Chapter VI: Che-Ka Tyranny (2)

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:

[_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.

[_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.

[_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.

[_See page 188._]

And only recently the _Izvestia_[205] of Moscow reported a session 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.

[_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]: