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]