“CLASS TERRORISM”
Proletarians, never let it escape you that cruelty is a remnant
of slavery, and a testimony to the brutality which still lurks
in us all.--JAURÈS.
So far the data concerning risings which I have extracted from the
British White Book deal exclusively with the suppression of peasant
outbreaks--outbreaks of the kind which never failed to occur where the
Bolshevists had been in occupation; but also I have at my disposal data
dealing with the suppression of risings of industrial workers in the
towns. On March 5, 1919, Sir C. Eliot wrote to Lord Curzon:
Industrial workers who oppose the Bolshevists are treated
precisely similarly to peasants who do so. Last December a
hundred labourers belonging to Motovilyky, near Perm, were shot
merely for having protested against the Bolshevists’ doings in
the locality.[148]
Nor do English reports alone furnish an endless succession of such
facts! Similar reports appear both in the ordinary Russian press and
in the Bolshevists’ official sheets (for at that period it was still
possible for a private Russian journal to describe the outbreaks which
Bolshevist tyranny in general, and seizures of food stuffs in payment
of the grain tax in particular, periodically evoked amongst the rural
classes). And always suppression of these risings was accompanied
with bloodshed: even the history of Russia, rich as it is in peasant
outbreaks, cannot show any suppressions of popular outbreaks comparable
with those perpetrated by the Bolshevists--no, not even the serfdom
period.
Of course, one reason of this is that modern improvements in mechanical
equipment, and the invention of tanks and machine-guns and poison gas,
enabled greater resources to be brought to bear against the rebels than
had ever before been the case.
During 1918 and 1919 I collected abundant material on this particular
subject; and though I lost it all again during the house-to-house
searches which subsequently became the rule in Moscow, as in every
other city of Russia, I can at least cite an interesting document
which gives a summary of events in Tambov Province just before the
Antonov rising--before the rising which, once started, spread like
wildfire, and was, primarily, a retort to the anti-peasant policy known
as “class terrorism.” Of date the end of 1919, and with, for subject,
the suppression of the Tambov “disorders” of the recent November, the
document represents a memorandum presented to the Council of People’s
Commissaries by a local group of Social Revolutionaries. The late
ebullitions of popular wrath in the Tambov region had been due to
many causes, including mobilisation, power to requisition stock, and
compulsory registration of Church property; and, having started in one
_volost_, or minor district, the unrest speedily spread until it
had involved the province as a whole.
The Soviet Power (the local Social Revolutionaries’ memorandum
stated) has sent thither punitive expedition after punitive
expedition, and we venture now to submit to the Council a
brief exposition of bloodthirsty doings which throw into the
shade even those once perpetrated in the same region by the
_oprichnik_[149] Louzhenovsky. For every _volost_ in
the Spassk district whither a punitive expedition was dispatched
has seen peasants flogged as abominably as indiscriminately, and
many of them shot. Also, ten peasants and a priest have been
publicly executed in the square of the town of Spassk, whilst
the inhabitants of the villages whence the victims came had to
attend the spectacle, and then supply transport for the bodies’
removal. Also, thirty men have been shot behind the prison of
Spassk after first being compelled to dig their own graves.
In the Kirsanov district their frenzy of cruelty has led the
“forces of pacification” even to keep victims locked up in a
shed for days with a hungry boar, until some of those subjected
to the torture of fear became bereft of reason. And the head of
the Nashtchokin Committee in Aid of the Destitute presumed to
perpetrate unauthorised executions long after the last punitive
expedition had left the neighbourhood; and in the Morshansk
district hundreds have been shot with shell fire, and thousands
wounded, and villages almost destroyed with the same, and the
peasants’ property looted by Red Guards and civilian Communists,
and their stocks of meal and grain taken away. But the fate of
the Michaevsk peasants has been worst of all. For in Michaevsk
every tenth hut has been burnt to the ground, and the men,
women, and children all driven into the woods. And at Perkino,
though the villagers took no active part in the rebellion, but
only elected an independent soviet of their own, a detachment
from Tambov has come and put all that soviet’s members to death.
And when fifteen peasants of Ostrov were brought to the prison
at Morshansk they were seen first to have been horribly injured,
whilst at this very moment there is lying in that prison a woman
who has had all the hair plucked from her head. And dozens of
cases of rape have taken place in Morshansk, and eight peasants,
after being grossly maltreated by Red Guards, have been buried
alive. And as regards the Bolshevist officials who have most
distinguished themselves in this region, they are Tsufirin,
the leader of the punitive expedition, a Communist named
Parfenoy whom the Tsarist Government brought back from exile
in answer to a petition, and Sokolov, an ex-sergeant-major.
In short, in this district of Tambov whole villages have been
destroyed--some of them by incendiary firing, and some by
shell firing--and many inhabitants executed. And Bondary has
had its local clergy shot for having held a service after the
Bolshevists had deposed the local soviet.[150]... The extent
to which the Bolshevists have shown tact and decency in their
suppressions of the risings is best illustrated by the fact
that they commissioned a sixteen-year-old youth named Lebsky to
lead a punitive expedition, and appointed to the post of head
of the Tambov Che-Ka a certain A. S. Klinkov--an ex-fraudulent
bankrupt trader, an ignoramus, an extortioner, a drunkard, and
a man who, up to the outbreak of the October revolution, was
engaging in discreditable speculative operations. And that
post he is still holding, and it gives him a right of disposal
over all prisoners’ lives, and he uses that right for shooting
prisoners indiscriminately. And in addition to dispatching
punitive expeditions, the authorities have initiated a practice
of dispatching certain Communist _nuclei_, in order that
those _nuclei_ may “acquire” a taste for fighting, although
they are nothing better than bands of ruffians, and spend most
of their time in carousing, committing arson and theft, and
transforming the great principles of “liberty, fraternity,
and equality” into the horrible principles of the medieval
Tartar invasions.... Also, we must call your attention to
the sanguinary work perpetrated by the Lettish detachments.
Universally they leave behind them terrible memories. And every
prison and dungeon under the Che-Ka is filled to overflowing,
the number of persons arrested having come to amount to
thousands, with cold and starvation causing disease to become
rampant amongst them. And their ultimate fate, in most cases,
is certainly that they will be shot. And that will continue to
be prisoners’ fate so long as commissaries and Che-Kas like the
present ones hold power.
The result of the constant increase in peasant risings was that
eventually they overflowed from the villages into the towns. The
Berlin-published Russian journal _Roul_ gives us a particularly
vivid description of a peasant upheaval in Petropavlovsk. True, the
peasants figuring in that rising are described as “White forces,” but
the movement was a purely popular one, and I will cite the conclusion
of the eye-witness’s narrative:
Here the Red Terror began as soon as ever the Red soldiers had
entered the place. And with the Terror went mass arrests, and
mass shootings with no preliminary trial. Also, every telegraph
and telephone pole soon was bristling with posters to the effect
that, in the event of another raid by a White detachment,
the town would be razed to the ground by the Red artillery.
A doctor of ours who was taken prisoner by the White forces,
and subsequently restored to us, has since told us that the
Red Terror has assumed even more ghastly forms in the villages
than in the towns--that in the villages every single hut has
been pillaged, and all the cattle stolen, and a great number of
families killed without a sparing even of the aged and women and
children. And in other huts there are left only the aged and the
infants, for the adult members of the household have all escaped
to the White army, whilst both the open roads and the village
streets are lying heaped with peasant corpses so mutilated as to
defy identification, but thrown there “to serve as a warning to
others,” with the people forbidden to take them away for burial.
Also, the doctor has told us that in some cases the peasants
have wreaked such ruthless vengeance upon the Communists that
the public hall of Petropavlovsk is standing lined with rows of
mutilated Communist corpses, and on each Sunday between February
and May last the Communists accorded choral rites of burial to
fifty or sixty of these slain comrades at a time, whilst both
the market square and what used to be the butchers’ market are
lying strewn with (again, “as a warning to others”) bodies of
anti-Communist hostages who were slaughtered as soon as ever the
Bolshevists had consolidated their position in the town, with,
amongst them, the mayor, the deputy mayor, the local magistrate,
and several prominent merchants and other citizens. Moreover,
a huge number of unknown victims has been shot in the Che-Ka’s
courtyard; both by day and by night, for months past, firing
has been heard there. And in some cases the victims were not
shot at all, but slashed to death with swords: in which case
their cries of agony reached the ears even of the surrounding
inhabitants. And amongst the executed were the local bishop
and most of the local cathedral staff, on the accusation that
they had rung the cathedral bells in welcome to the Whites--the
Communists having ignored the fact that when the Whites had
entered the city the time had been just four o’clock in the
afternoon, when, of course, the bells were tolling for evening
service! At this very moment the bishop’s body is lying, as a
further “warning,” in the public square near the road leading
to the railway station, where the Eastern Siberian Army has its
headquarters. And I have been told that as soon as the staff of
those headquarters entered the town they ordered all prisoners
arrested before the arrival of the White forces--even prisoners
arrested merely for trifling offences, and sentenced merely
to a few weeks’ or a few months’ imprisonment--to be shot. I
myself left Petropavlovsk on May 10. Everything then was quiet
in the town, despite that many Red Guards still were there.
Only in the surrounding districts was the rebellion not yet
wholly quelled, and peasant prisoners still were being brought
in from the villages, and mutilated remains of Communists being
given musical burial on holidays. Also, I know of a case in the
district of Mozhaisk where the peasants had become so embittered
that, after catching a commissary, they divided him in two with
a wooden saw.
The first volume of the _Bulletin_ issued by the Social Revolutionaries
of the Left gives, under date of January 1919, similar details with
regard to other localities. We read that in the Elifansky district of
Toula Province, towards the close of 1918, 150 peasants were shot; in
the Medinsk district of Kalouga Province, 170; in the Prousk district
of Riazan Province, 300; in the Kasimov district, 150; in the Spassk
district, several hundreds; in Tver Province, 200; and in the Velizhesk
district of Smolensk, 600.
And as regards risings which took place in two villages around
Kronstadt during the July of 1921, our information is exact. We know
that in the one village 170 persons were shot, and in the other 130,
and that in each case the principle observed was to select every
third man. Again, during a rising in Kolivan (Tomsk Province), during
1920, over 5000 peasants were shot,[151] while a like rising in Oufa
Province has been declared to have been suppressed so ruthlessly
that even the official data had to admit to 10,000 being the number
shot, whilst unofficial data gave the number as 25,000, or more.[152]
And from a correspondent of the journal _Znamya Trouda_ (“The
Labour Standard”) we have it that “in the Volkovsky district of
Kharkov Province hundreds of peasants were shot”--the Left Social
Revolutionaries of Moscow having contrived to have the statement
conveyed to and published in the city itself. In one village 140
persons are said to have been executed.[153] And the following
description of some mutinies in White Russia during 1921 constitutes a
page from the history of a regional struggle the causes of which were
the food tax and the punishment of acts of opposition to the tax:
The whole of the Liaskovicheskaya _volost_ in the Bobrinsk
district has been fired by the Bolshevists [the description
says]. Peasants have been arrested, and exiled either to
Vologda or to the famine-stricken areas, and had their property
confiscated. And the Bolshevists still are seizing hostages
by the dozen wherever a peasant insurgent band appears. The
punitive expedition operating in this neighbourhood is Stok’s.
Before execution he tortures his prisoners, and seeks to extort
confessions, by crushing their fingers in door-cracks.[154]
Now let me cite a document that was published at the time of the
suppression of the Antonov rising. The document is an Order issued by
the “Plenipotentiary Committee of the All-Russian Central Executive
Commission.” Of date June 11, 1921, it says:
(1) Citizens refusing to divulge their names shall be shot
without trial. (2) The decree authorising seizure of hostages
shall be read to all villages guilty of concealing arms, and
hostages shall be seized and shot unless the arms first be
handed over. (3) Households harbouring bandits (peasants in
rebellion) shall be arrested and exiled, and deprived of their
property. Also, the chief worker in each such household shall
be shot without trial. (4) Households harbouring members of
bandits’ families, or concealing those families’ property, shall
themselves be treated as bandits, and have their chief worker
shot without trial. (5) The property of a bandit whose family
may succeed in escaping shall be apportioned to any peasants who
have remained faithful to the Soviet Power, and his dwelling be
burnt. (6) Let this Order be carried out with the most ruthless
severity.[155]
Tambov and its neighbourhood, therefore, were drenched with blood, and
Gan, the Left Social Revolutionary, in no way exaggerated when, in
addressing a Bolshevist revolutionary tribunal, he said[156]:
Thousands of our peasants have been shot by you and other
circuit tribunals and provincial Che-Kas. You have mown down
defenceless people with machine-gun fire; you have exiled
peasant families to the northern provinces not merely in
thousands, but in tens of thousands, and pillaged and burnt
their property.[157] And members of my party possess also data
referring to other provinces--to the Provinces of Samara and
Kazan and Saratov. And both from there and from everywhere else
our information is the same.
In Bouzoulok, during 1920, 4000 persons were shot; in Christopol
600[158]; in Elatina (where you forced the victims to dig their
own graves) 300.[159]
All of which applies to Central Russia--rather, to Great Russia--alone,
without mentioning the Ukraine and Siberia.
Another device utilised by the Bolshevists was _mock_ shootings;
on which occasions the prisoners were divested of their clothes,
compelled to dig, as it were, their own graves, and, on the order to
fire being given, fired at merely with shots above their heads. Many
such cases occur in Maslov’s well-known book, _Russia after Four
Years of Revolution_.
“In Arskaya _volost_ (Kazan district) thirty peasants were placed
in a row, and had their heads slashed off with swords.” Such is the
statement to be found in No. 1 of the _Bulletin_ issued by the
Social Revolutionary Party! And the journal continues: “Floggings?
Floggings take place everywhere. Rods, ramrods, cudgels, whips, fists,
rifle butts, and revolver stocks all are used for the beating of
peasants.”
Officially it has been stated that floggings have ceased to be
inflicted in Russia, “for the reason that corporal punishment lies
beneath the dignity of a Peasants’ and Workers’ Government”; but the
facts do not coincide with the statement. In his book _The Moral
Aspect of the Revolution_[160] Steinberg, ex-Bolshevist Commissary
of Justice, adduces an interesting collection of communications
relating to floggings which he and his fellow Communist administrators
carried out during the earlier days of the Bolshevist _régime_.
And the collection carries the more weight in that its basis rests upon
reports published by the Soviet press itself--by the _Pravda_,
and by the _Izvestia_. Certainly the former journal published
an article entitled “_Derzhimordi_[161] under the Soviet Flag,”
which told how a grain surplus was beaten out of a reluctant rural
population, and a rebellion of _koulaki_ suppressed, by the Che-Ka
of Nikolaevsk (Province of Vologda):
The Che-Ka collected a multitude of peasants into an icy-cold
barn, divested them of their clothing, and beat them with
ramrods. And in the Brilsky district (Vitebsk Province) peasants
were beaten by order of the local Che-Ka. And in the village of
Ouren (Kostroma Province), though peasants donned five shirts
apiece to soften the blows, it was in vain, since the whips,
made of twisted wire, cut right through the material, and drove
it into the wounds until it dried there, and had later to be
soaked out with warm water.[162]
Again, a letter sent to the Central Committee of the Communist Party
by Madame Spiridonova quotes an informant as saying: “A third of the
men of our _volost_ were lined up, and beaten with clenched fists
in the presence of the other two-thirds. Anyone trying to escape the
beating with fists received also a flogging with whips.” To which
the informant adds an account of the doings of a “requisitionary
expedition”:
Whenever ... the expedition reached a fresh village its officers
made the members of the village council kneel down before them,
that the peasants might conceive a proper respect for the Soviet
Power. “And flog them too,” the officers said, “so that they may
remember us the better.”
After this can one wonder that the _Pravda_ had eventually
to admit that the term “Communist” had come to be synonymous with
“hooligan,” “ne’er-do-weel,” and “charlatan”? “We are treated like
senseless beasts,” once a peasant said.
But what a Terror of requisitionary expeditions and formations of
“committees of poorer peasants” and armed, hooligan dictatorship really
meant in a rural district can be realised only by trying to imagine the
conditions of peasant life whilst that Terror was in force. I quote
some villagers of Makarievo: “Whereas we used only to have the police
commissioner riding upon our backs, now we have the commissary riding
there.” And in a passage from a report published in the _Pravda_
we read:
Whenever an expedition that was collecting the grain tax in the
Khvalinsky district (Saratov Province) reached a village the
peasants were commanded to surrender their best-looking girls to
the officials.
In the same spirit a grain-tax commissary instructed a local “committee
of poorer peasants” to
inform your inhabitants that within three days they shall
render me 10,000 _pouds_ of grain, and that any person
not complying with this Order shall be shot with my own hand,
which finished off, only last night, a disobedient rascal in the
village of Varvarinka.... Also, I empower so-and-so to shoot in
the same way anyone not complying with my Order in this rascally
_volost_ of ----. And the name of the _volost_
followed.[163]
Hence we see that shootings and floggings were the two symbols of “the
period leading to Socialism.”
But neither real life nor life in fiction could furnish a parallel to
an incident which occurred in the Shatsky district of Tambov Province,
and is to be found described by Steinberg in his book:
In this district the peasants had a particular veneration for
an _ikon_ of the Vishinskaya Madonna; and when influenza
broke out in the district a solemn procession was held in
the _ikon’s_ honour, and a celebrating of Mass. And, on
the Bolshevists seizing both _ikon_ and clergy, and
the peasants learning later that the Che-Ka had insulted the
_ikon_, and “dragged it about the floor,” they set forth
to “rescue Our Lady,” with women and children and the aged and
everyone else joining the throng. And then the Che-Ka turned
machine-guns upon them, and mowed them down in rows as, “with
terrible eyes which saw nothing,” they moved forward over the
bodies of dying and dead, and mothers, flinging themselves
before their children, cried: “O Holy Virgin and Defender, bless
us as gladly we lay down our lives for thee!”
Always the Bolshevists made it clear that the Terror was directed not
so much against the _bourgeoisie_ as a class as against all classes in
general, and that the _intelligentsia_ happened to become the special
victim of the Terror because the _intelligentsia_ happened to comprise
all classes.
“The prime object of the Terror,” said a leading article in the
Che-Ka’s _Weekly_, “is the destruction of the spiritual leaders
and directors of the enemies of the Proletarian Government.” True,
sometimes decrees of local Che-Kas and tribunals stated that a sentence
had been remitted “because of the accused’s proletarian origin,” but
this was a blind, a mere masking of the Terror’s true nature, and for a
time deceived the less thinking sections of the Russian population, but
soon ceased to deceive even them.
It has been related of a certain Bolshevist official that, when holding
an inquiry in a village, he obtained such “evidence” as he required
merely by shouting out, “Show me your hands!” And if he next cried
“Strip the fellow!” the clothes were at once torn from the prisoner’s
back, and the prisoner himself set against a lorry, bayoneted, and
thrown into one of the cavities locally known as “plague pits” through
cattle having been thrown into them during an earlier season of
cattle plague. And a match for this official in rude arrogance was a
certain Mousikin who had been an artisan in the Lefortovsky Quarter of
Moscow. The _Pravda_ itself has told us how, at the time when the
Muscovite Soviet was debating the question of suspending the Che-Kas,
and Latzis propounded the thesis that legal trials were not needed,
Mousikin capped this by saying:
Why even _question_ prisoners?... Personally I should just
walk into the accused’s kitchen, look at his stock pot, and, if
the pot should contain meat, account him an enemy of the people,
and shoot him against his own kitchen wall.
Yet if this truly “proletarian” procedure had been followed in 1917 and
subsequently, not a man of the privileged Communist Party would have
escaped execution! Yet they have a saying that “if a man will not work,
neither shall he eat”!
Again, how are we to credit Latzis’ assertion that his Party never
permitted the Terror “to touch peasants and industrial workers who
have erred merely in being misled,” or Mousikin’s statement in No. 3
of the _Weekly_ that “in no instance have we directed terrorist
persecution against the working-classes”? For, to take only a single
instance, the inhabitants of Odessa had no sooner begun to protest
against the mass shootings instituted by the local Che-Ka during the
July of 1919 than that Che-Ka issued an order that:
Inasmuch as certain counter-revolutionaries are spreading false
rumours, and saying that industrial workers have been shot, the
Praesidium herewith announces that in no instance has such a
worker, nor yet a peasant, been shot, but merely a few proven
bandits and murderers.
And the document added that “any counter-worker so disposed” might come
and inquire into any allegation of a worker having been shot by the
Che-Ka. Finally, “from now onwards the supreme punitive measure allowed
by the law during a state of siege shall be applied to anyone from
whom a false rumour shall emanate.” Which warning would scarcely leave
anyone “disposed” to indulge in inquiries of the kind indicated, or in
any inquiries at all![164]
In 1920 there took place in Astrakhan massacres exceptional in their
scope even for Soviet Russia. And in September of the same year sixty
representatives of the workers of Kazan were shot for requesting an
eight hours day, a revision of the scale of wages, and the deportation
of the Magyars who had long been making trouble in the district.[165]
Later these doings led the Left Social Revolutionary Party of the
country to appeal to the workers to refrain from participating in
the ensuing May Day celebrations, on the ground that “ever since the
October Revolution the Communist Government has been shooting toilers
in their thousands--peasants, soldiers of the ranks, industrial
workers, and sailors alike.”[166]
On an official building in Soviet Russia there stands inscribed the
motto, “For the _Bourgeoisie_, Prison! For the Peasants and the
Industrial Workers, Comradely Persuasion!” And in the ravine near
Saratov which I have described the contained abomination is made up of
peasants and industrial workers just as much as of _bourgeois_ and
intellectuals and prominent politicians. Nay, it even includes members
of the Socialist Party! Similarly, the concentration camp near Kharkov
which witnessed most of Saenko’s exploits was, though nominally a camp
for _bourgeois_ alone, a camp crowded with representatives of all
classes, but most of all with representatives of the peasant class.
In fact, what was the amount of peasants’ and workers’ blood shed
during the Red Terror? The question is one which will never admit of an
answer. Once I attempted, with my card index library, to make a table
of social statuses. True, this applied to the year 1918 only, and the
data were far from complete; but at least I succeeded in arriving at
the following improvised classification:
Intellectuals 1286
Hostages (from the professional classes
exclusively) 1026
Peasants 962
Urban Dwellers 468
Persons Unknown 450
Criminal Elements (which in many cases
represented persons arrested, in reality,
for political reasons) 438
Officials convicted of professional misconduct 187
Domestic Servants 118
Soldiers and Sailors 28
_Bourgeois_ 22
Clergy 19
And though the above grouping is a casual grouping only, it is
sufficient to refute the statements of leading Bolshevists, and
to dislodge the corner-stone on which Communists strive to rear
_apologiae_ for their system. It was inevitable that the
internecine struggle for power should become what it was. Inevitably
that struggle came to resemble the parallel struggle witnessed
during the French Revolution. And though this incontrovertible
thesis is sometimes contested, the day will come when it will stand
corroborated. Take another illustration of it. On August 21, 1919,
an ex-warder from the Che-Ka gaol at Nikolaevsk testified before
the Denikin Commission that the lot of workers and peasants in that
prison who lacked the means to purchase its alleviation was far harder
than was the lot of their fellow workers and peasants, and that many
more of the latter were shot than of intellectuals. And a Denikin
Commission document declares that when the municipality of Nikolaevsk
was assisting the Commission to make local enquiries, and to attempt
to fix the total of shot, it finally obtained proof of a total of
115 (though the real number must have been much larger, seeing that
many burial pits could not be located, and advanced decomposition
rendered two such pits impossible of examination, and the Che-Ka had
published only partial lists of its victims, with no information
whatsoever as to local deserters from the Red Army) and then helped the
Commission to determine the social status of 73 out of the 115, with
the result that the list was found to be headed by 25 merchants and
other _bourgeois_, and filled up with 15 members of the working
_intelligentsia_ (engineers, doctors, students, and the like) and
as many as 33 peasants and industrial operatives.
In fact, as the Terror spread, the Bolshevists’ prisons became more and
more filled with the proletariat and the working _intelligentsia_,
and the shootings of the latter proportionately more numerous.
In addition to which there has now become added the category of
Socialists.
* * * * *
The statement that the Red Terror was a response to a White Terror, a
war of extermination against “enemies of our class who constantly plot
the ruin of the industrial and agrarian proletariat,” is a statement
explicable only on the hypothesis of political exigency. For it was the
Bolshevists’ own appeals to their Red Army that caused the civil war
to become the cruel, truly brutal thing that it became, added to the
fact that with Bolshevist propaganda went misrepresentations designedly
calculated to demoralise certain social sections. Such was the call
(and the menace) to volunteers to engage in “espionage” work--an order
issued by Piatakov, head of the Donetz Che-Ka, and proclaiming that
“any failure of any Communist to denounce a traitor will be regarded
as an offence against the Revolution, and punished with all the vigour
of the laws of the present war-revolutionary period.”[167] Thus
denunciation of one’s neighbour was elevated into a civic duty, into a
civic virtue! Bukharin, for his part, said:
Henceforth all of us must become agents of the Che-Kas, whether
in our houses, or in our streets, or in our public places, or on
our railways, or in our soviet institutions. Everywhere and at
all times must we watch for counter-revolutionaries, apprehend
them, and consign them to the nearest Che-Ka.
And Miasnikov, the Communist who assassinated the Grand Duke Michael,
and subsequently fell into disgrace for having published a pamphlet
opposing Lenin’s policy, advised that:
Every one of us workers do become an agent of a Che-Ka,
and keep the Revolution apprised of what is being done by
Counter-Revolution. Only so shall we become strong and secure
towards future efforts. For an honest citizen no other mode of
procedure is possible. It is no more than his duty.
That is to say, the Communist Party was to become one huge
politico-police force, and Russia herself one huge Che-Ka for the
purpose of stifling freedom and independent thought. And take a
suggestion tendered to Moscow by the Che-Ka of the Alexandrovskaya
Railway:
That all railway workers be charged to inform their railway
Che-Ka of any public meeting known to be pending, so that
representatives of the Che-Ka may attend the gathering, and note
the gathering’s proceedings.
And not only were the people as a whole called upon to engage in
“espionage.” Also the people as a whole were requested to sanction the
most odious forms of tyranny. For example, the Kievan revolutionary
tribunal cried:
Communists, Red Guards, and others, fulfil your great mission
by keeping constantly in communication with our investigation
department, so that wherever you may be--whether in a city, or
in a village, or a few paces away, or ten versts distant--you
may telegraph to us your information, or else call in person,
and so enable our inquiry agents to hasten to the spot.[168]
And the same city of Kiev saw its provincial committee of defence
empower not merely _individuals_, but the _population as a
whole_, to:
Seize and detain any and every person soever who shall be
found seeking to thwart the Soviet Government, and to select
hostages from the wealthy, and to shoot such hostages if any
counter-revolutionary manifestation shall take place, and to
subject villages to military investment until arms have been
surrendered thence, and to undertake indemnified domiciliary
searches after the expiration of dates for surrender of arms,
and to shoot all persons found still in possession of the
same, and to fix general contributions, and to deport leaders
and instigators of rebellion, and to make over those leaders’
property to non-affluent dwellers.[169]
Frequently, also, the Soviet’s provincial press displayed such
advertisements as: “The Provincial Che-Ka of Kostroma herewith
proclaims that it is the duty of every citizen of the R.S.F.S.R.
to shoot at sight Citizen Smorodinov, now standing convicted
of wilful defection.” And once a “Comrade Ilyin” wrote from
Vladikavkaz: “Each of you Communists possesses the right to kill any
_agent-provocateur_, or person guilty of sabotage, or person
seeking to hinder you from winning the victory over your foeman’s
body.”[170] Lastly, in 1918 a revolutionary tribunal in the South
went so far as to confer upon all its Communist supporters “power of
life and death over counter-revolutionaries of every species,” and a
Red Guard association in Astrakhan to order that, if a single shot
should be fired at either a Communist worker or a Red Guard, hostages
from amongst the _bourgeoisie_ “shall be executed within twenty
minutes.”