[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.