taken place, and of
   prisons; instructions to counsel for the prosecution, etc.)

   63. “STATEMENTS MADE BY MESSRS. SHMELOV, LOWKIN, AND OTHERS
   DURING THE LAUSANNE TRIAL.”

   64. “MATERIALS OF THE POLITICAL RED CROSS IN RUSSIA.”

   65. “MATERIALS COLLECTED BY THE AUTHOR IN RUSSIA,” and taken to
   a place of safety abroad in 1922. (Letters, appeals, documents
   of the Extraordinary Commission, etc.)


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FOOTNOTES:

[1] In the remarkable letter which, in 1906, Sagonov sent to
his parents from the Butyrka Prison, where he was lying for the
assassination of Plehve, the writer said: “I have committed the most
terrible of all acts. I have killed two human beings, and stained my
hands with blood. But it was only owing to the horrible struggle and
suffering, only owing to our confrontment with the sad realities of
life, that I had to take up the sword.... And, even so, we were not the
first to take it up.... Ah, I could not refuse to assume my cross! Try
to understand this, and to forgive me. Let people speak of me and my
comrades--of those who have been executed, and of those who are still
alive--as my counsel spoke. Said he: ‘The bomb which this man threw was
not a bomb filled with dynamite, but a bomb charged with the pain and
tears of a whole people. By hurling missiles at its rulers, that people
hoped at least to dissipate the terrible burden of nightmare from its
breast.’”

[2] _A Collection of Reports on Russian Bolshevism_, Abridged
Edition. British Parliamentary Paper, “Russia, No. 1,” p. 69.

[3] The same, pp. 25 and 26.

[4] The _Outro Moskvy_ (“Morning Post of Moscow”), No. 21,
November 4, 1918.

[5] The number of names originally given was fifteen.

[6] Giving evidence before The Lausanne Tribunal, P. Artibashev
estimated the number at 500.

[7] See the section “In the Days of the Red Terror,” in the compilation
known as _The Che-Ka_.

[8] In Tsarist days this room had been a disinfecting place for
newly-arrived convicts.

[9] From the section “The Hungry Guillotine” in _The Che-Ka_, pp.
49 and 50.

[10] See the _Severnaya Communa_ (“Northern Commune”) of September
18, 1918.

[11] See the _Izvestia_ of Moscow: also the _Severny Kavkaz_
(“Northern Caucasus”), No. 138.

[12] See the materials collected by the Denikin Commission.

[13] The almost incredible horrors of this massacre are described on a
later page.

[14] Still earlier than this, namely, on the previous March 1,
Dzherzhinsky had written in the Kievan edition of the _Izvestia_:
“It would be well if all Social Revolutionaries now in custody were
converted into hostages, and made to serve as guarantees for the good
behaviour of their respective wings of the Social Revolutionary Party.”

[15] See the _Izvestia_ of Saratov, October 2, 1919.

[16] In the section “A Year in the Butyrka Prison” in _The
Che-Ka_, p. 144.

[17] He did so in No. 3 of the author’s Berlin-published (Russian)
review, _Na Chouzhoi Storonyé_ (“In Foreign Parts”).

[18] The _Izvestia_ of Khakov, No. 126, May 13, 1919.

[19] In No. 345 of that journal.

[20] See British Parliamentary Paper, “Russia, No. 1 (1919),” p. 15.

[21] See the _Rousskaya Zhizn_ (“Russian Life”), of March 11.

[22] As a result of this disconcerting statement, Madame Zoubevich was
exiled to Orenburg.

[23] The organ of the All-Ukrainian Che-Ka. See its No. 134 of the year
1918.

[24] See the journal _Revolutsionnaya Rossia_ (“Revolutionary
Russia”), Nos. 14 and 15.

[25] I have heard that this man is now in a lunatic asylum.

[26] Only recently the Che-Ka of Georgia seized a large number of
Menshevist (Social Democrat) hostages.

[27] A notice to that effect was published in No. 1 of the _Gazeta
Vremennago Rabochago i Krestianskago Pravitelstva_ (“Gazette of the
Workers’ and Peasants’ Temporary Government”).

[28] The _Izvestia_, No. 27.

[29] The Kievan _Izvestia_ of May 17, 1919.

[30] “The New Life.”

[31] The _Weekly_, No. 6.

[32] See Margoulies’ work, _A Year of Intervention_, vol. ii., p.
77.

[33] Published in No. 192 of the _Izvestia_, 1918.

[34] The Commissary of Justice at the time was Steinberg.

[35] Meetings in support of a Red Terror were largely held in Moscow,
and addressed by Kamenev, Bukharin, Sverdlov, Lounacharsky, and
Krylenko.

[36] On October 18, 1919.

[37] That is to say, the three Russian characters which usually
are transliterated as “V,” “Ch,” and “K” begin both the title of
the _Vserossiiskaya Chrezvychainaya Komissia_ (“All-Russian
Extraordinary Commission”) and the words _Vsiakomou chelovekou
kapout!_ “Death to every man!”).

[38] For example, I failed to receive information as to twelve Social
Revolutionaries whom Nos. 16 and 18 of the journal _Revolutsionnaya
Rossia_ reported to have been shot at Astrakhan on September 5, 1918.

[39] See the _Izvestia_ for February 8.

[40] British White Book, 1920. Also British White Book, 1921.

[41] British Parliamentary Paper, “Russia, No. 1,” p. 56. Also “Sir C.
Eliot to Lord Curzon,” March 21, 1919.

[42] The _Obstchoyé Dielo_, No. 56.

[43] _Archives of the Revolution_, III, 159.

[44] In some localities it was impossible to verify numbers of victims
even when the Bolshevist forces had withdrawn. Thus the Kharkov branch
of the Denikin Commission, which accompanied representatives of the
Kharkov town council and trades council and working women’s union to
eleven prisons in the region, and discovered in those prisons two
hundred bodies, had still to estimate that the real number had been at
least three times as large, since exhumation of the bodies buried in
and beyond the public park was impossible.

[45] “In the Shadow of Death. Report of a Red Cross Worker on the
Bolshevist Prisons in Kiev,” in _Archives of the Revolution_.

[46] About a hundred yards.

[47] Published by the organisation “Der Firn.”

[48] That is to say, a “prosecuting counsel” for the Che-Ka.

[49] See also Margoulies’ book, p. 279.

[50] See “Shootings in Astrakhan,” in _The Che-Ka_, pp. 251 and
253.

[51] The _Volya Rossii_, or “Will of Russia.” The issue referred
to is the issue of December 7, 1921.

[52] See _The Che-Ka_, p. 227.

[53] See _The Che-Ka_, p. 102.

[54] Presumably, the Tsar.

[55] February 15, 1919.

[56] _The Kremlin through Prison Bars_, p. 112.

[57] Under date of August 30, 1919, the French author Cachin wrote
to _L’Humanité_ that, although the Terror, as such, had ended
with the previous year, prisoners still were being sent to the front
for execution. And, later, the Czech Socialist, Posenczka, rendered a
like report. See the _Posledniya Novosty_ (“The Latest News”--a
foreign-published Russian journal) of June 30, 1920.

[58] Executions at the front had been taking place uninterruptedly.
Madame Reissner said when writing of events in Sviashsk during
the August of 1918: “Red Guards were shot there like dogs, with
twenty-seven leading Communists who attempted to desert on the Whites
approaching the town--shot ‘as a warning to others.’”

[59] See the _Posledniya Novosty_ of October 20, 1919.

[60] Nevertheless, shootings ordered by the Central Che-Ka
_were_ reported, and No. 206 of the _Izvestia_ issued a list of
sixteen persons shot by that Che-Ka for having misused their
ration cards. Amongst the victims were Doctor Moudrov, a Princess
Shirinskaya-Shakhmatova, and others.

[61] Of February 18, 1921.

[62] In the issue of June 24, 1920.

[63] Certainly the British press, at that time, reported shootings of
sufferers from the disease--of _child_ sufferers. And see the
_Posledniya Novosty_, No. 656.

[64] In A. P. Akselrod’s book _Das Wirtschaftliche Ergebniss des
Bolschewismus_ (“The Administrative Result of Bolshevism”) we find
an account of a punitive train which was manned chiefly by Letts and
sailors in order to patrol the Vologda-Cherepovetz line, and to halt at
one or another station for the usual terrorist purposes.

[65] See the _Izvestia_ of Voronezh of August 12, 1919.

[66] The _Posledniya Novosty_ of November 8, 1920.

[67] Of March 25, 1922.

[68] See the section “Sketches of Prison Life,” in _The Che-Ka_,
pp. 119 and 120.

[69] 1920, No. 14.

[70] _The Twelve Condemned_, p. 25.

[71] See No. 6 of the _Revolutsionnaya Rossia_.

[72] See No. 33 of the _Posledniya Novosty_.

[73] See No. 233 and following numbers of that journal.

[74] See Ossipov’s book, _At the Cross Roads_, 1917–1920, pp. 67
and 68.

[75] See the _Posledniya Novosty_ of December 11.

[76] See the section “The Kuban Che-Ka,” in _The Che-Ka_, pp. 227
and 228.

[77] See No. 4 of _Revolutsionnaya Rossia_.

[78] Arbatov’s reminiscences in _Archives of the Revolution_, XII,
119.

[79] See the _Posledniya Novosty_ of December, 1920.

[80] As reported in No. 9 of that journal.

[81] See No. 7 of the _Revolutsionnaya Rossia_.

[82] Before the Lausanne Tribunal the well-known writer, Ivan S.
Shmelov, stated that he reckoned the slain in the Crimea to have
reached 120,000.

[83] “The Helm,” a Berlin-published Russian journal. The above refers
to its issue of August 3,1921. See also No. 392 of the _Posledniya
Novosty_.

[84] This woman is said later to have been caught and put to death by
the Greens, the rebel soldiers of the South.

[85] See also the _Posledniya Novosty_ of August 10, 1921.

[86] See the _Obstchoyé Dielo_ of July 10, 1920.

[87] Whips of horsehide.

[88] See No. 221 of the _Posledniya Novosty_.

[89] The _Dielo_ of January 13, 1921.

[90] The same of November 9, 1921.

[91] No. 148 of the same, and also the _Posledniya Novosty_ of
August 16, 1921.

[92] The _Dielo_ of December 11, and other journals.

[93] See the _Roul_ of December 11.

[94] See the _Dielo_ of December 8, 1920.

[95] See the _Dielo_ of December 24, 1920.

[96] See the issue of August 31, 1921.

[97] The Bolshevists’ telegraphic agency in the Crimea.

[98] See the _Dielo_ of August 23.

[99] See No. 81 of the _Pravda_.

[100] See the _Posledniya Novosty_ of October 14.

[101] Green Book, _A Record of the Peasant Movement in the Black Sea
Provinces_, by N. Voronovich.

[102] In this connection, see No. 11 of _Revolutsionnaya Rossia_.

[103] See the _Posledniya Novosty_, No. 572.

[104] See the _Posledniya Novosty_ of September 18.

[105] See No. 217 of the _Izvestia_.

[106] See the _Dielo_ of September 22 and October 7.

[107] See the _Posledniya Novosty_ of December 21.

[108] See the _Roul_ of September 30.

[109] See the _Roul_ of December 7, and the _Frankfurter
Zeitung_ of about the same period.

[110] Of April 19, 1921.

[111] See the _Posledniya Novosty_ of August 30.

[112] See the _Dielo_ of February 16, 1921.

[113] At present my store of Siberian data is incomplete, but I shall
hope later to complete and produce it.

[114] The _Dielo_ of March 22.

[115] Other shootings of the kind took place earlier. In 1919 some Boy
Scouts were shot in Moscow, and in 1920 the same fate (for “espionage”)
was meted out to the members of a tennis club. Other cases also
occurred.

[116] See the _Revolutsionnaya Rossia_, Nos. 12 and 13.

[117] Two other, but smaller, groups were shot later.

[118] See the _Posledniya Novosty_, No. 281.

[119] See No. 8 of _Revolutsionnaya Rossia_.

[120] See the _Posledniya Novosty_ of May 13.

[121] See _Archives of the Russian Revolution_, XII, 132.

[122] Well-to-do peasants--peasant capitalists or factors.

[123] See the _Segodnya_ (“To-day”) of April 25, 1921.

[124] In the _Vestnik_ (“Messenger”) of March, 1923, pp. 28 and 29.

[125] There is a pun in this, since _mogilev_ also means a tomb.

[126] See the _Posledniya Novosty_, No. 729.

[127] In _Archives of the Russian Revolution_, XII, 145.

[128] As announced by the Warsaw journal _Za Svobodou_ (“For
Freedom”), to which the deceased had been a contributor.

[129] See the _Dni_ of March 13, 1923, and No. 5 of the
_Sotsialistichesky Vestnik_, 1923.

[130] See the _Sotsialistichesky Vestnik_, No. 15.

[131] See the _Izvestia_ of February 27.

[132] See the _Izvestia_ of February 29.

[133] See the _Dni_ of January 24, No. 395.

[134] See the _Dni_ of March 4.

[135] See the _Novoyé Vremya_ of August 3, 1923.

[136] See “Reminiscences of Sub-Lieutenant Hefter,” in _Archives of
the Russian Revolution_, X, 118.

[137] See the _Roul_ of August 3, 1923.

[138] In an at once lucid and accurate series of articles on Russia,
published in the Edinburgh _Scotsman_, Professor Sarolea gives the
following table of classified totals:

“Bishops, 28; ecclesiastics, 1219; professors and teachers, 6000;
medical men, 9000; naval and military officers, 54,000; naval and
military men of the ranks, 260,000; police officials, 70,000;
intellectuals and members of the professional classes, 355,250;
industrial workers, 193,290; peasants, 815,000.”

[139] See _Archives of the Revolution_, VII, 164.

[140] See _The Twelve Condemned_, p. 21.

[141] British Parliamentary Paper, _Reports on Bolshevist Russia,
Abridged Edition, Russia, No. 1_, pp. 42 and 54.

[142] See the already quoted British Parliamentary Paper, p. 53.

[143] In a diary compiled by A. Boudberg, and included in _Archives
of the Russian Revolution_, we find the total of slain at
Blagoveschensk given as 1500.

[144] From reports and other documents contained in the State Papers of
Czechoslovakia, 1919, Vol. LIII.

[145] See _Archives of the Russian Revolution_, IX, 190.

[146] See his book _The Kremlin from behind Prison Bars_, p. 177.

[147] See “For the Soviet Power” in S. M. Pougachevsky’s _Diary of a
Participant in the Civil War_, and his _Materials for a History of
the Red Army_, I, 406.

[148] See p. 54 of the British White Book cited.

[149] That is to say, a member of the _Oprichnina_, or corps
of police-lifeguardsmen, which Tsar Ivan IV (“Ivan the Terrible”)
maintained during the sixteenth century.

[150] _A propos_, a report from a local Che-Ka included the query:
“What are we to do with people who would celebrate the downfall of the
Peasants’ and Workers’ Power by holding thanksgiving services?” See No.
4 of the _Weekly_, p. 25.

[151] See the _Revolutsionnaya Rossia_, No. 12.

[152] The _Znamya Trouda_, No. 3, 1920.

[153] See a letter of June, 1920, quoted in _The Kremlin from behind
Prison Bars_.

[154] See the _Posledniya Novosty_ of September 21, 1921.

[155] See No. 1 of the _Za Narod_ (“For the People”).

[156] See “Report of the Trial of some Left Social Revolutionaries on
June 27 and 28, 1922,” in _The Days of the Revolution_, p. 296.

[157] One provincial executive committee brazenly admitted to having
ordered villages of from 6,000 to 10,000 inhabitants to be burnt to the
ground for tearing down official proclamations.

[158] See the _Znamya Trouda_, No. 3, September, 1920.

[159] Gan received this item from an eye-witness.

[160] Pp. 56–61.

[161] A slang term (literally, an “insolent jowl”) for an official such
as Gogol has immortalised in his play _The Inspector-General_.

[162] From Steinberg’s book.

[163] From No. 15 of the _Izvestia_, 1919.

[164] See Margoulies’ book in this connection.

[165] See the _Znamya Trouda_, No. 3. _Cf._ also the Ekaterinodar
shootings of industrial workers already described.

[166] See the Left Socialist Revolutionists’ Party’s _Bulletin_,
No. 4.

[167] See the journal _Kharkovskaya Svezda_ (“Star of Kharkov”),
of June 7, 1919.

[168] See the Kievan _Izvestia_ of July 24, 1919.

[169] See the _Nachalo_ (“Principle” or “Guide”) of July 19, 1919.

[170] See the _Narodnaya Vlast_ (“Rule of the People”) of January
24, 1919.

[171] See the _Nachalo_ of July 24, 1919.

[172] See the _Posledinaya Novosty_ of April 25, 1922.

[173] See the _Posledniya Novosty_ of November 24, 1920.

[174] From data collected by the Denikin Commission.

[175] Possibly, in this execution the orgy of Bolshevist injustice
reached its apogee.

[176] See the _Rabochy Krai_ (“The Workers’ Realm”) of October 19,
1919.

[177] See the _Posledniya Novosty_ of November 6, 1920.

[178] See the same journal of November 6.

[179] This girl of seventeen was shot ostensibly for petty theft; but
there is reason to suppose that her real crime had been that she had
called Steklov a “Jew.”

[180] See Vishniak’s _Sovremenniya Zapisky_ (“Contemporary Notes),
I, 227.

[181] See the _Obstchoyé Dielo_ (“The Common Cause”), No. 126.

[182] Lane or alley.

[183] The British White Book already quoted, p. 43.

[184] The _Riazanskaya Izvestia_ (“Riazan News”) of September 7,
1919.

[185] In the _Volya Rossii_, No. 4, 1922.

[186] From _Six Months in Prison_, p. 65.

[187] See _The Che-Ka_, section 108, and Chap. iv. of the
Memorandum issued by the Social Revolutionary Party.

[188] See _The Che-Ka_, pp. 230 and 231.

[189] Report of the Denikin Commission.

[190] See No. 476 of the _Dielo_.

[191] In its issue of June 27, 1921.

[192] Materials collected by the Denikin Commission.

[193] See the materials collected by the Denikin Commission, and
also Madame Kourakina’s reminiscences in No. 5 of the _Rousskaya
Lietopis_ “Russian Chronicle”), p. 201.

[194] See the _Rabochnaya Zhizn_ (“Working-Class Life”) of May,
1918.

[195] Related by A. Nikolin in No. 9 of the _Kazachyi Dumi_
(“Cossack Opinion”).

[196] These details are taken from the instalment of the Denikin
materials published at Rostov-on-Don.

[197] In _The Kremlin from behind Prison Bars_, p. 187.

[198] He was the well-known Social Revolutionary Karelin.

[199] These details are taken from the foreign journal, _Brihwa
Seme_. If I have quoted the title of the journal wrongly, the fact
is due to my having been able to make but a hasty extract from it
whilst I was still living in Moscow.

[200] From the Appeal issued by the Georgian Social Democrats on July
5, 1923, as reprinted in No. 15 of the _Socialistichesky Vestnik_.

[201] The then British Consul in Petrograd.

[202] The article is to be found in the _Weekly_ of October 6,
1918.

[203] They were issued on March 3, 1919, as confirmed by P. Mayer’s
reminiscences of his former service in the Commissariat of Justice.

[204] Of December 7, 1920.

[205] Of December 12, 1923.

[206] And, if I am not mistaken, rewarded with “the Order of the Red
Flag.” See Digest No. 344 of the digests compiled by Denikin’s Staff.

[207] See _The Che-Ka_, pp. 242, 243.

[208] And published in No. 2 of the _Revolutsionnoyé Dielo_.

[209] See the _Ponti Revolutsyi_ of April 9, 1922.

[210] In an issue of the _Rabochy Listok_ or “Workers’ Sheet” we
find mention of the Petrograd Che-Ka putting prisoners into fetters
_pending inquiry_, whilst No. 5 of the _Socialistichesky
Vestnik_ tells of prisoners being sent to lunatic asylums for
confinement with dangerous maniacs.

[211] In _The Che-Ka of Odessa_, published at Kishinev in 1920, p.
30.

[212] The pair of “gloves” in question are still to be seen in the
Great Palace of the Kremlin. They figure in Edouard Herriot’s book,
_La Russie Nouvelle_.

[213] See Averbuch’s _The Che-Ka of Odessa_, p. 36.

[214] _Archives of the Russian Revolution_, Vol. VI.

[215] See Odette Kun’s _Sous Lenine, Notes d’une Femme Déportée
en Russie par les Anglais_, p. 179, and also No. 3 of the review
_Na Chouzhoi Storonyé_. Odette Kun had begun by being deported
from Constantinople by the British authorities, who suspected her of
carrying on Communist propaganda.

[216] See this author’s _My Memoirs_, p. 263.

[217] See Z. U. Arbatov, in _Archives of the Russian Revolution_,
XII, 89.

[218] Short for the slang expression “_Raskhod_,” equivalent to
“to be killed,” or “dispatched.”

[219] Of March, 1922.

[220] In the same connection see the _Posledniya Novosty_ of July
17, 1921.

[221] Of March 25, 1922.

[222] This was before she became Kedrov’s wife.

[223] See the _Golos Rossii_ of January 27, 1922.

[224] See the _Posledniya Novosty_ of March 2, 1921.

[225] _Der Blutrausch des Bolschewismus_, p. 19.

[226] See the section “A Year in the Butyrka” in _The Che-Ka_, p.
146.

[227] See the _Novoyé Russkoyé Slovo_ (“The New Russian Word”) of
New York, of February 19, 1924.

[228] See the _Dni_ of March 7, 1924.

[229] Other instances of this kind of phraseology are given by
Kartzevsky in his _The Speech of Warfare and Revolution_, Russ.
Univ. Edition, Berlin, 1923.

[230] See _Archives of the Revolution_, VIII, 153.

[231] In that journal’s issue for April 1919.

[232] From the _Posledinya Novosty_ of September 21,1920.

[233] From the same, No. 168.

[234] Medviedev’s and others’ evidence before the Commission has been
published by Telburg in America, and in No. 5 of the journal _The
Contemporary Historian_ in Germany.

[235] See _The Che-Ka_, pp. 232, 233.

[236] No. 168 of that journal.

[237] Published in the _Rousskaya Lietopis_ (“The Russian
Chronicle”), No. 5, pp. 199 and 200.

[238] From _The Che-Ka_.

[239] In the tenth issue of that journal.

[240] Nos. 3 and 4.

[241] Respectively _The Workman’s Gazette_ and _Proletarian
Truth_.

[242] This description is quoted from Nos. 12, 13, and 43 of
_Revolutsionnaya Rossia_.

[243] See Margoulies’ _Years of Fire_.

[244] These particulars are taken from the manuscript data with
relation to the Crimea which the Denikin Commission collected.

[245] Many other details of the sort are to be found recorded in the
“Memorandum concerning Political Prisoners in Soviet Russia,” which the
Paris Congress of the Russian Constituent Assembly drew up.

[246] See No. 15 of the _Socialistichesky Vestnik_.

[247] See Nos. 33 and 34 (1924) of _Revolutsionnaya Rossia_.

[248] The British public may be reminded that the Russian pound is
equivalent only to nine-tenths of the pound avoirdupois.

[249] In addition to which it may be said that in many prisons the
authorities either made food parcels common property--that is to say,
divided the meagre contents of the parcels amongst a large number of
prisoners--or confiscated the contents themselves.

[250] This document was reproduced in the _Izvestia_ of December
26, 1918.

[251] See the _Izvestia_ of December 4, 1918.

[252] Peasant low shoes of bark.

[253] At times the Butyrka, though built to hold 1100 prisoners only,
contained over 3000.

[254] This was, of course, in addition to thousands of others who had
been deported to outlying provinces, or thrown into the prisons of
Tiflis and Kukais.

[255] See the _Zveno_ (“Link”) for 1923.

[256] So phenomenal, indeed, that even twelve doctors who ventured
to criticise the Government’s starvation of prisoners policy found
themselves deported.

[257] As complementary, of course, to the account already given.

[258] Some of the foregoing details are from a letter actually written
from Solovetsky by a prisoner, and dated March 8, 1924.

[259] As an instance of this Che-Ka’s taste for drama it may be
mentioned that one of the most terrible of all extant photographs of
mutilated corpses is one of victims slain by this Che-Ka.

[260] Lenin’s dictum on the point was that “for every hundred decent
members of Che-Kas there are ninety-nine rogues.” Yet the fact in no
way depressed him. As early as 1905 he said: “Our party is not meant to
be a boarding-school for young ladies. For the very reason that a rogue
is a rogue he may prove the more useful.” Naturally, he knew what he
was talking about.

[261] A Russian diminutive of the name Michael.

[262] See Margoulies’ _Years of Fire_, pp. 178, 179.

[263] In view of this official’s original profession, it is not without
interest to note that his surname, of patronymical formation, is based
upon the Russian word for “cat.”

[264] See the _Obstchoyé Dielo_ of March 1, 1921.

[265] See the _Posledniya Novosty_ of March 2, 1921.

[266] See the Che-Ka’s _Weekly_, No. 5.

[267] See the _Posledniya Novosty_ of October 14, 1921.

[268] In the _Obstchoyé Dielo_ of November 3, 1920.

[269] See the same journal in its issue of October 18, 1921.

[270] See No. 299 of the _Volya Rossii_, 1921.

[271] Published in _The Times_ in 1923, and subsequently
translated into Russian.

[272] See British Parliamentary Paper, “Russia, No. 1 (1919),” p. 36,
and the materials collected by the Denikin Commission.

[273] The actual term “dreadnought” was used--transliterated, of
course, into Russian characters.

[274] A leading Che-Ka official.

[275] This document was reproduced in the _Golos Rossii_ of April
16, 1922.

[276] Since writing these words I have heard that a version already
current is _Gospody, Pomilouy Oumershikh!_ (“Lord, have mercy upon
the dead!”).

[277] Of July 13, 1921.


Transcriber’s Notes:

1. Obvious printers’, punctuation and spelling errors have been
corrected silently.

2. Some hyphenated and non-hyphenated versions of the same words have
been retained as in the original.

3. Italics are shown as _xxx_.





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