CHE-KA TYRANNY
Wild beasts should be shot, but not wantonly teased and
tormented.--A. P. POLONSKY.
The instigators of the Red Terror did more than afford full scope to
lawlessness outside Che-Ka premises; they also established within
those premises a complete system of illegality, and a mere glance at
official comments on lists of shot will bring before the imagination
an unforgettable spectacle of outrage. Frequently persons were shot by
order of officials who did not so much as know what the accusations had
been, or even the victims’ names. “Shot--Names unknown”!
On June 18, 1918, Gorky’s journal, the _Novaya Zhizn_ or
“New Life,” published an interview with Dzherzhinsky and Zachs,
who expounded to the journalist the policy of the Che-Ka, whilst
Dzherzhinsky, in particular, said:
Those who accuse us of secret murder do so wrongly. As a matter
of fact, the Che-Ka consists of eighteen tested revolutionaries,
is representative both of the Party’s Central Committee and
of the Party’s Central Executive, and can pass a sentence of
death only by an unanimous decree--one dissentient vote alone
being sufficient to save an accused’s life. Above all things
our strength lies in the fact that we know nor brother nor
friend, and treat with especial severity any colleague found
wanting in rectitude. Hence the Che-Ka’s personal reputation
stands above suspicion. Also, it is swiftly that we deal out
justice: it is seldom that we allow more than one or two or,
at most, three days to elapse between arrest and sentence. At
the same time, that does not mean that our findings are not
invariably well-founded. The possibility of a mistake is always
present, but as yet no instance of such a _contretemps_ has
occurred, and the best proof of what I say is to be found in our
protocols, which will show that, in most cases, a criminal, on
being confronted with a mass of circumstantial evidence, at once
confesses to his guilt. And how could guilt be made clearer than
by a confession from the accused himself?
True, the correspondent of the _Novaya Zhizn_ next referred to
rumours as to employment of physical violence during examinations of
prisoners; but Zachs at once replied:
Rumours of that kind are false; and the more so because we make
it our particular business to exclude from our labours any
element which threatens to prove unworthy of sharing in those
labours.
Whence, as I will show, the interview constituted a tissue of lies.
_Callousness in Executions_
For one thing, the above-named officials’ assertion that eighteen
members were required to pass a death sentence was false. All too
frequently such a sentence was passed by two or three members
alone--even by one after a “people’s justice” had been empowered with
the capital penalty.[171]
“It is swiftly that we deal out justice.” Well, possibly Dzherzhinsky
and his kind did deal out justice swiftly on occasions of mass
shootings. At the same time, I know of innumerable cases when things
were otherwise, and months passed before the accused was even
questioned, and, from first to last, the proceedings with regard to
a given prisoner occupied more than a year before they reached their
inevitable end in execution.
“We are accused of secret murder.” Quite so. Seldom were shootings
officially reported, even though on September 5, 1918, during the
height of a wave of Red terrorism, a resolution of the Council of
People’s Commissaries called for “compulsory publication both of names
of the shot and of reasons for applying the supreme punitive measure!”
The exact manner of fulfilling this resolution, so far as practice
was concerned, can be gained by perusing casual announcements in
the Central Che-Ka’s _Weekly_, whose purpose was “co-ordination
and direction of the provincial Che-Ka’s activities.” To take a
particularly instructive illustration. On Oct 26, 1918, six weeks after
Madame Kaplau’s attempt upon Lenin, No. 6 of the _Weekly_ published
what purported to be a list of the persons shot for the deed. Yet
though, in reality, the number of the shot had amounted to several
hundreds, the list’s total amounted only to ninety, and in sixty-seven
instances gave no Christian name or patronymic, and in two instances
only some initials, and in eighteen instances only a surname and the
social status--“Razoumovsky, ex-lieutenant-colonel”; “Kotomazov,
ex-student”; “Mouratov, co-operative employee”; and so forth. And only
in ten instances was any reason for the execution appended, with, even
so, the accused merely described as “an obvious counter-revolutionary,”
or “a White Guard,” _et cetera, et cetera_. And though the list also
contained such entries as “Khvostov, ex-Minister of the Interior, and
a counter-revolutionary,” and “Vistorgov, Arch-Priest,” the reader was
left to guess that a bare entry of “Maklakov” referred to another man
who had been a Minister of the Interior. True, in the latter case,
the identity was easy enough to discern; but what of the many plain
Zhichkovskys and Ivanovs and Zhelinskys and so forth who figured with
him? No one was to be allowed to know who they had been. Nor, probably,
will anyone ever know.
And if the central authority’s orders were carried out by that
authority’s central subordinate organisations in such a manner, what
must have been the case in provinces remote from the centre? Well,
there the Terror assumed forms truly bestial, and official reports of
shootings became even more obscure than reports of shootings in the
metropolitan neighbourhood. “Thirty-nine prominent landowners have
been shot after arrest for connection with the counter-revolutionary
organisation known as ‘The Union to Support the Provisional
Government’”; “Six adherents of the late Imperial _régime_ have
been shot”; and so forth. Or a few names would be published over a note
that the remaining, unnamed persons in the list had met with a like
fate.
And the same procedure continued even after what Moroz, the notorious
Che-Ka employee, described (in No. 6 of the _Weekly_) as “chaotic
disorder” had passed away. Whence Dzherzhinsky’s denial that his Che-Ka
committed secret murder was out of place. It did so in every sense of
the term. Sometimes it passed a death sentence without even having seen
the person whom it was condemning, or even listened to a plea on his
behalf. Also, it was seldom that the names of the condemners themselves
appeared, or that the permanent identity of a Che-Ka’s _personnel_
became public property. (In passing, shootings carried out without
any notification of occurrence, or of names, acquired the special or
technical name of “blind-alley” shootings.)
Hence, what impudence must have been needed for a man like Chicherin
to reply to a correspondent of the Chicago _Tribune_, when the
latter inquired how many persons had been shot “by order of secret
tribunals,” and what the fate of the surviving members of the Tsar’s
family had been:
In Russia no such thing as a “secret tribunal” exists. And as
regards the number of persons shot by order of the Che-Ka, the
number has already been published. Nor do I know anything about
the Tsar’s daughters, save that I have read in some journal that
they are now supposed to be residing in America![172]
Again, Dzherzhinsky spoke of “confessions of guilt from the accused
himself.” Well, I myself have heard such “confessions” made--made under
pressure of threats, at the point of a revolver. So also have many
other inmates of Che-Ka gaols.
“Rumours that we employ physical violence are false.” We shall see
about that, and in the meanwhile it may be said that Che-Kas inflicted
the most excruciating of tortures, and that the Che-Kas which inflicted
them were not exclusively Che-Kas sitting in the more remote provinces.
For human life came to be so valueless in Soviet Russia that Golodin (a
deputy sent from Moscow to sit on the Che-Ka of Kungur) put things in a
nutshell when he said: “Nowadays, neither suspicion nor investigation,
nor even proof, is needed for the shooting of an accused. When the step
is deemed advisable one can just shoot, and have done with it.”
Next, let us consider some of the _published_ reasons for
executions, as occasionally set forth in the official and semi-official
Bolshevist press. They are significant. Sometimes we come across a
reason at least definite to the point of describing the “criminal” as
“a cunning and crafty counter-revolutionary,” or as “a wife fully
cognisant of her husband’s activities,” or as “the son,” or “the
daughter,” “of a general” (these examples are from the registers of
Petrograd); but more often was the “crime” set down, with amazing
effrontery, as, in the case of Gorokhov, a peasant, and others,
“assaulting a commissary”; in the case of Rogov, a shopkeeper, as
“using his premises for intrigue against the Soviet”; and so forth, and
so forth. Moreover, many were just described as “Shot in the ordinary
course of the Red Terror,” and there is nothing excessively explicit
about “twenty well-known White Guards,” “Zvierev, a doctor and a White
Guard,” “sixteen _koulaki_,” “an ex-member of the Constitutional
Democratic Party,” “a counter-revolutionary by conviction,” and entries
of the same kind. In fact, I possess a host of cuttings from the
official press to swell these instances, but anyone could obtain them
by scanning the first six issues of the _Weekly_.
One list brought especial grief to all who had known the victims
named. That list was a list comprising the names of men once prominent
in the educated world of Russia, and including, amongst others, such
intellectuals as N. N. Stchepkin, A. D. Apferov, A. S. Apferov,
A. A. Volkov, A. I. Astrov, V. I. Astrov, N. A. Ogorodnikov, K.
K. Chernoevitov, P. V. Gerasimov (who was shot under the name of
“Grekov”), S. A. Kniazikov, and many more--the names numbering, in all,
sixty-six, and appearing in the journals of Moscow on September 23,
1919. These murders the conscience of Society will never to the end
forgive. And this applies especially in the cases of A. I. Astrov and
V. I. Astrov, who were shot as “spies in Denikin’s employ” because in
their house there had allegedly been found (1) “a plan for reorganising
our legal courts and means of transport and commissariats when the
Soviet Power shall fall,” and (2) “a proclamation to the Volunteer
Army.”
But why, also, were N. I. Lazarevsky and Prince Oukhtomsky and others
shot? The official report is dated September 1, and says of Lazarevsky
that
he had ever been a convinced supporter of a Social Democratic
_régime_, and looked for the Soviet Power speedily to come to an
end, and prepared plans in connection with the problems of (_a_)
reorganisation of local self-government, (_b_) disposition of
various Soviet paper currency issues, and (_c_) re-establishment
of the credit system on Russian territory;
whilst of Prince S. A. Oukhtomsky, the sculptor, it was said in the
report that “he had betrayed to an organisation engaged in transmitting
information to foreign parts certain items concerning the condition of
our Russian museums [!], and prepared an article on the subject for the
White press.” And another of those shot was the poet Goumilev.
Similar to this report was a report of the trial of N. N. Stchepkin.
The same document added that “Maria Alexandrovna Yakoubovskaya, a
member of the Constitutional Democratic Party, and a school teacher,
had been found to be in communication with an agent of Kolchak’s”; but
as a matter of fact the lady’s real “crime” had been that on August 29,
1919, a few days before the Bolshevists were expelled from the city of
Kiev, she had been found in a house where some other arrests (arrests
in no way connected with her) were about to be carried out. At the same
period the Kievan _Izvestia_ published 127 names of persons as
shot for “themselves carrying out mass shootings of workers and members
of the Communist Party in localities recently vacated by Denikin and
Petlura”: and though these persons may really have been the sworn foes
of the workers and the poorer peasants, which the report declared them
to have been, we have only the Bolshevists’ word for the fact.
Again, take events in Odessa. We read:
Nikiforov, an ex-magistrate, and subsequently caretaker at the
works of the Odessa Shipping and Transport Company, has been
shot for attempting evasion of mobilisation, for refusing to
work for the good of Soviet Russia, and for obtaining his post
at the aforesaid works solely for the purpose of engaging in
espionage and propaganda amongst unenlightened members of the
proletariat.
And an old lady named Sigismundova was shot for having received a
letter from her officer son at Varna! She was shot, that is to say,
for “having been in communication with an agent of the Entente, and of
the Entente’s hireling Wrangel.”[173] And in Odessa, in 1919, General
Baranov was shot merely for having taken a photograph of the Catherine
II Memorial in that city--the said memorial having had the misfortune
to be situated in the very square confronting the local Che-Ka’s
premises.[174]
We have seen that revolutionary tribunals shot, in addition, persons
convicted of such offences as drunkenness and petty theft. And the same
thing happened to an individual who was found to be in possession of
an officer’s badges, and to another for having “criminally recovered a
son’s body,” and to a butcher of Moscow for having “insulted” images
of Marx and Engels by calling them “scarecrows,”[175] and to some
doctors of Kronstadt for having “made themselves popular with the
local workers.” So need we wonder that the Communist officials of
Ivanovo-Voznesensk threatened similarly to shoot anyone who concealed,
or failed to register, a sewing-machine,[176] or that Mitayev, the
commandant of Vladikavkaz, vowed to “cleanse from off the face of the
earth” anyone selling intoxicating liquor,[177] or that the commissary
of posts and telegraphs at Baku issued an order that any telephone girl
found guilty of tardy response to a call, or of response to a call “in
an uncivil manner,” should be shot within twenty-four hours?[178]
True, of death sentences passed the All-Russian Che-Ka kept protocols;
but did Dzherzhinsky really imagine that protocols like those drawn up
in Kiev during 1919 were good enough to go upon? No. 4 of the Berlin
review _Na Chouzhoi Storonyé_ (“In Foreign Parts”) published
some astonishing Kievan returns of the sort, and also some cognate
returns drawn up by the All-Ukrainian Che-Ka under friend Latzis.
Which returns, with their original seals and signatures, now lie
lodged in the archives of the Denikin Commission. From them let us
take an example or two. They show that once (so easy is it to sign
a death warrant) the All-Ukrainian Che-Ka decided fifty-nine cases
at a sitting, and that on May 19, 1919, the same Che-Ka not only got
through its ordinary routine work for the day, but also tried forty
“personal” cases, and passed, in twenty-five of those cases, a sentence
of death. And the sentences must have been (to use Dzherzhinsky’s
word) “well-founded,” for the returns which give them do not so much
as mention the antecedent “crimes.” And the same applies to some
executions carried out at Kharkov when two Che-Ka employees named
Portugeis and Feldmann, as they shot the prisoners, merely achieved
such a brief and rough jotting down of notes in pencil as, for example,
“Baeva--Shot as an incorrigible criminal.”[179]
But, of course, to a Che-Ka employee, to an individual who despised the
old ethics, the old “_bourgeois_ prejudices,” such proceedings
would seem no more than “trials in legal form terminating in justified
shooting.” Indeed, Sigal of Odessa, an ex-Che-Ka official, and at one
time an ex-student of the University of Novorossisk, stated, in answer
to a question from the Denikin Commission, that it had been quite a
common practice for the Che-Ka’s secretary merely to send out word that
“the trial must be conducted in such a manner as to result in at least
fifteen persons being sent to the wall.”
And the same callousness with regard to human life frequently caused
two or more persons to be shot through the fact that both or all of
them bore the same or similar names. This might happen accidentally,
or it might purposely be done to avoid any possibility of a mistake.
I myself know of such a case when, in Odessa, three doctors named
so wholly dissimilarly as Volkov, Valsov, and Vorobiev were shot in
a batch[180]; whilst in another case a man named Ozerov was shot
before the “people’s prosecutor” had discovered an error to have been
made--whereupon the rightful Ozerov was shot as well.[181] We find
several such cases in Averbuch’s book _The Che-Ka of Odessa_.
Again, the same Che-Ka once received information concerning some
“counter-revolutionary activities” said to have been carried on by
a man called Aaron Chonsir, but not at the same time, unfortunately,
the man’s address: wherefore the “people’s prosecutor” engaged in the
case ordered the local street directory to be looked through, and then
caused _eleven_ persons of the accused’s name to be arrested and
imprisoned. Only after a fortnight of enquiries _which included
several applications of torture_ were two out of the eleven Chonsirs
selected, and shot. And the reason why still as many as two were shot
(although the original indictment had called for the arraignment only
of one) was that the “inquisitional department” had not been able to
make up its mind even with regard to the pair chosen, and so had made
sure of bagging the real “counter-revolutionary” by shooting both the
one and the other. Similarly a responsible witness who could not well
be suspected of attempting to colour his testimony has stated that once
an ex-assistant procurator named A. S. Baranov was shot in mistake for
an officer of the same name; also, that once the witness was present
in a cell when the name of “Vivordtsev, Alexey” was called out, as
denoting a certain prisoner destined for execution, and when the only
Vivordtsev in the cell was pointed out to the authorities, but stated
to possess the initials _K. M._, the authorities, undeterred,
replied: “Never mind the exact name! All that we want is a Vivordtsev.”
Lastly, an educated landowner testified before the Denikin Commission
that a peasant named Yakov “Khromoy” (“the Lame”) of the village of
Yavkino was shot in mistake for a perfectly sound Yakov belonging to
the same village, whereas the man executed was (as his name implied) a
cripple.
Occasionally, however, the lives of persons placed in such a position
were saved at the last moment by a lucky accident. Cases of the sort
occurred under the “inquisitional departments” at Moscow, and similar
ones are to be found recorded both in the British White Book and in
_The Che-Ka_; whilst Nilostonsky tells of like incidents in Kiev.
In fact, “inadvertent” executions became so frequent as at last to
give rise to a special class of victims, and to acquire the name of,
in Che-Ka parlance, “mistakes.” In 1918, when the Che-Ka of Moscow
discovered a secret organisation of ex-officers known as the Levshinsky
Club, _all_ ex-officers, without exception, who happened to live
in the Levshinsky Perëonlok[182] were arrested, and thrown into the
Butyrka Prison--where, for fellow inmates, they had the persons who
had been arrested in connection with the Lockhart affair. And of these
ex-officers (who numbered in all, twenty-eight) only six lived to tell
the tale. And take the following:
In Brounitsy, near Moscow, the commissaries took to shooting
anyone whose looks in any way displeased them. Hence there was
no need at all for the local executive committee to assemble:
one of its members needed merely to say, “We have decided to,
_etcetera, etcetera_,” and nothing remained to be done save
to send Red Guards for the victim, to give him a spade with
which to dig his own grave, to take him to the courtyard of the
local riding-school, to shoot him there, and to bury him.
All of which things at least help us to understand passages in Latzis’
statistical articles which state that “shootings had to be employed to
intimidate the population,” or “to produce the required effect,” or
“to kill any leanings towards sabotage and conspiracy,” and the rest.
In Yaroslav, for example, he and his party shot hostages merely on the
ground that a rising of _koulaki_ was anticipated, though it had
not actually come to pass. And on February 11, 1919, Mr. Alston wrote
to Lord Curzon:
According to the Bolshevists, the only way to forestall
counter-revolutionary movements in this town (Ekaterinburg) is
anticipatorily to terrorise the inhabitants.[183]
But perhaps the vilest episode of all was the shooting of a whole
family of hostages in Elizabetgrad during the May of 1920, when the
four little daughters of an officer, children from seven to three years
old, were shot along with their grandmother of sixty-nine!
A passing thought is: How came “counter-revolutionaries” sometimes
to be shot forthwith, and sometimes to be kept until later? There
would seem to be a mystery here. When, during the autumn of 1918, a
policy of shooting ex-Tsarist Ministers was entered upon, Bouligin,
the ex-Minister of the Interior, had his life spared during the year
just named, but on September 5, 1919, was brought before the Che-Ka of
Petrograd, and tried for having pursued a reactionary policy as long
ago as 1905! “Wherefore it is resolved that Citizen Bouligin be shot,
and have his property confiscated, and handed over to the Executive
Committee, for transference to certain workers in a State factory.”[184]
Perhaps _this_ was one of the protocols which Dzherzhinsky
declared to be “well-founded”?
_Physical Outrage and Torture_
If the reader will recall what has been said in connection with
Che-Kas, he will scarcely doubt--nay, he will feel certain--that
physical outrage was practised in Che-Ka dungeons. The appeal to
European public opinion framed by the Paris Executive Committee
of the Russian Constituent Assembly in no way exaggerated when it
protested against “the present orgy of political murder in Russia, with
employment of physical torture and physical injury.” For all that has
ever been written about the ancient Russian prisons--in particular,
about “the Russian Bastille,” as the Schlüsselburg Fortress, the
repository of olden-time important political offenders, has been
called--pales before the prisons and the prison system established by
the Soviet Government. And we have seen how Peter Kropotkin declared
the Soviet’s prison conditions, and the practice of seizing hostages,
to constitute a return to the old methods of torture.
During my confinement in the Butyrka Gaol I became acquainted with
a Dr. Moudrov of Moscow, whose “offence” I do not know--I only know
that he had never had any definite indictment framed against him, and
that, inasmuch as he had spent several months in the Che-Ka building’s
dungeons before being transferred to the Butyrka, he had become so
acclimatised to the prison atmosphere as to be able to be entrusted
by the prison authorities with the duties of medical officer to the
establishment (previously no medical staff at all had been in existence
there), and dealt so efficiently with the prevailing epidemic of typhus
as to be left unexamined by the Che-Ka. But at length a day arrived
when he passed from us in the very midst of his mission of healing,
and never returned; and soon afterwards we heard that he had been
shot. No explanation has ever been forthcoming for this insensate deed
of cruelty, and probably it would be impossible to present one. All
that the _Izvestia_ of October 17 said was that Dr. Moudrov “had
formerly been a member of the Constitutional Democratic Party.”
Another encounter in the prison similarly affected me. When, during the
summer of 1922, I was summoned to give evidence in the great trial of
Social Revolutionaries that was then held, I happened to walk from the
cells to the court beside a thin, middle-aged man whom, on the way, I
contrived to engage in a little conversation, and thereby discovered to
be a Colonel Perkhourov who had taken part in the Savinkov rising at
Yaroslavl in 1918, and been thrown into the Che-Ka building’s cells,
and, though those cells were, supposedly, only a place of detention
pending inquiry, half-starved, allowed no books or interviews, and
conceded no facilities for exercise. And though I could not clearly
ascertain whether until now he had escaped the authorities’ memory,
or whether he had purposely been held over for the present occasion,
at all events I found him being conducted to the court in the same
capacity (as a witness) as myself. But no sooner had the proceedings
begun than he found himself transferred from amongst the witnesses
to amongst the accused! And later he was taken to Yaroslavl, and,
according to an officially published statement, shot.
These are examples with which I myself came in contact: but there were
hundreds of others. And if this kind of thing could happen in the
centre of the country, at a time when the anarchical conditions of the
Bolshevists’ early days of rule were supposed to have given place to a
semblance of regular and established order, what must have happened in
far-removed provinces where there sat enthroned despotism in its vilest
forms?
Well, there was torture in progress there. For the mere fact of having
to live for months, for years, in daily expectation of death alone
constituted torture. And so did the provincial Che-Kas’ universal
system of mock shootings; and during the time that I was in the
Butyrka I had many such cases of shootings personally related to me by
informants whose veracity I have no reason to doubt, seeing that they
were confiding to me their narratives whilst the shock communicated to
their nerves by their horrible experiences had not yet wholly faded.
Amongst others who were subjected to such an ordeal were some prominent
co-operative officials of Petrograd who had been “tried” before the
Supreme Revolutionary Tribunal during the autumn of 1920: and in their
case the torture took the form of nightly being led out as though for
execution, and forced, despite the intense frost, to strip to the last
shred of clothing, and witness real executions of other prisoners
before being led back to their cells for the whole ghastly “rehearsal”
to be repeated a few nights later.
But sometimes persons subjected to this mental torture would so lose
their self-control as to make any admission rather than be compelled to
go through the experience again. An American named Kalmatiano who was
sentenced to death at the Lockhart trial, and subsequently reprieved,
told V. A. Miakotin and myself, when the three of us were lying in the
Butyrka gaol together, that thrice he and a fellow-accused named Fride
had been taken out of prison as though for execution, and that though,
on May 10, 1920, he was informed that his sentence had been commuted,
his sentence of death had been passed as long previously as the year
1918, and meanwhile he had had to spend the whole of the intervening
time in daily expectation of being shot.
A Madame E. O. Kolbasina who was imprisoned with us has since
related[185] a similar experience told her by a fellow inmate. The
scene of the experience was the Che-Ka’s building in Moscow, and the
following is the lady’s account of what happened:
Convicted of offering a bribe of 100,000 roubles for the life
of an officer, I was conducted to the basement of the building
as though for execution, and saw there a number of corpses clad
only in strips of clothing. How many of them were there I do
not know, but in particular I remember two--the corpse of a
woman and the corpse of a man, the latter clad only in a pair
of socks. In each case the dead people had been shot through
the back of the head, and the floor actually felt slippery to
my feet with blood. Unwilling to undress myself, I left it to
the executioners to do it for me, but they shouted, “Undress,
you!” and I felt my hands raise themselves mechanically, and
automatically undo the buttons of my cloak, and take it off. And
just as I was going to do the same with my gown I heard a voice
reach me as though half-muffled, as though filtered through
cotton-wool, and say, “Kneel down,” whilst at the same moment
I felt myself pushed on to one of the heaps of corpses--as a
matter of fact, on to a corpse that was still quivering, and
emitting gasps! And then the voice from a distance came to
me again, and seemed to say as in a whisper, “Up again, you,
and quickly!” whilst someone gave a tug at my arm, and I saw
Romanovsky, the “people’s prosecutor,” standing before me with
a grin on his face--ah, you know the look of that foul, low,
underhand countenance!--and saying to me: “How now, Ekaterina
Petrovna?”--for also you know how he calls his victims by their
Christian names and patronymics--“how now, Ekaterina Petrovna?
You have had a little scare, have you--a little shock to the
nerves? But that is nothing, nothing. At all events it may make
you feel rather more disposed to be communicative with us in
future. Is not that so?”[186]
And Madame N. Davidova, for her part, has noted the following:
To-day we heard that ... the Baroness T--gen was not shot, after
all, but only her husband and some others.
Yet she had to stand by and see it done, as supposedly she
waited for her own turn to arrive! Only when everyone else had
been shot was she told that she herself had been reprieved, and
made to clean up the execution room, and wash away her husband’s
and his companions’ blood.... Her hair, I have been told, has
turned completely grey.
_A propos_ of the Saratov ravine, a narrator has said in _The
Che-Ka_:
During the October of 1919 two young women were brought to the
ravine, stripped of their clothing, and, under threat of a
revolver, made to stand at the edge of the yawning abyss--this
being done in order to force them to disclose where some
relatives were. And [the narrator adds] when later I saw these
young women their hair had turned white.
Consider also the mental and physical agonies which Ivan Ivanovich
Kotov, an ex-member of the Russian Constituent Assembly, must have
endured in 1918 as he was being dragged to slaughter from the hold of
a barge after having had a leg and an arm broken, and an eye gouged
out![187]
The Che-Ka of Ekaterinodar, in particular, went in for intimidatory
measures, and an example of them is seen in the case of a Doctor
Shestakov who, after being taken across the river Kuban, and forced
there and then to dig his own grave, and in every way led to suppose
that he was about to be executed, was fired at only with a volley
of blank cartridges. And a man named Korvin-Piotrovsky was treated
similarly, and again and again, with, as a finishing touch, a cruel
flogging, information that his wife and ten-year-old daughter had also
been arrested, and an enforced witnessing of their subjection to a
“mock” execution similar to those which had so often been inflicted
upon himself.
[Illustration: Exhuming Bolshevists’ victims at Odessa.
[_See page_ 152.]
Again, according to an article in _The Che-Ka_:
Tortures in these districts [Ekaterinodar and Kuban] are both
physical and mental. And Ekaterinodar has a particular method
of their application, as follows. The victim is laid upon his
back on the floor of his dungeon, whilst two burly Che-Ka
employees tug at his head, and two others at his shoulders,
until the muscles of his neck are absolutely stretched and
taut. Then a fifth man falls to beating the victim’s neck with
a blunt instrument--usually the butt-end of a revolver--until,
the neck swelling, blood gushes from the mouth and nostrils,
and frightful agony is suffered. And I will tell you also how
a Madame Dombrovskaya, an ex-school teacher, was tortured in
her solitary confinement cell. It seems that the accusation
against her had been that there had been discovered at her house
a suit case of officers’ clothing which the officer concerned,
a relative of hers, had left with her for safe keeping whilst
the Denikin _régime_ had been operative in the town. Also,
it seems that though Madame Dombrovskaya had confessed to this
“crime,” the Che-Ka had been informed that she had by her
jewellery which another relative, a general, had deposited in
her keeping: wherefore on receipt of this fresh information, she
was ordered to be tortured until she should reveal where the
jewellery might be. For a beginning she was raped and outraged
generally--the raping taking place in order of seniority of
torturers, with a man called Friedmann raping her first,
and the others in regular sequence. And, that done, she was
questioned further as to the whereabouts of the jewellery,
and further tortured by having incisions made into her body,
and her finger tips nipped with pliers and pincers. Until at
last, in her agony, with the blood pouring from her wounds,
she confessed that the jewels were hidden in an outbuilding of
her house. The same evening (the date being November 6) she
was shot, and when she had been dead about an hour, one of the
Che-Ka’s employees searched the outbuilding indicated, and
duly found hidden there--a plain gold brooch and a few rings!
Again, in a certain Caucasian village the usual instrument of
torture was an iron “glove,” a solid, glove-shaped piece of
metal studded on the outside with nails, and able, when slipped
onto the torturer’s right hand, to inflict blows causing
not only terrible pain through their mere weight, but also
suppuration through the multiplicity of the nail wounds which
they produced. This torture was applied to, amongst others, a
citizen named Leliavin, a man from whom the Che-Ka desired to
obtain information as to the whereabouts of a hoard of Tsarist
gold coins which he was reported to have got concealed. As for
the town of Armavir, the local Che-Ka’s instrument of torture
was the “wreath,” an ordinary leathern strap into one end of
which an iron nut was let, and into the other end a screw, so
that, the strap having been fixed around the victim’s head, the
nut and the screw could be drawn together until the extreme
compression of the scalp caused indescribable pain.[188]
In Piatigorsk the head of the local Che-Ka’s “operative department”
used to accompany “questionings” with strokes from a rubber whip--as
many as twenty strokes at a time. Once, also, the fellow ordered some
nurses who had rendered first aid to some wounded Cossacks to be given
fifteen lashes apiece.[189] It was the practice of this Che-Ka, too,
to thrust pins under prisoners’ finger-nails. In general, it conducted
its “inquiries” on a basis of flagellation with whips and ramrods
and clenched fists. We have evidence also that similar treatment
was accorded to Admiral Miazgovsky at Nikolaev in 1919; whilst the
_Dielo_ once published a statement as to how a citizen of Lougansk
had been tortured by having ice-cold water poured over his naked body,
and his finger-nails wrenched backward with steel pliers, and his body
pricked all over with needles, and slashed with razors.[190] And on
another occasion a correspondent of the same journal[191] wrote with
regard to Simferopol: “The Che-Ka there has invented new forms of
torture by injecting into the rectum enemas charged with powdered
glass, and holding lighted candles beneath the generative organs.” In
Tsaritsin the victims were variously laid upon a heated grid, thrashed
with iron rods or metal-tipped flails of rubber, or subjected to
twistings of the arms until the bones were broken.[192]
[Illustration: An inscription written by a prisoner on a cell
wall in Kiev.
[_See page 168._]
A whole chapter in Averbuch’s book is devoted to the tortures
practised in Odessa, with the Che-Ka’s system of fetters, confinement
in pitch-dark cells, castigation with rods a centimetre thick and
cat-o’-nine-tails of plaited leather, crushings of hands with
pincers, and suspensions by the neck. And amplification of Averbuch’s
descriptions is to be found in the materials collected by the Denikin
Commission, which detail two cases of mock shooting. In the first case
the victim was thrust into a crate which already contained a dead body,
and shot at so that only one ear was singed--then removed until his
tormentors should see fit to repeat the torture; and in the second case
the proceedings consisted of forcing the victim to dig what he believed
to be his own grave in a condemned cell which had had scratched across
one of its walls: “Twenty-seven bodies lie buried here.” This second
case, of course, was designed to intimidate only; much as when, in a
third case, a man was nightly awakened by the jailor, led out into the
courtyard, and, on the jailor being bidden to “take him back again,
and let him live through the rest of the night,” restored to his cell.
Also, in Odessa members of the Che-Ka used to visit the cells several
times a day, and say mockingly: “By to-night you will have become
something different.”[193]
In 1919, when an important trial of political prisoners was proceeding
in Moscow, armed guards were posted over the prisoners whilst they
were in the cells, and the cells would be periodically visited by
female Communists, who said to the guards: “These prisoners are spies.
Shoot them at once if they attempt to escape.” But most abominable of
all were the doings of the female president of the Che-Ka of Penza, a
woman called Boche, in the year 1918. They grew so bad that at last the
central authorities had to insist upon her retirement. And during the
winter of 1920 it was the practice of the twenty-year-old male head
of the Che-Ka of Vologda to seat himself on a chair beside the frozen
river, have a pile of sacks prepared, send to the gaol for the captives
due for the day’s “questioning,” and, having caused the wretches to be
thrust into the sacks, keep them immersed in a hole in the ice whilst
he subjected them to examination. But at length his case, like the case
of the woman Boche, attracted the notice of the central authorities,
and, on his being medically examined, he was found to be insane.
In Tiumen the chief mode of torture was to beat the prisoners with
rubber rods.[194] And of the Urals Che-Ka’s methods we can form an idea
when we read, from the pen of a Madame Froumkina:
Meder was brought into the shed and compelled to kneel down
beside one of the walls. Shots then were fired at him--to his
right first of all, and then to his left. And then Goldin, the
“people’s prosecutor,” said: “Unless you surrender to us your
son, you will be shot. But we shall not shoot you at once. We
shall do so only when we have broken your arms and legs.” And
the next day this was done.
[Illustration: Saenko, commandant of the Che-Ka of Kharkov, a
notorious torturer and executioner.
[_See page 166._]
In the prison of Novocherkassk a “people’s prosecutor” once thrust two
revolvers into a victim’s mouth in such a manner as to hitch the
sights upon the victim’s teeth, and bring away both them and portions
of the gum bones.[195]
Next, consider the execution of General Roussky and his companions, as
detailed in the materials collected by the Denikin Commission:
The executioners forced their victims to kneel down and stretch
out their necks. Then they slashed at the necks with swords,
but in some cases, through inexpertness, failed to deal a fatal
blow at the first attempt, and had to deliver five or more blows
before the hostage with whom they were dealing finally was
slaughtered. It was with his own hand that Artabekov, the head
of the Che-Ka, stabbed General Roussky. And some of the victims
had their arms and legs cut off before finally having their
necks severed.
And now the time has come for me to tell of the “heroic” deeds of
Saenko, head of the Che-Ka of Kharkov. This man first came into
prominence at the time when, in 1919, the city was occupied by the
Bolshevists before their subsequent evacuation of the same. Hundreds
of victims then passed through his maniacal, sadistic hands. An
eye-witness has related how, when first this witness entered the Che-Ka
cells, he was struck with the terrified aspect of the prisoners, and
enquired the cause of their fear. Said they: “Saenko has been here,
and taken away Syichev and Bielochkin for examination. And he has
promised that this evening he will come and see some more of us.” And,
sure enough, a few minutes later, the Syichev in question, a boy of
nineteen, re-entered the cells leaning upon a couple of Red Guards, and
looking like a ghost. His comrades cried, “What has been done to you?”
and he replied, “Oh, Saenko has been examining me.” His right eye was
one huge bruise, his right cheekbone seemed to have been laid open
with a revolver butt, four of his front teeth were missing, his neck
was covered with bruises, his left shoulder-blade had been gashed all
over, and on his back were thirty-seven contusions and abrasions. And
in this manner Saenko had been “examining” victims for five days past,
so that in the end one of the victims, the man Bielochkin, died of his
injuries in the prison infirmary. A favourite trick of Saenko’s was to
keep digging the point of a knife into the examinee’s body for about a
centimetre’s distance, and twisting it about. He would do this right in
front of the “people’s prosecutor” and the rest of the Che-Ka staff.
And to the foregoing the witness has added an account of the executions
which Saenko duly carried out, as threatened, on the evening of the day
mentioned.
At nine o’clock he entered the cells with an Austrian
staff-captain named Klochkovsky. Sodden with drink or drugs,
he then ordered three prisoners named Pshenichny, Ovcherenko,
and Bielonsov, to be taken out into the courtyard, and,
having divested them of their clothing, fell, with “Comrade
Klochkovsky,” to cutting and stabbing at their naked bodies from
the lower portions upwards. Daggers were used for the purpose,
and the stabbings made to ascend to the victims’ trunks only
very gradually. And when he had completed the three executions
he returned to the cells and, all covered with blood, said to
the rest of the prisoners: “Do you see this blood? Well, that is
the fate which befalls anyone who opposes me and the Workers’
and Peasants’ Party.” And, that said, an employee of the Che-Ka
seized hold of Syichev (the lad who had been so cruelly beaten
that morning), dragged him out into the yard, and forced him
to look at Pshenichny’s body. And because the body was still
heaving the employee at length killed it outright with a
revolver shot; after which he hit Syichev several times with a
sword sheath, and drove him back into the cells.
An idea of the mental agonies suffered by prisoners at Kharkov can
be gained from inscriptions since found on the dungeon walls. Such
inscriptions are: “For four days past I have been flogged. I lost
consciousness, and then was forced to sign a ready-written protocol.
I signed it because I could bear the torture no longer”; and “I
have been given 800 strokes with a ramrod, until I am like a piece
of raw meat”; and “At seven o’clock on March 6 ---- was shot, aged
twenty-three”; and “What a chamber of suffering this cell is!”; and
“Abandon hope, all ye who enter here!” And we have further confirmation
of the horrors undergone in Kharkov’s “chambers of suffering” from
survivors’ stories, from experiences related by persons who contrived
to escape from the Che-Ka’s clutches. For the most part, that Che-Ka’s
“investigations” were conducted at night-time, and accompanied with
such threats of flogging and shooting that often enough victims
would “confess” to crimes which existed only in the imagination of
the Che-Ka’s agents. But should even such threats be unsuccessful,
“confessions” would be extorted with beatings with ramrods until the
victim lost consciousness. Two officials prominent in these doings
were an ex-hairdresser’s assistant named Miroshinchenko and an
eighteen-year-old youth named Iesel Mankin. Once the former threatened
a servant girl named Kanisheva with a revolver until she “confessed” to
having harboured some officers; and once the latter said to a victim
as he covered him with his weapon, “Your life will depend upon your
answering me correctly.” And in time the Che-Ka began to add moral
tortures to physical: executions began to be carried out in such close
proximity to the cells that the other prisoners could plainly hear the
rifle shots as they issued from the small, dark kitchen which Saenko
had converted into a torture and execution chamber. And when later,
in June of the year in question, Denikin’s searchers inspected the
room, they found there two _pood_-weights so tied together with
an _arshin_-long section of rubber piping as to form a kind of
flail, with the straw covering of the floor sodden with the blood of
the slaughtered, and the wall facing the door seamed and scarred with
bullet marks, and the other walls bespattered with blood and fragments
of scalp, and hair, and particles of brain, and the floor littered
with similar fragments. And when 107 corpses were disinterred in
the adjacent concentration camp the most horrible atrocities became
revealed--terrible traces of flogging, shattered ribs and leg bones,
fractured skulls, amputated hands and feet, heads attached to the
trunk only with a strip of cartilage, patches where the skin had been
burnt off with red-hot instruments, stripes branded upon the back, and
general mutilations.
The first body to be exhumed was the body of Zhakobritsky, an
ex-cornet of the 6th Hussars. He must have been cruelly beaten
before death, for some of his ribs had been fractured, and there
were thirteen scars on the body caused by pressure against some
red-hot, circular implement. All the scars were on the front of
the body save for a single stripe burnt upon the back. The skull
of another corpse was found flattened into a single, smooth,
round disk about a centimetre in thickness. Such expatulation
of the head could have been caused only by enormous pressure
between two flat objects. On a woman whose identity we could not
establish we found seven stab and shot wounds. Also, manifestly
she had been thrown into the grave before death.
And the Commission discovered corpses of persons who had been scalded
from head to foot with boiling liquid, and of persons who had been
slowly (beginning with wounds intended only to torture, not to prove
of a fatal character) _hacked_ to death.[196] And in every town
in the region where concealed hiding-places had been available were
corpses in a similar condition brought to light. Particularly was this
the case at Odessa, Nikolaev, and Tsaritsin. True, where some corpses
with fractured skulls were found in a quarry near the first-mentioned
place, the fractures may have been caused by a fall, and what seemed
external traces of torture may have been due to prolonged contact with
the soil, and the conclusions of the examining doctors may have been
made through inability to distinguish between ante-mortem changes and
post-mortem, between macerations and scald wounds, between testicles
swollen with decomposition and testicles ruptured before death; yet,
even so, testimony both oral and photographic goes to show that no
natural cause whatsoever could have caused the corpses to look as they
did when at length exhumation brought them to light. Again, granted
that some of the tales of physical tortures equal to those practised by
the Inquisition in Spain may have been exaggerations, our conscience
is not likely to feel relieved by knowing that tortures in Russia of
the twentieth century can be a degree, but only a degree, less cruel
than tortures in Spain of the centuries of the Inquisition; and though
one may draw a certain moral satisfaction from the circumstance that
the staff of the Anatomical Theatre to which the Che-Ka of Odessa
sent some of the corpses of its victims testified that none of those
corpses “bore traces of physical violence,” one will scarcely feel
satisfied that no tortures at all were practised in Odessa, or do more
than conclude that the number of cases in which torture was inflicted
may have been small in comparison with the huge total of victims, or
that, as luck would have it, no corpses of tortured had happened to be
sent to the Theatre concerned. Moreover, it may be added that in most
instances the evidence relating to torture that was given before the
Denikin Commission came from persons who might justifiably be supposed
to have been _pro-Bolshevist_ in their sympathies.
But to return to Saenko’s exploits in Kharkov. An ex-prisoner of
Kharkov, a Social Revolutionary, has written[197]:
In proportion as Denikin’s forces drew nearer to the town, the
bloodthirsty hysteria of the local Che-Ka increased. And it was
then that the real “hero” made his appearance upon the scene.
This was Saenko, a man originally a minor official, a member
of the local revolutionary tribunal, but now notorious amongst
his panic-stricken fellows, and one who held in his hand the
lives of all the prisoners in the place. Nightly his motor-car
would drive up to the prison to remove inmates. Usually he shot
them with his own hand, and once he shot a patient suffering
from typhus. A fellow small of stature, with the whites of his
eyes gleaming prominently, and his features constantly on the
twitch, this Saenko would brandish a revolver in his trembling
hand, and rush about the building like a madman. At first he
selected for his victims only persons who had actually been
sentenced; but during the two days immediately preceding the
evacuation he took to selecting his victims indiscriminately
from the prisoners at large, and then and there driving them out
into the yard, and hitting at them with the flat of his sword as
they went. And on the last day of all (though by then the gaol
had become strangely silent) the place resounded with volley and
individual firing from early morning until late at night--the
small prison-yard seeing slaughtered, on that day, 120 persons.
Such the narrative of one of the twenty or thirty prisoners who were
fortunate enough subsequently to be evacuated. And another ex-prisoner
has given us a description of the previous sorting-out--a terrible
process which lasted for three hours:
The rest of us were made to wait in the office whilst the whole
odious examination took place. An over-dressed youth entered
the office from an adjoining room, a name was called out, and
a party of Red Guards proceeded to the proper cell. As we
waited we could picture to ourselves the dungeons and their two
thousand half-alive, half-dead inmates stretched upon wretched
bunks--tossing to and fro in agonised anticipation--tossing to
and fro amid a silence of night broken only by gun-fire close
to the town, and by single revolver shots from the horrible
shambles where human beings were being done to death!...
Presently a door could be heard opening in the corridor, and
we knew that to a confused accompaniment of heavy footsteps,
groundings of rifle-butts, and the rattle of a lock, someone
was raising aloft a lantern, and someone else searching
lists with a gnarled finger, and someone else--lying upon
a bunk, and trembling with a trembling that convulsed both
heart and brain.... “Is it I?”... A name would be called.
Then slowly, very slowly, fear would temporarily release its
grip--temporarily the heart would begin to beat more evenly....
“Is it I?” No. Not, at all events, _yet_. Then the person
summoned would begin to dress himself with fingers benumbed with
terror, unequal to the task. Upon that a Red Guard would tell
him to make haste. “Hurry up!” the Guard would repeat. “There is
no time to waste.”... How many victims passed before us during
those three hours I do not know, or should find it difficult
to say. I only know that many, many, many did so pass before
us--men more dead than alive, men walking with unseeing eyes.
Nor did their “trial” take long. “Trial,” indeed! It consisted
merely of the head of the tribunal (or his secretary, dressed in
a smart tunic) looking at some lists and saying “Remove him.”
Whereupon the condemned was led out of the office by another
door.
And take this description of the horrible incidents of the Kharkov
prison evacuation, as given in the Denikin materials:
Soon after midnight on June 9, the prisoners in the
concentration camp in Chaikovskaya Street were awakened by a
sound of shots within the prison, and long, as they listened,
could hear firing, and footsteps of warders in the corridors,
and snappings of bolts, and the heavy, lagging tread of
condemned as they were taken from the cells, and Saenko and his
assistants marching from door to door, and the officials calling
out names, and “Come out, you!” and “Collect your things!” so
loudly that they must have been audible even in the farthest
dungeons.... And automatically, one after another, too weary in
body and soul to protest, the condemned rose, and crept towards
the doorway leading to the staircase of death. And presently,
clad only in their shirts, or altogether naked, they knelt down
before a large, newly-dug grave. And, lastly, Saenko, Edward,
and Bondarenko moved from prisoner to prisoner, and methodically
shot each of them through the back of the head, so that blood
and brains came flying from the shattered skulls, and body after
body sank forward upon their still warm predecessors.... The
executions lasted for more than three hours, and over fifty
persons were put to death. And next morning, when news of the
executions reached the inhabitants, and friends and relatives of
the deceased assembled in Chaikovskaya Street, and were standing
there, suddenly the doors of the _kommandatur_ flew open,
and there issued thence two shabbily dressed men, with Saenko
and Ostapenko, armed with revolvers, behind them. And just as
the two unknown men reached the half-way point of the plank
spanning a large, open grave beside the prison wall, two shots
caught them, and they sank forward.... Finally Saenko dispersed
the crowd by having them beaten with rifle-butts--he himself
shouting: “Do not be afraid that I am not going to bring the
Red Terror to an end! I am going to bring it to an end _by
shooting every one of you_.”
The same eye-witness[198] has described also the journey from Kharkov
to Moscow. And what he says confirms our information concerning Saenko,
since he relates how the latter shot further prisoners _en route_.
And confirmation is to be found also in the Denikin materials. Our
eye-witness says:
[Illustration: Inscriptions written by prisoners on a cell
wall in Kiev.
[_See page 174._]
Stories concerning Saenko are still current in Kharkov, and
represent no more than the truth. Once I myself saw him shoot
a sick prisoner on a stretcher; whilst on another occasion
he killed a prisoner with a dagger in the presence of a comrade
of ours, who subsequently told us of the deed. Also, once when
one of a party of prisoners who were in his custody managed to
escape, he atoned for that _contretemps_ by shooting the
first upon whom his eye happened to alight. He was a man whose
eyes were always bleary and inflamed, like the eyes of a man
under the influence of either morphia or cocaine. And whenever
he was in this state the symptoms of his sadism would become
more than ever pronounced.
And Nilostonsky’s book, _Der Blutrausch des Bolschewismus_ (a
work based mostly upon the findings of the Röhrberg Commission, which
carried out its investigations immediately after the occupation of Kiev
by the Volunteer Army during the August of 1919), gives us an even more
harrowing picture:
On the eve of the evacuation of Kiev every possible victim was
murdered by the Che-Ka. During the night of August 26, 1919,
at 5 Sadovaya Street, no fewer than 127 persons were done to
death by the provincial Che-Ka, whilst (as there was little
time to spare) 100 others were shot in the garden of the Che-Ka
building proper, and seventy in the building in Elizabetinskaya
Street, and as many more on the premises of the Chinese Che-Ka,
and fifty-one railwaymen on the premises of the railway Che-Ka,
and others in buildings belonging to the tribunals of Kiev.
The primary reason for these butcheries was a desire to have
no prisoners at all to remove, and the secondary reason a lust
to wreak vengeance in return for Denikin’s successful advance.
In one lot of Che-Ka buildings some prisoners were still found
alive, since the Bolshevists had been in such a hurry as to be
forced to abandon them. And terrible their condition was when
found! They looked like corpses, and could scarcely move, but
gazed at us with fixed, unseeing eyes.
And with that Nilostonsky goes on to describe the appearance of a
“human slaughter-house” (he asserts that that had come actually to
be the _official_ appellation of such places) when, later, the
Denikin Commission inspected one.
The place had formerly been a garage, and then the provincial
Che-Ka’s main slaughter-house. And the whole of it was coated
with blood--blood ankle deep, coagulated with the heat of the
atmosphere, and horribly mixed with human brains, chips of
skull-bone, wisps of hair, and the like. Even the walls were
bespattered with blood and similar fragments of brain and scalp,
as well as riddled with thousands of bullet holes. In the
centre was a drain about a quarter of a metre deep and wide,
and about ten metres long. This led to the sanitary system of
the neighbouring house, but was choked to the brim with blood.
The horrible den contained 127 corpses, but the victims of the
previous massacre had been hurriedly buried in the adjacent
garden. What struck us most about the corpses was the shattering
of their skulls, or the complete flattening out of those skulls,
as though the victims had been brained with some such instrument
as a heavy block. And there were corpses the heads of which were
altogether missing. But in these cases the missing heads cannot
possibly have been cut off. They must have been _wrenched_
off. In the main, bodies were identifiable only if they still
had left on them some such mark as a set of gold-mounted
teeth--left, of course, only because the Bolshevists had not
had time to extract it. And in every case the corpses were
naked. Also, though it had been the Bolshevists’ rule to load
their victims on to wagons and lorries as soon as massacred,
and take them outside the town for burial, we found that a
corner of the garden near the grave already described had in
it another, older grave, and that this second grave contained
eighty bodies which in every instance bore almost unimaginably
horrible wounds and mutilations. In this grave we found corpses
with, variously, entrails ripped out, no limbs remaining (as
though the bodies had literally been chopped up), eyes gouged
out, and heads and necks and faces and trunks all studded with
stab wounds. Again, we found a body which had had a pointed
stake driven through its chest, whilst in several cases the
tongue was missing. And placed together in one corner of the
grave we found a medley of detached arms and legs, as well as,
near the garden fence, some corpses which bore no sign at all of
death by violence. It was only a few days later that, on these
unmarked bodies being subjected to post-mortem examination,
our doctor discovered their mouths and throats and lungs to be
choked with earth. Clearly the unfortunate wretches had been
buried alive, and drawn the earth into their respiratory organs
through their desperate efforts to breathe. And it was persons
of all ages and of both sexes--old, and middle-aged, and women
and children--that we found in the grave. One woman was lying
tied with a rope to her daughter, a child of eight; and both
bore shot wounds. Further, a grave in the yard of the building
yielded the body of a Lieutenant Sorokin (accused of espionage
on behalf of the Volunteer Army) and the cross on which he had
been crucified a week before our arrival. Also, we found a chair
like a dentist’s chair which still had attached to it straps
for the binding of its tortured victims. And the whole of the
concrete floor around the chair was smeared with blood, and the
chair itself studded with clots of blood, and fragments of human
skin, and bits of hairy scalp. And the same with the premises of
the district Che-Ka, where, similarly, the floor was caked with
blood and fragments of bone and brain. There, too, a conspicuous
object was the wooden block upon which the victims had had to
lay their heads for the purpose of being brained with a crowbar,
with, in the floor beside it, a traphole filled to the brim with
human brain-matter from the shattering of the skulls.
[Illustration: A torture-chamber at Kiev, with “Death to the
Bourgeoisie!” scrawled across a wall.
[_See page 176._]
Again, here is a description of a form of torture which the Chinese
Che-Ka of Kiev employed:
The person to be tortured was first of all tied to a wall or a
stake. Then an iron tube a few inches in diameter was clamped to
him by one of its ends, and a live rat inserted into the other
end, and the end covered over with wire netting, and the tube
held over a flame until the rat became so maddened by the heat
as to attempt at all costs to escape by gnawing its way out
through the human victim’s body. And so the torture would be
continued for hours--sometimes all through the night into the
following day, and in any event until the victim died. And the
Commission found that the following form of torture also had
been employed in Kiev. The person to be tortured had been buried
to the neck in the ground, and left there until consciousness
had failed, when he had been dug out again.
And then he had been re-buried to the neck until once more
unconsciousness had supervened. And so on, and so on,
indefinitely. And inasmuch as the Bolshevists had been treating
some victims in this manner just before they evacuated Kiev,
they had, in the hurry of their departure, left some of the
victims in _statu quo_--to be dug out, of course, by the
Volunteers.
In fact, each Che-Ka seems to have had its speciality in torture.
Kharkov, for instance, under Saenko, went in primarily for scalpings
and hand flayings; and in Voronezh the person to be tortured was first
stripped naked, and then thrust into a nail-studded barrel, and rolled
about in it, or else branded on the forehead with a five-pointed star,
or, if a member of the clergy, “crowned” with barbed wire. As for the
Che-Kas of Tsaritsin and Kamishin, it was their custom to saw their
victims’ bones apart, whilst Poltava and Kremenchoug made it their
special rule to impale clergy (once, in the latter place, where a
ruffian named Grishka was in command, eighteen monks were transfixed in
a single day). Also, inhabitants have testified that Grishka would burn
at the stake any peasant who had been prominent in a rebellion, and sit
on a chair to enjoy the spectacle. The Che-Ka of Ekaterinoslav, again,
went in for crucifixion and death by stoning, and the Che-Ka of Odessa
for putting officers to death by chaining them to planks, and slowly,
very slowly, pushing them into furnaces, or else tearing their bodies
on a capstan wheel, or else immersing them in a boiler of water heated
to simmering point, and then flinging them into the sea, before finally
consigning them to the flames again.
[Illustration: A corner of a coach-house on the premises of
one of the Kievan Che-Kas where prisoners were shot. The
floor is littered with chips of skull bone, clots of brain,
etc.
[_See page 178._]
In fact, the list of tortures is endless. Another Kievan method was
to thrust the living victim into a rough coffin already containing a
decomposing body, and to fire shots over him as he lay there, and then
inform him that he was going to be buried, and bury him (with the
decomposing body) for about half an hour, and, lastly, disinter him
again for further “questioning.” And, seeing that all this might be
repeated more than once, can we wonder that sometimes the victim lost
his reason?
Similarly, the well-known report of the Kievan Sisters of Mercy
mentions the local practice of locking up living prisoners with dead.
And the statement is confirmed by a Latvian lady who was imprisoned for
“espionage” in 1920, and has related that, after being flogged with a
whip, and having her finger-tips pounded with an iron implement, and
her head screwed into an iron circlet, she was pushed into a cellar.
Very soon the dim light of the electric globe enabled me to
realise that I was standing amongst corpses, and to recognise
the corpse of an acquaintance of my own, of a lady who had been
shot the previous day! And everything had blood upon it, so
that all my garments became stained.... At last my surroundings
horrified me to the point that I could feel cold sweat break
out on my brow.... What happened next I do not know. I only
know that when I regained consciousness I was back in my own
cell.[199]
The following is an extract from a statement issued from the central
bureau of the Social Revolutionary Party:
In Kerensk victims usually were tortured with subjection to
sudden changes of temperature. First they were put into a
steaming bathhouse, and then led forth, naked, into the snow.
And at Alexievskoe and other villages in Voronezh Province the
victims would similarly be taken naked into the winter-bound
street, and soused with cold water until they became living
statues of ice. And at Armavir the “death wreath” was the
implement most used. That is to say, the victim would have his
head encircled with a leather strap fitted at the ends with
an iron nut and a screw, and the nut and the screw be joined
together, and the head increasingly compressed. Lastly, the
Che-Ka of a Caucasian _stanitya_ used an iron-studded
“glove” that was made to be worn on the executioner’s hand.
In his book _Russia during Four Years of Revolution_ S. S. Maslov
writes:
Possibly the reader may say that these instances of cruelty were
isolated instances; but alas, and to humanity’s shame, they were
not so. For example, the practice of transforming living persons
into statues of ice was widespread in Orel Province whenever
levyings of “extraordinary revolutionary tax” were toward; and
once in the Malo-Archangel district the tax-gathering detachment
placed a merchant named Yinshkevich upon a red-hot stove until
his due was paid; and in Voronezh Province, in 1920, some
peasants who were in arrears with their food-tax were subjected
to the method of “persuasion” of being let down a well, immersed
at the bottom of it, brought up, and once more plied with
demands for payment of the tax in full.
In passing it may be said that this author did not go solely to
“counter-revolutionary” sources for his information, but collected
information also from fellow-prisoners of the Democratic and Socialist
Parties.
In the present supposedly civilised age one would rejoice to be able
to believe that some of these stories were exaggerations; but to do so
is difficult when whole companies of persons stand vouchers for them.
A trustworthy correspondent of the _Dni_ of May 13, 1923, writes
thus concerning Georgia and the Transcaucasian Che-Ka:
The Che-Ka confines its prisoners in damp, deep, hidden dungeons
for weeks at a time, and meanwhile leaves them practically
without food, and practically even without water. And beds
and tables and chairs are not to be found in those dungeons,
but instead, the captives have to lie on a floor compounded
of knee-deep mud and blood, and nightly to do battle with the
rats. And if even those surroundings fail to affect a prisoner,
he is taken downstairs to a lower, a wholly pitch-dark cellar
of a kind to make the blood congeal in his veins and render
him insensible with the cold. And then he is taken upstairs
again, and once more told to inform against his associates and
organisation. And if he should still prove recalcitrant he
is a second time relegated to the cellar--and so on until he
either dies or reveals the “information” required, no matter how
improbable that “information” may be. And in other cases victims
will be awakened by Che-Ka agents in the small hours of the
morning, and taken into the courtyard, and subjected to a blank
volley or two in imitation of a real execution, and lastly, half
alive and half-dead, relegated to the cellar. Of late, too, much
use has been made of the “wreath of death.” Rakaobadye, the
Social Democrat, was subjected to the torture until he agreed to
enter the Che-Ka’s service, but later regained his freedom, and
told his comrades of his experiences.[200]
Sometimes denunciations of tortures inflicted during “investigations”
appeared even in the Soviet press itself. Especially was this the case
in the early days of Bolshevism, before the usurping Party’s members
had all ceased to be shocked by the fact that outrage and violence were
perpetrated in their “Socialist-run” prisons. In a letter “Do medieval
torture chambers still exist?” which was dispatched to the Muscovite
_Izvestia_ on January 26, 1919, by a Communist who had been
arrested, and temporarily interned, through an error, the writer stated:
My arrest was accidental, and came about through the fact that I
happened to be discovered in a house where (as I learnt later)
counterfeit Kerensky notes had been manufactured. But, for all
that, I had to spend ten days in prison before the authorities
even questioned me, and meanwhile I suffered greatly in mind.
And, next, speaking of the “Investigatory Commission” attached to one
of the quarters of the city of Moscow, the writer said:
Persons in that prison were flogged until their senses left
them, and then, still unconscious, taken down to a cellar which
had been the refrigerator chamber, and thenceforth beaten for
eighteen hours out of the twenty-four. Things of the sort so
impressed me that I nearly lost my reason.
Again, in the _Pravda_ of March, 1919, we are informed that the
Che-Ka of Vladimir kept a special den for “pricking prisoners’ heels
with needles,” and that when an imprisoned Communist appealed to public
opinion with the words, “One is as much afraid to live as to work, now
that even the most reputable of workers may at any time, if domiciled
in the provinces, find himself in the position in which I am now,” the
matter only attracted official attention because a Communist happened
to be concerned, whereas thousands of similar cases had already been
passed over in silence. “I blush for your torture chamber,” also wrote
L. Reisner to the Che-Ka of Petrograd in December 1918. But his words
were looked upon as “sentimentality,” and few protesting voices joined
in, and even they speedily gave way to the chorus. In February, 1919,
the _Pravda_ cited a case which it roundly declared to illustrate
the actual _advantages_ of mock shootings: the case being one of
a well-to-do peasant who had refused to meet a requisitional order for
20 _poods_-weight of grain by way of “extraordinary food tax,”
and had been imprisoned, and still refused to pay, and had then been
stood up against the local churchyard wall, and again refused to pay,
and, lastly, had had a shot fired about his ears, and--oh, miracle of
miracles!--at length agreed to pay what was owing.
An equally amazing item is to be found in the Che-Ka’s _Weekly_,--an
item which furnishes us with yet further historical proof of our point,
and was headed “Why does the Che-Ka hesitate?”
Tell us [asked the signatories of the article--the head of
the Che-Ka of Nolinsk, and others] why you did not subject
that fellow Lockhart[201] to the most refined of all possible
tortures, and thereby wrest from him the information which
we require, and also the budget of valuable addresses which
such an official always possesses? Why, we repeat, did you
allow him to leave your premises without having been subjected
to such tortures as would have made the blood of every
counter-revolutionary in the land run cold?... Away with such
shilly-shallying! When a dangerous rascal has been caught he
should have all the information possible extracted from him, and
then be dispatched to a better world.
This was an article in an official journal,[202] and that journal the
very journal which purported to be “imparting wise direction to the
activities of local Che-Kas, and propagating the ideas and methods
of warfare which the All-Russian Che-Ka itself employs”! However, at
the sixth Congress of Soviets the representatives of the All-Russian
Che-Ka assented to this by saying: “We recognise that it is time for
shilly-shallying and namby-pamby methods to be eliminated from our
dealings with the _bourgeoisie_ and the _bourgeoisie’s_ servants.”
Hence, from the moment when the Che-Ka’s slogan of “Show no mercy to
the _bourgeois_ rabble!” first rang out in the provinces that
slogan was bound to be interpreted by the provincial officials as at
once a call for and a sanction of cruelty, and to nullify in advance
the Che-Ka’s subsequent instructions that a watch be kept over the
“legality” of the proceedings of provincial executive committees.
And this was the more bound to be so because those instructions were
theoretical rather than practical.[203] For the provinces, of course,
took their cue from the centre, where, as British reports have stated,
a precedent for torture was set in the torturing of Kannegiesser, the
assassin of Uritsky. But is it, or is it not, the case that Madame
Kaplau, the assailant of Lenin, also was tortured? At all events,
rumours to that effect gained currency in Moscow; and though I cannot,
for my own part, feel sure on the point, I do know this much: that one
night whilst I was lying in the Butyrka, a night which I now believe to
have been the night immediately following the Lenin attempt, we could
hear that _someone_ was being tortured in the building, and long
lay listening to the sounds. Also, although, in those days, it was as
unusual for news of torturings to reach the public ear as it is now,
I did at least hear of the “safes trial” in August, 1920, and learn
about the details of seating the victims upon ice (and the rest) which
were laid before the Supreme Revolutionary Tribunal. And the picture
becomes more vivid still when we read of the great political trial in
Turkhestan in October, 1919, when the accused, to the number of twelve
or so, repudiated the evidence which they were alleged previously
to have given before the local Che-Ka, and pointed out that their
signatures to the “confessions” had been extorted through torture, and
thus caused the Tribunal to question the “special detachment” of the
Che-Ka which had inflicted the torture, and thereby to elicit the fact
that torture had been a regular item of that Che-Ka’s routine. “Upon
this,” a correspondent of the _Volya Rossii_[204] who was present
has said, “sobs and cries arose in the hall, and made the building
re-echo:” with the result that the judges disregarded the fact that the
counsel for the prosecution dubbed the protests “mere _bourgeois_
lamentations,” and uttered a formal condemnation of what had been done.
[Illustration: Kharkov victims.
[_See page 188._]