of the provincial court of Omsk at which there were tried one Hermann,
commandant of the district militia at Sherbanov, a fellow militiaman of
his, and a Dr. Troitsky on a charge of having tortured prisoners during
examination by pouring hot sealing-wax upon the victims’ palms, arms,
necks, and scalps, and then tearing away the wax, and, with it, whole
patches of skin. “We cannot,” the President of the Court moralised,
“tolerate such methods of inquiry, for they are worthy, rather, of the
Spanish Inquisition.” Yet they were “methods of inquiry” which had
received practically the sanction of “law,” and we gain additional
information of value on the subject from the _Socialistichesky
Vestnik_. To that journal a correspondent wrote:
Last spring persistent rumours and disclosures of certain
occurrences caused the provincial court of Stavropol to
appoint a special commission of enquiry into torturings said
to have been inflicted by the local criminal investigation
department.... The commission found that, in addition to
floggings, suspensions, and other physical violence, the
following means of torment had been employed. (_a_) First
of all there had been confinement in “the hot cellar,” a dark,
sunken cell three paces long, and oneand-a-half paces wide,
with the floor of the cell cut into steps. For purposes of
torment as many as eighteen persons at once had been placed
in this cell, so that, there not being standing-room for them
all, some of them had had to remain constantly supported upon
their companions’ shoulders, whilst the atmosphere had been
such that a lamp would not burn in it, nor matches strike.
Yet the prisoners had been left there for from forty-eight to
seventy-two hours, and, meanwhile, given neither food nor water,
nor yet permission to leave the cell for natural purposes. And
even women, as well as men, had been incarcerated there--a
case in point being a certain Madame Weitzmann. (_b_)
Secondly, there had been confinement in “the cold cellar,” a
vault communicating with the shaft of a disused icehouse. In
this case prisoners had been wholly divested of their clothing,
and lowered into the shaft of the icehouse on a sliding ladder;
after which the ladder had been withdrawn, and cold water poured
upon the prisoners. And this torture had been inflicted even
during seasons of severe frost, and in some cases included
pourings of as many as eight bucketfuls of water upon a single
prisoner.... (_c_) Thirdly, there had been measurement
[compression] of the skull.
Also, it appeared that this criminal investigation department had
been shooting prisoners for alleged attempts to escape, and, in the
April of 1922, used the pretext for putting to death, in particular,
a certain Mastriukov. In fact, when the commission of inquiry issued
its findings they were findings based upon testimony both of victims
and of eye-witnesses, upon discoveries made by qualified medical men,
upon results of post-mortem examinations, and upon confessions of
Che-Ka employees, the actual inflicters of the tortures--the plea of
these last being that they had acted only on the express orders of a
certain Grigorovich who was head of the local C.I.D., head of the local
executive committee, and head of the local provincial committee of
the Communist Party. Also, they said, they had received instructions
from Povetsky, Grigorovich’s assistant, and from Topishev, judicial
adviser to the C.I.D., and carried out the tortures _with these
two officials’ personal help_. Yet, though the commission ordered
the persons inculpated to be arrested and proceeded against, their
arrest was found to be impracticable owing to the fact that a certain
Chernobrovy, head of the local O.G.P.U., concealed them for a while
on premises attached to his official quarters, and then produced in
their justification a secret circular issued by the Central Che-Ka
itself which laid it down that if, during a process of “investigation”
of prisoners, or a preliminary enquiry with regard to prisoners, the
latter should resist circumstantial evidence, confrontation, and
“threats,” and refuse to confess to their imputed crimes, “the old and
proven remedy” should be applied to them. The origin of the circular
had, apparently, been as follows. During the summer of 1921 Voul, a
notorious “people’s prosecutor” attached to the Che-Ka of Moscow, had
been accused of employing inquisitional torture and violence, and,
upon that, had threatened to send in his resignation on the ground
that, should torture be debarred him, he would not be responsible for
preventing any further increase of “banditism” in Moscow: and this
threat had so frightened Menzhinsky that the latter had forthwith
accorded Voul licence to pursue his inquisitional methods as before,
and issued the foregoing “old and proven remedy” circular. Hence the
usual result happened, and none of the Stavropol officials who had
employed torture were arrested--the only persons to be arrested being
persons who had displayed an altogether uncalled-for amount of zeal and
initiative in probing Stavropol’s criminal-investigatory mysteries! And
we have detailed confirmation of this from a letter published in No. 1
of the journal _Pouti Revolutsyi_ (“Roads to Revolution”), one of
the Left Social Revolutionary Party’s journals.
Akin to the Stavropol business was a Turkhestan affair. In Turkhestan
the chief inflicter of torture was, for a while, an ex-circus clown
named Drozhin, a member of, and an executioner employed by, the local
Che-Ka. In time, however, this man was dismissed from his post on a
torture charge--only to be reappointed, on the strength of his record
as a “questioner,” to the post of local political commissary.[206]
And how we can imagine the exploits of the ex-circus clown in his new
rôle! Not that we know very much about his exploits in that particular
quarter of the world. What we do know about him is his career in a
kindred sphere at the other end of Russia, at Archangel. I have before
quoted a report in _The Che-Ka_ dealing with the concentration
camp at Kholmogory; and although I am not personally aware of the
identity of the author of the report, of the man who, in the face of
every possible danger and difficulty, travelled to the far North to
collect for himself authentic information concerning horrors which had
reached our ears even in Moscow, it was in Moscow that subsequently he
sought for means of assistance for the unfortunate prisoners in the
“Camp of Death,” and I was present when a paper was read on his behalf.
The paper proved to be even more terrible than his report had been: so
much so that we sat petrified, and realised at once that no possible
means of help was conceivable. And if I cite a few details from the
paper, they will help the reader to realise what life conditions were
in that inferno of a camp.
[Illustration: Human “gloves,” flayings of human hands,
found in a torture chamber at Kharkov after the Bolshevists’
departure.
[_See page 196._]
So long as the abominably cruel Bakhoulis was commandant of the
place, persons were shot in large numbers for purely trivial
offences. Truly detestable are the tales told of him! Amongst
other things, he made it his practice to divide his prisoners
into groups of ten, and punish a whole group if any one of
its members committed an offence. Once a member of a group
escaped, and could not be found; whereupon the other nine
were shot forthwith; and when the actual offender himself was
caught he also received a sentence of death, and was led to the
side of a ready-dug grave, and cursed at for a while by the
commandant, and, lastly, hit over the head in such a manner as
to fall, half-stunned, into the grave, and be buried alive.
This incident I had from one of the camp guards themselves.
Later, when Bakhoulis had been transferred to the command of the
camp at Portaminsk, the most northerly camp of all (situated
about a hundred versts north of Archangel), he continued his
Kholmogory practices there, and caused the prisoners to be fed
upon dried fish alone (so that they never saw bread) and, in
general, gave full rein to his cruelty. In particular it is said
that of 200 prisoners whom he removed thither from Kholmogory
very few survived. I found the very name of Portaminsk to
inspire captives with fear, so much had the name come to mean
practically a death sentence. Yet the conditions of Portaminsk
differed little from those obtaining at Kholmogory.[207]
Further details as to life in the Portaminsk disused Monastery reach us
in a private letter secretly conveyed to Petrograd.[208]
Once, as we were starting work at six o’clock in the morning,
and had not yet left the courtyard, one of the prisoners, a man
recently recovered from typhus, and therefore still weak from
the attack, fainted away: whereupon the commandant declared him
not to be genuinely ill, and, to punish him for “malingering,”
had him stripped stark naked, thrust into an icy-cold cell, and
pelted with snow. Later the man died of the chill then caught.
Also the writer records how a sick man who failed to keep up with a
prison convoy proceeding from one village to another was shot before
his comrades’ very eyes. And another eye-witness has written:
The following may give you an idea of the abominations committed
here. Whilst some prisoners were digging sand for building
purposes in front of the commandant’s house he noticed that
they sat down for a rest. Accordingly, without moving from his
place at the window, he drew his revolver, fired, and killed
and wounded several of the party. Upon that the prisoners went
on hunger strike; and on this coming to the ears of Moscow, a
commission of enquiry was dispatched to Portaminsk, and the
commandant removed. But the new commandant, a sailor from the
“Gangut,” is just as cruel as his predecessor, and haphazard
shootings of prisoners by guards before their comrades’ eyes are
as common as ever.
The mere fact that in six months, during the years 1921 and 1922, 442
prisoners out of 1200 died should show us what were the conditions of
confinement in the North.
At Kholmogory prisoners would be thrown into a pitch-dark cell, or
confined in buildings known respectively as “the cold tower” and “the
white house”--the latter an isolated edifice the one small room of
which had no lavatory attached, and at times would be made to hold as
many as forty persons. Typhus patients confined there had to spend the
ten days before the “crisis” of the malady without any sort of medical
attention, and it was quite a common thing for prisoners to lose their
reason whilst in the building.
And since we in Moscow could gain only fragmentary news of such
happenings, and were ourselves in the power of officials who stood
indemnified against punishment for their acts, how could we voice a
protest with safety, even if it had been possible for us to voice
one? More than once during my time in the Butyrka Gaol I have known
prisoners whom I had seen undergoing ill-treatment whilst under
examination subsequently beseech me to keep silence on the subject. The
prison doctors themselves were forbidden to disclose that floggings
of prisoners were being practised, and once when a Dr. Sheglov gave
some Socialists a certificate that they had been subjected to physical
outrage he was sent into exile at Archangel, and allotted for his
portion of hard labour the task of clearing away sanitary refuse. Of
floggings outside the prison we did hear news, whilst also we heard of
a Social Democrat named Treigav being thrust into a cell which measured
three paces by two, and made to share it with a Chinese lunatic who had
homicidal mania. These and other instances of the sort are to be found
detailed in Nos. 1 and 14 of _Revolutsionnaya Rossia_. Again,
a letter secretly conveyed to us from a Left Social Revolutionary
named Shebalin told how he had been tortured (in Petrograd) by having
his arms and legs beaten with a revolver butt, his eye-sockets and
testicles prodded and compressed until he had swooned with the agony,
and his body flogged in such a manner as to leave no weals or blood,
but cause the blood of the flagellation to pour from his throat
alone.[209] And similar to his statements concerning compression of
the testicles was evidence given by Sinovary before the tribunal at
Lausanne. Besides, I myself knew Shebalin, who for six months had been
my fellow-prisoner in the Butyrka, and therefore can testify that he
was a man incapable of telling a lie, or even of exaggerating.
I can assure you (he wrote), that this letter is being sent
to you from a torture establishment the _régime_ and the
resources of which outdo even those of the ancient “Bastilles
of Russia,” the Fortress of Schlüsselburg and the Fortress of
Petropavlovsk--in both of which I have been imprisoned for
offending the Imperial Crown.
Also, the letter mentioned certain cunningly devised cells which had
just been contrived on the Gorokhovaya Street premises of the Petrograd
Che-Ka--little cramped, icy-cold rooms walled with double linings of
cork so as to prevent all sounds whatsoever from reaching the outside
world. And there, our informant said, prisoners were “questioned” by
being frozen and burnt and otherwise tortured--usually for between five
and ten days at a stretch, or even for a month.[210] And in a book
written abroad, but based primarily upon materials which the author
had brought with him from Russia, S. S. Maslov has stated that it was
a common, almost a universal, thing for prisoners to be kicked and
beaten with rifle and revolver butts all over their bodies. Also, he
cites an instance of barbarism which is the more characteristic of the
Bolshevist “justice,” whose principles are so enthusiastically extolled
in the Soviet press as “tending less to punish than to reform” in that
the instance had no sort of relation to politics.
In Moscow, during the May of 1920, some juvenile pickpockets of
from eleven to fifteen years of age were arrested, thrown into
a cellar on the Che-Ka’s premises, and kept separate from the
rest of the prisoners. For the Che-Ka had decided to put these
children to an official use, and obtain, through them, the names
of pickpockets with whom the children had associated in the
past. Yet, though the authorities cajoled and threatened, the
children persisted in saying that they knew nothing whatsoever
on the subject, and all inquiries proved fruitless. Next,
employees of the Che-Ka entered the cell, and beat the children
with their fists, and, as the victims fell under the blows,
stamped upon them with their heels. And then the children did
promise to inform against their late companions, but, never
having known those companions’ real names, had to be driven
about the streets in motor-cars and tram-cars, or else taken to
the railway stations, on the chance that, _en route_, they
might be able to point out one or more of the culprits wanted.
And though on the first day the children persistently avoided
denunciation of any former comrades, they were so cruelly
beaten for this when they returned to the Che-Ka building in
the evening, and every evening afterwards, that at last they
did begin to betray old associates, and then, through fear of
further floggings, even to inform against _perfectly innocent
persons_, persons whom they had never known at all. And
when this had been going on for three weeks or so, orders were
received for the children to be transferred from the premises
of the Che-Ka to the Butyrka Gaol: by which time the children
were emaciated, bruised all over, clad in rags, stamped with
fear until they had come to look like little animals constantly
confronting death, given to trembling, and apt to moan and weep
even during their sleep at night. Then, after two or three weeks
in the Butyrka Gaol, orders came for them to be restored to the
Che-Ka premises: and I have since been told by prisoners who
had often and long been confined in gaol that they had never
before in their lives--no, not even during their imprisonment
in Siberia--heard such terrible cries as those children uttered
when they realised that they were going to be taken to the
Che-Ka’s cellars again. Indeed, my informants said, they had
never before felt such burning hatred of their oppressors as
when their tear-dimmed vision beheld those young creatures’
suffering, and saw their young forms being marched away to the
yard in a frenzy of weeping.
And only recently I heard that at Irkutsk an old revolutionary named
Kulikovsky had been done to death during examination by an agent of the
O.G.P.U. And I have since read in the journal _Dni_ the details
of the occurrence: how that when Kulikovsky refused to reply to his
torturer’s questions the latter battered him with a revolver-butt
until, with skull fractured, the old man fell and died.
_The Amount of Licence accorded to Executioners_
I have said that Saenko was a sadist, and described some of his doings.
And from writings by the Socialist Karelin we obtain also items
concerning Saenko’s chief assistant, the sailor Edward, a fellow who
would fall to friendly talk and jest with a group of prisoners, and
then suddenly draw his revolver and shoot one of the wretches through
the back of the neck.
And from a writer named Averbuch, a man well acquainted with affairs in
Odessa, we hear of the abominable doings of Kalinchenko, the head of
the Che-Ka of that city. To his fantastic whims and crazy dispensation
of “justice” many stories are due. For example, once he celebrated
his nameday by sending to the local prison for “three of the fattest
_bourgeois_ to be obtained,” and, in his drunken frenzy, shooting
them then and there. And Averbuch also has written:
Once when I called at the Café Astra (a place frequented
almost exclusively by Bolshevist officials) I heard from Vaska
the executioner’s own lips the story of his shooting of two
_bourgeois_. Yes, he described to me their agonies of
mind before death, their kissings of his hands and feet, their
beggings for mercy. And he added: “After all, I have only done
my duty as a revolutionary.”
At Odessa, too, there was an executioner named Johnson, a man sent
thither from Moscow. And of him Averbuch has written[211]:
Before long the fellow’s name became a synonym for everything
that was cruel and vile. For only he, only this Johnson, only
this negro executioner, could skin a victim before killing him,
or cut off a prisoner’s limbs, one by one, during the ordeal of
examination.
Yet _was_ Johnson the only ruffian who could do such things? At
a Bolshevist exhibition held in Moscow during the years 1920–21 one
of the exhibits was a pair of “gloves” which had been ripped from
the human hand; and though the Bolshevists represented this pair to
be an example of atrocities committed by the Whites, rumours as to
Saenko taking “gloves” from victims at Kharkov had reached Moscow much
earlier than that, and “gloves” of the sort had actually been found in
the basement of the Che-Ka’s premises, whilst Anarchists subsequently
brought from Kharkov to the Butyrka had unanimously testified to
perpetrations of the abomination in question. Yet Lounacharsky, a
member of the Party thus exhibiting Saenko’s “gloves” as a sample of
cruelty committed by the opposite side,[212] had said at a session
of the Soviet held on December 4, 1918: “Although we are accused
of a Hottentot standard of morality, we are not going to admit the
impeachment”!
With Johnson was associated a young woman executioner named Vera
Grebenninkova (or “Dora”). This female’s talent for barbarism rivalled
that of the negro himself, and amongst other stories of her ferocity
we may include the item that she would tear out victims’ hair by the
handful before doing the same with them limb by limb--cutting off ears,
dislocating jaws, and the like. Her activities may be summed up in the
fact that during her two and a half months with the Odessan Che-Ka she
shot over 700 persons--a third of the whole tale![213]
In Kiev it was the practice to make the condemned prostrate themselves
amongst the curdled blood on the floor before being shot through the
back of the head, or brained. And in certain cases they were even made
to prostrate themselves upon victims shot a moment or two earlier, or
were taken out into the garden for the purpose of a “human hunt” of the
kind related by the Kievan Sisters of Mercy. “Mikhailov, the spruce,
immaculate chief of the Che-Ka, had a particular love for stripping
prisoners naked, and then chivying them about the Che-Ka garden with a
brandished revolver.”[214]
There is a similar reminiscence recorded by the French authoress,
Odette Kun, a self-styled Communist whom untoward circumstances caused
to be confined in Che-Ka cells at Sebastopol, Simferopol, Kharkov, and
Moscow. In one passage this writer describes a Petrograd hunt of women
prisoners which she had had related to her by an actual eye-witness of
the “sport.”[215] It seems that in 1920 her informant had, with twenty
other women, been incarcerated for “counter-revolutionary activity.”
One night a band of soldiers arrived at the building, and drove
some of my companions out into the yard; and the next moment,
when a chorus of almost inhuman cries reached our ears, and we
looked through a window into the courtyard, we saw that the
women had been stripped of every shred of clothing, and were
being bundled into a wagon. Later, we learnt that they were
taken out into the country, and told to run for their lives,
with a promise that the first who reached a given goal should
have her life spared. Needless to say, all of them were killed.
S. N. Volkonsky’s memoirs, again, state that in Briansk it was the
practice to shoot prisoners in the back as soon as ever an examination
was concluded[216]; also, that in Siberia prisoners were brained with
an iron “rattle.” And a woman has related:
Just under our window I saw an ex-agent of the _Okhrana_
(the old secret political police force) being killed in the
Che-Ka’s courtyard. He was killed with a pole or a rifle-butt.
It took over an hour to finish him off, and all the time he was
beseeching the men for mercy.
At Ekaterinoslav, too, a fellow called Valiavko who shot
“counter-revolutionaries” by the hundred would release from ten to
fifteen prisoners in a small garden around which he had had a special
fence constructed, and then enter with two or three friends, and fall
to shooting at the “game.”[217] In the same city “Comrade” Trepelov,
head of the Che-Ka, would select victims for execution merely by the
process of marking names on the lists whose appearance displeased
him, and so, with a “_Raz_.”[218] in thick red pencil, sign the
victims’ death-warrant. Another device of his was to pencil the lists
in such a manner as to render exact determination of which names were
meant impossible. Also, when the local prison was being evacuated he
saved time by having the whole of his listfuls of persons (fifty in
all) shot indiscriminately.
In the _Revolutsionnoyé Dielo_ (“The Revolutionary Cause”)[219] of
Petrograd we find the following details of how sixty persons were shot
after the Tagantsev trial:
The shootings took place at a station on the Irinovskaya
Railway, where the prisoners were led out at dawn, and told to
dig their own graves. Then, when the graves were half dug,
they were told to remove their clothing.... From all sides came
groans and cries for mercy, but the victims nevertheless were
pushed into the holes, and fired upon--one lot being pushed upon
the top of the previous lot, and shot even as the latter had
been shot, until all the graves had become filled up with dead
and groaning.
The executioners of Moscow did their daily work in dungeons fitted with
asphalt floors and gutters and trap-falls to carry off the blood. We
find a good description of the ruffians in an article entitled “The
Ship of Death,” and included in the collection _The Che-Ka_. The
three executioners most prominent in Moscow were men named Emelianov,
Pankratov, and Zhoukov--all of them registered members of the Communist
Party, and therefore persons accustomed to live on the fat of the land.
Like all other executioners, too, they were paid by piece rate, and
received their victims’ clothes and jewellery for their perquisites.
Hence many of them amassed perfect fortunes from gold-mounted teeth
torn out, and pectoral crosses filched.
An eye-witness has stated in the journal _Echo_ of Kovno that at
one time shootings in the cellars of Nos. 13 and 14 Bretenka Street,
Moscow, were carried out by so poising a rifle on a stand at the nearer
end of the basement as to point towards the precise place where the
head of a victim would naturally come, and that if the victim was too
short to reach the place, steps were placed beneath his feet.[220]
Again, S. S. Maslov speaks of a woman executioner whom he frequently
saw during the year 1919. Every two or three days this woman would make
her appearance in the central prison hospital with a cigarette between
her teeth, a whip in her hand, and an unsheathed revolver at her waist.
And as she traversed the wards whence the next batch of victims was
about to be removed for execution, she would revile and flog like
dogs any patients who were so benumbed with terror as to be slow in
collecting their belongings, or who sobbed too audibly as they bade
their comrades farewell. Quite a young woman she was--not more than
twenty or so. Nor was she the only female executioner in Moscow.
And from the same Maslov, who, as ex-member of the Constituent Assembly
for Vologda Province, was well acquainted with events in that region,
we have a description of a non-professional female executioner named
Rebekah Plastinina-Maisel who was a surgeon’s assistant in a small
town in Tver Province, shot, single-handed, over 100 victims. Of this
harpy and her second husband, the notorious Kedrov, a woman named E. D.
Kouskova who then was living as an exile at Vologda has stated that the
pair would question prisoners from their travelling saloon at railway
stations, and then and there shoot the wretches as soon as Rebekah had
finished belabouring them, and shouting at them, and attacking them
with her fists as ever and anon she cried hysterically “To be shot!
Put them up against the wall!” And, adds Maslov, “I myself know of at
least ten cases in which women executioners amused themselves for a
while with ‘_potting_’ holes in their victims’ heads.” And from
a correspondent of the journal _Golos Rossii_ (“The Voice of
Russia”)[221] we have a description of similar activities in Archangel
during the spring and summer of 1920, with, for “heroine” again, the
same Rebekah Plastinina-Maisel.[222]
In Archangel (says the correspondent), after the mock funeral
procession of empty red coffins, Rebekah fell to wreaking
vengeance upon her old party foes. Indeed, she became a maniac
upon whose head there must have fallen the curses of hundreds of
mothers and wives, for her malice surpassed even the malice of
her male colleagues on the All-Russian Che-Ka. To begin with,
she repaid petty insults once shown her by her first husband’s
family by having that family crucified _en masse_.... So
cruel, mad, and hysterical she was that also she invented a
story that once some White officers had tied her to a horse’s
tail, and started off the animal at a gallop. And she came to
believe this self-imagined legend so firmly that, as soon as
she reached Solovetsky, she took over from her husband the post
of director of atrocities in that establishment, whilst later
she had the victims whom Eydouk’s commission had arrested and
dispatched to Moscow returned thence, forwarded by steamer to
Kholmogory (that graveyard of the flower of Russia’s youth!),
stripped, loaded on to barges, shot, and thrown into the sea. To
the end of the summer the town groaned under the burden of her
terrorism.
And in another communication to the same journal the correspondent
adds: “In Archangel alone this Rebekah Plastinina-Maisel killed
eighty-seven officers and thirty-three citizens with her own hand. And
on another occasion she with her own hand scuttled a barge laden with
500 refugees and Miller soldiers.”[223]
Take also the following thumbnail sketch by an eye-witness who was
present at the shooting of fifty-two persons in a single evening:
The chief executioner, a Lettish woman with a face so brutalised
as to have earned for her, amongst the prisoners, the sobriquet
of “The Pug,” was a female sadist. Always she wore breeches; and
always she carried two revolvers at her belt. But subsequently
this same “Comrade Louba” (she hailed, I believe, from Baku) was
herself shot for stealing Government property.[224]
Another such woman was the female chief of the Che-Ka of Ounech, who,
a brute beast rather than a human being, and a fit match for the
Lettish hag, never stirred a step without revolvers and a goodly stock
of cartridges in her leathern waist-belt. Once a refugee just come
from Russia said of her to me: “The inhabitants of Ounech speak of her
literally with bated breath.” May history preserve her name for the
benefit of future generations!
And the town of Rybinsk too had its beast-woman, a creature named Zina.
And Ekaterinoslav, Sebastopol and other places similarly evolved female
monstrosities.[225]
For the rest, human nerves are fallible, and even Bolshevist
executioners can weary of “a task for the people’s benefit.” Hence, in
many cases it was by ruffians sunken in intoxication, in the requisite
condition of “irresponsibility” for slaughtering their fellows, that
massacres were carried out. Frequently I myself, whilst in the Butyrka
Gaol, could see that its most hardened administrative officials, from
the Commandant downwards, had indulged in cocaine or some other drug
before the functionary whom we called the “Commissary of Death” was
due to call at the gaol for his victims, and they would have to be
collected from the cells by the officials. “In almost every cupboard,”
says Nilostousky concerning the Che-Kas in Kiev, “and, for that matter,
in almost every drawer, we found empty cocaine bottles in piles.” Thus
drugged, of course, executioners would lose the last semblance of
humanity, and a trustworthy witness has given us a particularly good
instance of this, as related to that witness by a high official of the
All-Russian Che-Ka[226]:
Once (the informant said), the chief executioner of Moscow, a
man named Maga, a fellow who had shot thousands with his own
hand (and the informant gave the almost fantastic estimate of
11,000!), completed the shooting of fifteen or twenty victims by
throwing himself also upon the director of the special branch,
Popov, who had attended the batch of executions merely for the
pleasure of the spectacle. Maga’s eyes were bloodshot, and his
frame bespattered with blood and brains. Indeed, he looked mad
and horrible. Fortunately, though Popov lost his head, and
ran for his life, and a scuffle followed, some other Che-Ka
officials came to the rescue, and overpowered Maga.
Yet even drugging did not always enable executioners’ minds to stand
the strain. In the report of the Kievan Sisters of Mercy to which I
have more than once referred we read that sometimes Avdokhin, head of
the principal Kievan Che-Ka, so felt the nerve-tension that actually he
would go and pour out his troubles to the Sisters! “I am ill, Sisters,”
he would say. “My head is burning, and I cannot sleep. All night the
dead men keep torturing me.” And says another of the Sisters:
Never can I think of the faces of Terekhov, and Nikiforov, and
Ougarov, and Abnaver, and Gousig and other members of those
Che-Kas without feeling more than ever convinced that they are
abnormal, sadists, cocaine fiends, men who have lost the last
semblance of humanity.
At all events, it stands beyond doubt that for a while the lunatic
asylums of Russia registered large numbers of cases of a disease
which became known as “executioner’s dementia,” owing to its tendency
to render its subjects a prey to real or imaginary remorse for
bloodshed done, and to the most harrowing hallucinations. Similarly,
eye-witnesses have told of Bolshevist sailors suddenly being seized
with paroxysms in public places, and a Muscovite correspondent of
the _Dni_ once wrote: “The State Political Department has been
trying to dispose of these madmen by shooting them--a resource which
alone has enabled more than one such sufferer to find release from his
terrible, haunting nightmares.”
Also, there were executioners evincing the clearest possible symptoms
of mental degeneracy. Well do I remember a boy executioner who, aged
only fourteen, shared my imprisonment in the Butyrka. So intellectually
deficient was this lad, and so insensible of the enormity of what he
had done, that he would boast of his exploits to his fellow prisoners,
and relate them in the fullest detail. And when, during the January
of 1922, a female “people’s prosecutor” of one of the Che-Kas of Kiev
(Remover, a Hungarian), was arrested on a charge of having, without
authority, shot a batch of eighty prisoners, _most of whom were young
men_, she was found to be sexually deranged, and to have shot not
only persons actually suspected, but also witnesses who unfortunately
had excited her diseased craving during the time that they had been
testifying before the Che-Ka. Lastly, a medical man has described for
us a woman commissary named Nesterenko who would compel Red Guards to
violate helpless women and girls--yes, and young children--in her very
presence.[227]
Again, one needs but scan the records of the Denikin Commission to see
that in dozens of cases higher officials, functionaries who in no way
stood charged with the actual performance of executions, killed victims
with their own hands. An example is Vichmann of Odessa, who had six
executioners at his disposal (one of them, by the way, officiated under
the pseudonym of “Amour”!) yet would go into the cells, and slaughter
prisoners for his personal pleasure. And Atarbekov of Piatigorsk is
known to have stabbed victims with a dagger, and Novar of Odessa to
have killed a man named Grigoriev and his twelve-year-old son before
witnesses, and another Che-Ka official to have had a weakness for
“making his victim kneel down in front of him, and compressing the
unfortunate man’s head between his knees, and shooting him through the
back of the neck.”[228] Such instances, in fact, are endless.
Also, so common, in Russia, did death become that, as previously
mentioned, a special phraseology of cynicism crept into the official
press when detailing lists of shootings: examples being seen when
victims were said to have been “paid over,” or to have been “given
a change,” or to have been “sent to meet their father,” or to have
been “dispatched to Doukhonin’s headquarters,” and when Voul of
Moscow adopted the practice of writing that he had “played the guitar
upon” them, or “sealed” them, and when Piatigorsk journalists took
to speaking of “giving” victims “the natsokal” (an onomatopœic word
based upon the sound of a revolver trigger snapping), and of “sending”
them “to the Mashouk to sniff violets.” Lastly, once the Commandant of
the Che-Ka of Petrograd himself was heard shouting to his wife over
the telephone: “To-day I am to take some _woodcocks_ over to
Kronstadt.”[229]
An equal amount of brutality and cynicism marked the actual carrying
out of the executions. In Odessa, when the death sentence had been
pronounced upon an accused, the executioners stripped him naked, hung
a numbered tab about his neck for identification purposes whenever the
moment for slaughter should arrive, and forced him to sign a paper
acknowledging that he had himself heard his doom proclaimed. It was
in Odessa, too, that the cells of the condemned would be visited by
officials who mockingly charged the condemned to supply biographical
details for their own obituary notices! And a similar instance of
mocking condemned prisoners is described by Madame Vyroubova--a party
of sailors under an ex-lawyer named Levitsky, in this case, driving
round and round a prison with songs, accordion music, and shouts of
“Hi, you _bourgeois_! We are chanting your requiem!”[230]
But Petrograd, rather, went in for scrupulous observance of “legality”
in the carrying out of executions. It even set aside a room specially
for the purpose of informing prisoners of their fate: with the result
that the room came to be known as “The Chamber of Departures.” True,
the _Pravda_ once took it upon itself to ridicule an English press
assertion that military bands were wont to play during the progress
of executions; yet this is no more than what actually happened on an
occasion during the Terror of September, 1918, when Moscow shot some
ex-Tsarist Ministers and others. In passing, it should be said that at
that period all Muscovite executions were carried out by Red Guards
on the Khodynka Plain, but later some Chinese replaced those Guards,
and later, again, a special corps of paid executioners, assisted by,
when necessary, amateurs. Again, witnesses examined by the Denikin
Commission testified that both in Nikolaev and in Saratov ordinary
criminals were set to execute their political fellows, and conceded
their own lives as a reward, whilst in far Turkhestan judges themselves
would act as executioners, and the custom seems still to obtain. Of
course, it is a debatable question whether the person who has passed a
death sentence ought not also to carry out that sentence; but, however
that may be, there lies at our disposal a statement that as late as
in 1923 a Judge V--always killed his own condemned, and as soon as he
had sentenced them caused them to be divested of their clothing in an
adjoining room, and shot. And of the Che-Ka of Odessa it is said that
in 1923 it devised, for execution purposes, a dark, narrow passage-way
which had a gaping cavity in the flooring at its further end, and an
embrasure in each of the flanking walls, so that as the condemned man
walked unawares along the passage way he fell into the pit, and could
be fired upon from the embrasures without the executioners having even
seen his face.
For only one more description of the kind need I make room--a
description published in the fourth issue of the suppressed Left
Social Revolutionary _Bulletin_,[231] and telling of shootings
perpetrated by the Muscovite Che-Ka at the period when the “rights” of
provincial Che-Kas and revolutionary tribunals were under discussion.
But, as a description, it is the more valuable in that it was obtained
from an actual onlooker at what was done.
Nearly every night a certain number of prisoners are removed
from the cells for “dispatch to Irkutsk,” as our modern
_oprichniki_ now express it. Formerly the condemned were
taken out to the Khodynsky Plain for execution, but since then
their destination has become, in the first instance, Number 11,
Varsonofievsky Pereonlok, and then Number 7, where, in batches
of thirty, or twelve, or eight, or four, as the case may be,
they are led to a room on the fourth floor to be stripped to
their shirts, and then marched downstairs again and, half-naked
as they are, stationed against stacks of fuel at the end of a
snow-covered yard, and shot through the back of the head. And
if any shot does not prove fatal, and a victim falls with life
still left in him, he receives a whole volley, or else some of
the executioners run and jump upon his chest, and stamp upon it,
and rain blows upon his head. It was thus that on the night of
March 10–11 a Madame Olekhovskaya was shot for an offence for
which a sentence even of a day’s imprisonment would have been
absurd. And it proved so difficult to dispatch her that, even
when her head and bosom had been struck with seven bullets, her
body still was quivering: whereupon Koudravtsev, an ex-Tsarist
officer employee of the Che-Ka (and therefore a man fired with
all the zeal of the Communist convert), ran and seized the
woman by the throat, tore from her her blouse, and twisted and
kneaded the vertebræ of her neck until life had fled. Her age
was nineteen only.... Recently, seeing that the snow in that
courtyard had become red and brown with the blood with which
everything else in the yard is bespattered, the Che-Ka decided
that the snow had better be melted away; and as there was plenty
of fuel ready, large bonfires were lighted not only in the yard
but also in the street outside it. Unfortunately, as the snow
dissolved, it did so in a blood-red, curdled stream, and ran
out of the yard and formed pools in the street, and had to have
improvised, for the removal of its damning traces, a trapfall.
Yes, mingled with that dark, accusing, terrible stuff there was
blood come from the hearts of people recently as alive as the
executioners themselves!
Arrogantly the Bolshevists proclaim that “we have no guillotine.” Ah,
I know better. I know that, to an accompaniment of motor engines kept
running to drown the sound of the shots, executions still are taking
place in secret dungeons and basements.
And it was not only by night that shootings took place. There was a
small square in front of an Archangel factory, where they took place
by daylight, “where crowds of children from the neighbourhood could
collect to witness them.”[232] And similarly in Odessa were people
executed by daylight. And the same in Mogilev, and before the very eyes
of their relatives.
Every evening between five and seven o’clock a motor-lorry
would halt before the premises of the revolutionary tribunal of
the Sixteenth Army; and when there had sprung into it a dozen
executioners provided with a perfect armament of weapons and a
couple of spades, the persons about to die also would be loaded
into the vehicle, and it would be driven away. And when, an hour
later, the lorry returned, the executioners would drag thence
sackfuls of boots and clothing which the deceased had recently
been wearing. And all this was done exclusively in the day time
(the clocks were advanced three hours for the purpose), and in
the presence of the victim’s relatives and friends--men, women,
and children.[233]
But the conditions under which the late Tsar and his family were
murdered at Ekaterinburg constitute the episode which is bound to
transcend any other such episode in striking disgust to the heart of
any person not either dead to human sentiment or drunken with political
fanaticism: the episode of the night when a Tsar, a Tsarina, and their
children were taken into a cellar, and killed before each other’s eyes.
Subsequently a Red Guard named Medviedev, a witness of the executions,
stated to the Commission of Enquiry that was held during the February
of 1919 that the victims made their preparations slowly, as though they
guessed what was in store for them. All history contains no parallel
to the murders wrought at Ekaterinburg during the night of July 16–17,
1918.[234]
_The Condemned_
We know that in a past age persons ascended the scaffold singing
the Marseillaise. Similarly, when, in Odessa, the Left Social
Revolutionaries sentenced to execution had been lashed together in
pairs and loaded on to a lorry, they sang _their_ Marseillaise,
even when the weight of thirty-five corpses had been heaped upon
them. But, above all, it was within the prison gates of Russia that
death came to seem an everyday incident. In _The Che-Ka_ we find
described the emotions of a prisoner when first he found himself in a
condemned cell.
A strong _posse_ of Red Guards brought us to this horrible
dungeon at seven o’clock in the evening: yet hardly had we
realised our surroundings before the bolts of the iron door
rattled, and the door itself creaked upon its hinges, and the
commandant entered with a bevy of warders. “How many?” he
inquired. “Sixty-seven.” “Sixty-seven, when a grave has been
dug for ninety?” And the commandant seemed puzzled, but, still
more, supine and _ennuyé_. And we? We just sat benumbed.
Already death seemed to be breathing upon us. We sat like men
paralysed. “Of course, though!” cried the commandant presently,
“I had forgotten that there are thirty prisoners to come from
the special branch.”... And so there began horrible, infinitely
long hours of waiting for death. By some miracle a priest
imprisoned with us had contrived to retain his pectoral cross;
and now he produced this, fell upon his knees, and began to
pray. Yes, and a Communist prisoner followed his example. Yet
all the while that sobs could be heard within there were making
themselves heard, without, the sounds of a hackneyed waltz on
a cracked piano, and of gay folk-songs. Ah, how those songs
tore at our hearts! The sounds were coming from what had been
the prison chapel, where some young Communists were holding a
musical practice! Thus closely had the irony of fate caused life
and death to stand intertwined![235]
Waiting at death’s door to the sounds of a cracked piano!--It is to
Nilostonsky’s book that we owe this description of a condemned cell,
whilst also we know that in many such cells and cellars permanent
darkness reigned, and that from fifteen to twenty persons would be
confined in a place 4 _arshini_ (9½ feet) long by 2 _arshini_
wide, and that amongst those people there would be both women and old
men, and that, as none of them were allowed ever to leave the cell,
natural functions had to be performed on the spot. And in Petrograd
condemned prisoners were kept like this for as long as thirty-six
hours after sentence of death had been pronounced, with neither food
nor water conceded them, nor permission to leave the cell for a single
moment.
And think of the mental torture endured by anyone who, like
myself, has had to watch victims preparing to be shot. In
particular I remember an evening in the July of 1920 when I was
lying in the Butyrka prison. That evening, as a “privileged”
captive, I was sitting alone in the prison yard when the
following experience befell me, an experience which still
leaves me doubtful as to whether I was most horrified or most
awed, but not at all doubtful as to the fact that the unnatural
contrast which the experience presented stabbed my senses like
the point of a needle. It happened that from the portion of
the prison building reserved exclusively for Communist inmates
there was issuing a boisterous revel of piano music and gipsy
songs and a telling of tales, for there was in progress one of
the entertainments, with special artists engaged, which the
administration periodically arranged for the amusement of the
“privileged offenders.” But suddenly, as the sounds of song and
piano were echoing over the prison yard, and I was listening
to them in silence, I happened to glance towards the window
of the “Chamber of Souls,” and saw behind the bars a face--a
face convulsed with agony, a face pressed hungrily forward to
inhale the free air. And I recognised it as the face of a victim
who was to be shot that night, and remembered that several
other such victims, over twenty of them, were awaiting their
turn to die.... Later that night all were fetched away by the
“Commissary of Death.”... What happened after the vision I
scarcely remember, but I know that never afterwards did I feel
inclined to enter the prison yard save when other prisoners
were present. Often since then have I thought of the lines from
Korolenko’s _An Incident of the Past_--lines supposed
to have been written by a prisoner when a death sentence was
about to be carried out within the prison’s walls. “... The
place is silent with a silence that is the silence of death,
and therefore a silence which, for all our usedness to the
valuelessness of life in Russia, none would willingly break....”
Next let me quote a description of a certain incident in Mogilev. My
source for it is a correspondent of the _Posledniya Novosty_.[236]
On the eve of the session of the Gomel circuit court we saw
it announced on the street corners that the court was going
publicly to try some deserters from the Red Army; and later,
when the trial opened in the local theatre, I attended it. There
I saw the three men who were supposed to be sitting in judgment
upon the accused (of whom there were about a hundred) do no
more than shout at them for a while, and then sentence them to
death.... As I passed out of the building through the foyer I
saw people calmly buying tickets for the theatrical performance
of the coming evening!
And the condemned in general? Well, most of them went to the slaughter
silently, and without protest or resistance, after submitting to be
pinioned with barbed wire.
If (wrote Sister Medviedeva in the Kievan report)[237] you could
see our condemned being taken to execution, you would see that
they are practically dead already. But the few who either resist
or make abject, useless petition to the executioners are beaten
and kicked before being dragged down to the basement where
slaughter awaits them.
And take another reminiscence of Kiev, as related by Madame Kourakina:
We stood horror-stricken, and our very hearts seemed to stop,
when night fell, and some men arrived to fetch away the
condemned. The room lay hushed in a silence as of the grave.
Yet the unfortunates knew how to die: they went to their doom
without a sound, with truly amazing calmness. Only the pallor
of their faces and the abstraction of their gaze showed that
already they had ceased to belong to this present existence. Yet
a few poor creatures did rebel against the thought of death: and
it was these who produced upon me the most harrowing impression
of all as horribly, to the last moment, they struggled against
the guards’ violence, and clutched at bunks and corners and
doors, and wept and shrieked in the frenzy of their terror. Yet
the guards only laughed at them, saying: “So you don’t want to
be put to the wall, eh? Yet to the wall you must go.”
Apparently, those of the condemned who committed suicide before
execution did so less through fear of death itself than through fear
of death through official slaughter. For example, I remember a Tartar
in the Butyrka who went to immense pains to cut his throat with a
fragment of glass rather than be executed. And suicides included many
cases of self-incineration, as mentioned both in _The Che-Ka_ and
in the materials amassed by the Denikin Commission. But always the
executioners tried to restore the suicides to life. And why so? Because
always they wished to put an end to the unfortunates with their own
hands--it was against the Communists’ rule to let a single victim, when
sentenced, escape “revolutionary justice.” There are many staggering
instances of such insistence upon fulfilment of “justice” included in
the data compiled by the Denikin Commission, and I will cite one of
them. Once when some bodies of persons who had been executed were being
driven to the Odessa mortuary, the driver noticed a woman victim’s
eyelids flutter, and pointed the fact out to the mortuary attendant.
And, sure enough, the woman had no sooner been carried into the
mortuary than she regained her senses sufficiently to cry out (though
still half-dazed, and for the reason, as a witness has asserted, that
she had caught sight of her dead husband near her): “I am cold!” and
“Where is my cross?” And though the attendant besought her to be quiet,
she persisted until some executioners heard her, and came and gave her
the _coup-de-grâce_. And by another deponent it has been related
that when a man was already in his coffin he regained consciousness,
and promptly was finished off. And there is on record a case where, on
the lid of a coffin slowly opening and emitting a cry of “My comrades,
I am still alive!” a telephone message was sent to the Che-Ka, and
elicited the reply, “Settle him with a brick,” whilst a further appeal
to the head of the Che-Ka himself (Vichmann) called forth the jest: “We
are to requisition the best surgeon in Odessa, I suppose?” and finally
a Che-Ka employee had to be dispatched to the scene, to shoot the
victim a second time with a revolver.
As regards relatives seeking information concerning the fate of
imprisoned kinsfolk, I myself know how often the Che-Ka of Moscow got
rid of such inquirers by giving them permits to see captives whom the
Che-Ka knew already to be lying in the Lefortovsky Mortuary. And even
women and children attending with parcels for prisoners would be met
with the answer: “No person of that name is confined in this prison,”
or with the enigmatical statement that “that person has been removed to
another place in the city.”
Finally, in S. M. Oustinov’s reminiscences we came upon the following
horrible, yet apposite, picture: “In the main street a barefooted,
bedraggled woman was whirling madly to and fro before the advancing
troops. The previous night, before leaving the town, the Bolshevists
had shot her husband.”
_Bolshevist Treatment of Women_
As one reads accounts of Bolshevist outrages upon women one scarcely
wonders that these outrages should have provoked a desire for revenge.
Take the following description of sufferings endured by women in the
concentration camp at Kholmogory:
The authorities’ recruiting of their cooks and laundresses and
other serving-women is done exclusively from the ranks of the
female prisoners. And for the most part they select gently
nurtured women. Also, the staff (especially a man called Okren)
compel such girl prisoners as take their fancy to come and
visit them by night, on the plea that there is domestic work
requiring to be done, but, in reality, to use these girls as
their mistresses. And the terrified victims cannot refuse, but
must bear such insults in silence. Once a woman prisoner did
voice her disgust (this was during the days when Bakhoulis was
in command) but was shot on the spot; and when, on another
occasion, an ex-girl student was sent for by the assistant
commandant at one o’clock in the morning, and at first refused
to answer the summons, her comrades actually besought her to
go, lest all of them should be made to suffer for her refusal.
In the same way, whenever women prisoners were taken to the
bathhouse, they would find Red Guards in wait for them, both
there and in the retiring-rooms.[238]
Like things obtained under the special branch of the Kuban region.
And outstanding cases elsewhere are those of an ex-school teacher,
a Madame Dombrovskaya, who was raped before being shot, and of a
young woman who, sentenced to death by the Che-Ka of Kislovodsk for
“speculative trading,” was subsequently violated by the head of the
“counter-espionage department” before being killed with his sword, and
having foul sport made of her naked, dismembered body.
Akin is a witness’s statement that, before the wife and daughter of
General Ch---- were executed near Chernigov, the daughter, aged twenty,
was raped: the facts being related to the witness by the chauffeurs who
drove the party to the scene of execution. And another statement says:
Some women were writhing hysterically on the floor amongst
a group of executioners as, with drunken laughter and lewd,
filthy jests, they kept tearing open the women’s clothing on the
pretext of “searches.” All of a sudden the senior warder (one of
the regular prison staff, not a regular Che-Ka employee) cried
in a voice tremulous as with apprehension: “Don’t touch the
women! Such fellows as you are not to be trusted with women when
they are going to be shot.”
Such, if you please, a description of an ordinary execution night
(the date was November 17, 1919), at Saratov! _Revolutsionnaya
Rossia_[239] also gives details of rapings. And only recently a
woman exile wrote to the Berlin-published journal _Anarkhichesky
Vestnik_[240] an account of her experiences in the Vologda transport
prison:
Before the wardress left us she warned us to be on our guard,
since infallibly, when night fell, either the superintendent
or the director would enter “with the usual intentions.” The
procedure, she said, was so stereotyped that very few women
passed through the prison without something of the sort being
done to them, whilst, owing to most of the officials being
syphilitic, the women so treated in most cases caught the
disease.... We found that we had not received the warning for
nothing.
I myself can remember a woman prisoner being violated in the top
storey of the men’s solitary confinement building in Moscow (the then
prison of the Muscovite Special Branch, an institution notorious for
the severity of its _régime_) and the Red Guard concerned in the
affair excusing himself on the ground that the woman had given herself
to him for half a pound of bread. And this is not impossible. For half
a pound of foul, black, prison bread! Yes. What further comment is
necessary?
Before the Lausanne Tribunal the witness Sinovary told of a multitude
of Petrograd rapings. And the following extract enables us to read of
what was done in that way by the Che-Ka of the Kuban region:
Over that Cossack village Saraev held such unlimited sway as
to possess power of life and death over every inhabitant, and
be able to carry out what confiscations and requisitions and
shootings he liked. Yet, though exhausted with sensual pleasures
already, he still desired to gratify his animal instincts, and
never let a pretty woman come under his notice without outraging
her. His method of procedure was equally simple, primitive,
lawless, and cruel. As soon as he coveted a female victim he
would begin by arresting her nearest male relative--brother,
husband, father, or what not, or all of them together--and
sentencing them to death. And, upon that, petitions would be
presented, and intercession made, by influential inhabitants and
Saraev would avail himself of the fact to confront the woman
with the ultimatum that, unless she became his mistress, her
relatives would become lost to her. Whereupon, forced to choose
between the two evils, the woman, naturally, selected, in most
cases, the alternative of degradation; whilst, for his part,
Saraev would, so long as she continued in that degradation, hold
up the accused man’s trial. And the terror-stricken population
dared not make the slightest protest, but had to remain deprived
of the elementary right of every population, the right of
defending its own interests.
In another Cossack village a Madame Pashkovskaya, the wife of a
Cossack officer, found favour in the eyes of the head of the local
executive committee, and upon that there began a persecution of
her husband, and the head of the committee even went so far as to
requisition a portion of the husband’s house for his own residence.
Lastly, since the object of his attentions failed to be affected even
by the factor of propinquity, the head of the committee removed the
husband, the obstacle, by having him imprisoned as “an ex-officer and
counter-revolutionary,” and, finally, shot.
Again, once a Che-Ka inquisitor said to a prisoner of his, a
Madame G----: “You are very pretty, and your husband is unworthy
of you.” Then, as though it had been an afterthought, he added: “I
have a great mind to release you, and to shoot your husband as a
counter-revolutionary. But no--I will release both him and you if you
will become my mistress as soon as ever I have set you free.” And
though, almost beside herself with agitation, Madame G---- consulted
a fellow prisoner on the point, and was advised to save her husband
at all costs, and allowed the inquisitor to begin visiting her, her
husband was shot as though no agreement at all had been made!
Again, a Madame M----, an ex-officer’s wife, was imprisoned by a
special branch, and told by the inquisitor concerned that, provided she
became his mistress, she should be released; whereupon she agreed, and
was released, and the inquisitor took up his abode in her house. Yet
later she confessed to a friend:
I detest the man, but what can I do against him with my husband
away, and no one else in the house but my three small children?
All that I can say for myself is that at least I feel secure in
so far as that I no longer have reason to fear inquisitional
searches, or to live in daily dread of having my house entered,
and myself dragged before the Che-Ka again.
And a witness whom I have already quoted in connection with events in
the Crimea told the Lausanne Tribunal that each of the sailors active
in that region possessed four or five mistresses, and that in most
cases the poor women were wives of massacred or escaped officers, since
rejection of the sailors’ overtures meant execution, and only a few
stronger-minded ladies were able to muster up sufficient courage to
solve the problem by suicide.
Intoxicated with blood, the sailors ran amok, seized the
execution lists, and, in haphazard fashion, put crosses against
any name which offended them by its appearance. And into their
midnight orgies they impressed even Sisters of Mercy, the wives
of imprisoned or escaped officers, and women hostages. And
before the night was over all against whose names they had put
crosses had been shot.
Again, a witness testified before the Denikin Commission that
licentious orgies had been carried out _systematically_ by the
Che-Ka and tribunal of Nikolaev, and included even women who had
come to beg for relatives’ release, with that inclusion as the price
of their relatives’ freedom. And from Sister Medviedeva the same
Commission heard a Kievan incident of still greater shamelessness:
Not an employee of the Che-Ka lacked a certain number of
women. In fact, such fellows could cast the eye of lust upon
_every_ woman, and the state of things was absolutely
disgusting. Sorin, in particular, loved lustful orgies, and on
Easter Eve the large hall which used to belong to Demechenko
witnessed the following. Two ladies entered the hall to present
a petition on a prisoner’s behalf; and just as they did so,
some curtains were drawn aside, and disclosed three nude women
playing upon a piano; and it was in these women’s presence that
the ladies had to proffer Sorin their petition. They themselves
told me of the occurrence later.
Naturally, in face of such an order of life in Russia, the “fortnights
for inculcating respect for women” that were advocated by the
_Prabochnaya Gazeta_ and the _Proletarskaya Pravda_[241]
proved a foregone conclusion, and there set in a system of
“communisation of women,” and of “days of free love,” which became an
established, undeniable manifestation of the true meaning of Bolshevist
tyranny, even though both Bolshevist and non-Bolshevist journals have
attempted to ridicule the idea that the system ever existed as a fact.
The existence of it stands corroborated by a host of documents.
“_Squeezing the Bourgeoisie_”
The Terror meant murder and bloodshed and capital punishment.
And it meant still more, for at its disposal it had means
of affecting contemporary thought and imagination that went
yet deeper. And those means were as endless, and as diverse,
of form as always is the case when tyranny and outrage are
expressing themselves. But, above all, the Terror meant capital
punishment--capital punishment everywhere, and at every step, in
every nook and cranny.
Thus wrote, in _The Moral Aspect of the Revolution_, the Herr
Steinberg who helped to bring about the October upheaval, and at first
was for building a social system which he has since declared to “have
for its bloody crown, for its tragic apotheosis, the death penalty,”
and to be “daily and persistently killing the people’s soul.” Well,
he had better have written the words in Petrograd in 1917 than in
Berlin in 1923, for since 1917 the Bolshevist tyranny has daily been
setting human life at nought, and stifling free speech, and cramping
the popular soul with the heavy fetters of a censorship, and slaying
Russia’s best writers and publicists.
But I must draw the reader’s attention to the incomparably clumsy and
senseless form of popular terrorisation which, known as “squeezing the
_bourgeoisie_,” was a resource practised upon the educated classes
everywhere, but more especially in the south. The procedure was that
special days would be set apart for carrying out wholesale domiciliary
searches which stripped the inhabitants of the bulk of their clothing,
linen, and other articles, and left them, by way of “rations,” merely
a shirt apiece, a couple of handkerchiefs, and so forth. Let us take a
description of a particular “squeezing day” which, in 1921, was carried
out in Ekaterinodar on the anniversary of the Paris Commune[242]:
At nightfall, that day, all houses inhabited by persons unlucky
enough to have been “gentry” or merchants or leading citizens
or lawyers or officers before the Revolution, and to be doctors
or professors or engineers (in short, _bourgeois_) at the
present time, were invaded by Red Guards and Bolshevists armed
to the teeth, who made careful search everywhere, and removed
all money and other valuables, dragged the houses’ occupiers
outside in their indoor clothes, and, without regard for age
or sex, or even for state of health (so that persons suffering
from typhus were taken), loaded the lot on to wagons, and
dispatched them to destinations elsewhere--half of them to a
local concentration camp, and the other half to Petrovsk for
forced labour in the Caspian fisheries. And this atrocious
deportation of families by the hundred went on for a day and
a half, accompanied with confiscation of the property of the
deported, and distribution of the same amongst the local
workers--though, as a matter of fact, we do not know how far
it really reached those workers; we only know that at least it
reached the market-place, and, in many cases, was bought back by
its owners from the speculators who had since purchased it. Thus
it became quite a common thing to see one’s clothes figuring
on commissaries and their wives and relatives, and during the
first year of the Bolshevist usurpation the system gathered to
itself a secondary system of arbitrary “contributions” which in
time attained almost fantastical dimensions. Yet to decline to
pay those “contributions” meant arrest and imprisonment as a
hostage, and then, not infrequently, death.[243]
Perhaps a speech delivered by the notorious Bolshevist leader Mouraviev
at a forced meeting of _bourgeois_ held after the Bolshevists’
seizure of Odessa in 1918 will best illustrate what the term
“contributions” or “mites given for the revolutionary cause” really
meant. Said Mouraviev:
I have reached the hall late, and the enemy is knocking at the
gates of the city already. And, perhaps you _bourgeois_
like the sound of that? However, do not rejoice too soon, for
if I should have to surrender Odessa to the enemy, I intend to
leave you neither your houses nor your lives. So look here. What
you have to do is that within three days you must pay up to me
ten million roubles. And if you don’t, then woe betide you, for
I shall drown every man of you with a stone about his neck, and
deport his family.
On the same lines as the foregoing was a “day of peaceful protest”
which the Bolshevists of Odessa announced for May 13, 1919, just a
year after the above speech by Mouraviev. And for the purposes of the
day these Bolshevists formed as many as sixty gangs charged to relieve
Odessa’s propertied classes of all “redundant” food and footwear and
outer and under clothing and money: after which they broadcast threats
that anyone who failed to observe the decreed day, as ordained by the
local “council of workers’ deputies,” would be imprisoned, and anyone
who actively opposed the decree shot. Also, the committee drew up an
“Instruction” which set forth in minute detail the articles to be
confiscated, but at least left to each inhabitant three shirts, three
pairs of under-pants, and three pairs of socks. Which last provision
had the effect of inspiring Pieshekhonov, our informant, to say that
the devil is not always as black as he is painted. Pieshekhonov then
continues:
Unfortunately, on the arrival of the day the citizens gave way
to panic, and ran hither and thither in terror and perplexity
as to where they should hide their valuables. I, for my part,
could only smile at the idea of thinking that anyone could rob
several hundreds of thousands of persons in a single day, and
so thoroughly as to include even money concealed in nooks and
corners. “No!” I said to myself. “One of two things will happen.
Either the Bolshevist bands will be held up as soon as ever they
enter the first houses, or a Bolshevist organised robbery will
become a popular uncontrolled brigandage, and the Bolshevists
at length find themselves forced to restrain the latter.” And
this duly happened--the Bolshevist bands being held up on their
first entry into houses and--well, and the unexpected happening
in the circumstance that it was precisely in the localities
inhabited by the working-folk that those bands met with the most
abuse. In fact, it was not long before sounds of firing began
to be heard there, and in the end the Bolshevists altogether
had to abandon their “day of peaceful protest” or they would
have found themselves confronted with an armed rebellion not
so much of the _bourgeoisie_ as of the proletariat. True,
later (in 1920), the Bolshevists of Odessa did succeed, I
believe, in a “confiscation of all surpluses”; but by that time
I had left the place, and cannot say how the confiscation was
effected, save by, probably, allowing a large number of persons
to evade the affair altogether. And a Kharkov confiscation of
surpluses during the same year came to an equally unsatisfactory
conclusion, for, though on the first night, the Bolshevists took
care to search strictly on the system of house by house, on the
following night they were foolish enough to visit only houses
previously selected--the more prosperous residences--and so to
draw protests from influential inhabitants, with complaints of
unauthorised robbery, which eventually compelled the searches to
be stopped. As for my own experience in Kharkov, it was that the
searchers never reached the house in which I was.
The chief reason for the Bolshevists’ failure in Odessa [wrote
Margoulies] was that they committed the gigantic tactical error
of not previously exempting from search all houses belonging
to the industrial workers and the petty officials. For failure
to do so brought it about that, as soon as ever news of the
impending “peaceful protest” reached the town, there set
in a panic not so much of the _bourgeoisie_ as of the
proletariat, and a stoppage of work at most of the factories
in order that the hands might hasten home and safeguard their
property from the illegality that was supposed to be threatening
even the goods of Communists. Whence some of the scenes were
indescribable as the requisitionary detachments (mostly youths
and young women of questionable character) were assailed with
curses and abuse, and in some cases even with physical violence
and sousings with boiling water: until, the popular passions
having become thoroughly aroused, no course was left save
reluctantly to relinquish the scheme before isolated cases
of protest should coalesce into a popular upheaval, and, as
early as one o’clock in the afternoon (that is to say, four
hours only after the “peaceful protest” had been begun), to
circulate an urgent message that the domiciliary visitations
must cease, and, next day, to issue an address on the subject to
the workers. Said the address: “We feel not a little hurt that
yesterday the workers should seem to have taken the part of the
_bourgeoisie_. As a matter of fact, it was impossible for
us to charge our instructions with an order that searches should
not be carried out in the working-class districts, for in that
case the _bourgeoisie_ would have resorted thither in large
numbers for concealment of all the stolen wealth which they have
been hoarding.” But the appeal concluded: “The misunderstanding
which has happened is the more regrettable in that it is bound
to act as a setback to what constitutes a primary factor in the
workers’ cause.”
A month earlier a similar demand had been made upon Odessa, but in this
case for a definite “contribution” of 500,000,000 roubles. And both in
Odessa and elsewhere evictions were carried out at twenty-four hours’
notice, whilst in Vladikavkaz women found walking out of doors were
then and there sent to menial work in the hospitals, and in Sebastopol
and other towns of the Crimea members of the _bourgeoisie_ were
seized and put to hard labour. “All members of the male sex found
wearing starched collars, and all members of the female sex found
wearing hats, shall be apportioned tasks of severity.” Such persons
were arrested just as they were, conveyed forthwith to the outskirts
of the town, and set to trench-digging. And in time casual street
seizure of the kind was improved upon with nocturnal house-to-house
collection, and dispatch of the captured _bourgeois_ to militia
camps. There, the next morning, the men were, regardless of age, sorted
into batches of ten, and set to loading railway wagons and digging
trenches--tasks which such of them as had never before done manual
labour found come none too easy, and admit of but slow performance,
and so bring down upon the performers both the taskmaster’s tongue
and the taskmaster’s lash. And meanwhile the womenfolk amongst the
captured _bourgeoisie_ were set to clear and scour out Red Guard
barrack-rooms, commissaries’ houses, and Communist establishments
generally. And one Easter Sunday a party of young girls in Sebastopol
were unexpectedly commandeered for menial tasks in public for the sole
purpose of making a spectacle of them; after being ordered to assemble
at given points, they were sent to scrub out and dust and scavenger Red
Guard barrack-rooms that were, it need hardly be said, plunged in an
extremity of filth. And not only had these gently nurtured girls (who
were, for the most part, only of school age) to perform their tasks in
ordinary (non-working) clothes, but also, being forbidden to bring with
them any of the cleaning implements necessary for such work, had, at
the point of commissaries’ revolvers, and threatened with the lash, to
scrape out barrack lavatories with their bare fingers![244]
Kiev, too, had its “week for confiscation of surpluses.” And the manner
in which that “week” was carried out makes it more than ever certain
that Steinberg was right when, in his book, he asserted that no system
at all governed Bolshevist requisitions and confiscations, so that, as
always happens in such cases, spoliation aimed at the well-fed and the
leisured missed a large number of them, and hit, for the most part, the
underfed and the overworked.
In Vladikavkaz an Order promulgated on April 9, 1918, said that “all
members of the _bourgeoisie_ shall assemble at the Winter Theatre
at 8 P.M. to-night (no matter whether they have paid their
contributions or not) and be shot in case of failure to comply with
this Order.” Also, it might be well to quote the following conversation
between Peters and some Communist journalists, as reported in the
Kievan _Izvestia_.
Let me remind you [said Peters to the journalists] how the
workers of Petrograd responded to my appeal for voluntary
searchers of _bourgeoisie_ dwellings, and the searches came
to be participated in by 20,000 workers (men and women alike),
with sailors and Red Guards. Never could the thoroughness with
which those volunteers executed their task be sufficiently
praised! And what was the result? That the searches brought to
light 2,000 bombs, 3,000 prismatic binoculars, 30,000 compasses,
and many other articles of military equipment, and that for
the first time we were enabled to get upon the track of the
counter-revolutionary organisations which subsequently were
discovered to have sprung up in every part of Russia. But here,
in Kiev, unfortunately, popular discipline of the kind does not
exist; marauders and speculators are allowed to inflate prices,
and to conceal the food needed of the city.
Only yesterday some searchers in our employ unearthed fresh
stocks of provisions, so that there confronts me the necessity
of subjecting the holders of those stocks to the supreme
punitive measure for having failed to comply with my Order
concerning Registration of Supplies.
And in the same issue of the Kievan _Izvestia_ there stood
published the names of the 127 stockholders in question--as shot.