Chapter III: Blood Statistics (2)

“Life here is like living upon a volcano,” said a private letter
to the editor of the _Posledniya Novosty_.[72] “Daily mass
arrests of counter-revolutionaries take place in every quarter
of the town, and individual arrests and domiciliary searches.
It is sufficient for anyone to inform the authorities that such
and such a family has a relative serving in the Volunteer army
for a plundering of that family’s house to be carried through
forthwith, and the family itself to be made prisoners. Unlike
last year, however, the Bolshevists now execute their victims
very quickly, and publish no slaughter lists.”

Again, we find a Constantinople correspondent of the _Obstchoyé Delo_,[73] a man who knew well what was happening in Odessa, sending his journal a heart-rending series of accounts of life in that city, and saying that official information showed the number of persons who had been shot to date to amount to 7000, since at least 30 or 40 had been executed nightly, and sometimes as many as 200--even as 300.

Machine-guns did the work: the victims were too numerous for
individual execution. Nor was any publication made of the names
of the shot; the prisoners were just taken from the gaol by a
wardful at a time, and exterminated.

An exaggeration? Possibly. But at least an exaggeration resembling known facts, seeing that there stands on record the massacre of the ex-officers captured on the Roumanian frontier when attempting to escape to the forces of General Bredov. The attempt failed because the Roumanian Government refused to accord the fugitives licence of passage across the river Dnieper, and subsequently the 1200 officers were dispatched to concentration camps, and executed there. And as regards their execution on May 5, I agree that one can scarcely believe the story that, owing to the _Izvestia_ having published an announcement of the hecatomb, certain persons tolled the local church bells overnight, and the local ecclesiastics were subsequently arraigned and allotted sentences of from five to ten years.

To about the same period there may be assigned the execution of a number of Galicians who had played the Bolshevists false. The ex-Galician garrison of Tiraspol was shot to the last man, and, by orders from Odessa, the rest were sentenced to be punished for their “treason” with deportation. But no sooner had these Galicians, with their wives and children, assembled at the goods station than machine-gun fire was poured into them _en masse_, and such of the “traitors to the proletariat” (to quote the _Izvestia_) as were not killed thereby were done to death by a goaded-on Bolshevist mob.[74]

Like shootings took place when the Crimea had been seized. “All persons of the region to whom I spoke,” says a correspondent, “were unanimous in declaring that they had seen a list of 119 persons as shot on December 24.” And, of course, the real number was, quite justifiably, rumoured to have amounted to 300. The shot on this occasion had been persons accused of participation in the so-called “Polish counter-revolutionary organisation.” As a matter of fact that organisation had been engineered by _agents-provocateurs_ in the employ of the local Che-Ka, and the _agents_ had been given the job for the same reason as was the case when the “Wrangel conspiracy” caused sixty employees of the Shipping and Trading Company, and thirty-one other persons, to be shot for “espionage”: namely, that the _agents_ might at least have their energies devoted to _something_.[75]

And the same informant tells us that “when the Bolshevists were in Ekaterinodar every prison there was overcrowded with inmates, most of whom were destined to be shot.” To which a local citizen has added that between the August of 1920 and the February of 1921 the prisons of the town saw 300 victims slaughtered.[76]

Most of the shootings of that year, however, took place in August, when, on Wrangel’s forces reaching the Kuban region, the head of the Kuban Che-Ka ordered that “all persons now lying in the cells of the Che-Ka building be shot,” and answered a Che-Ka employee named Kossolapov, who had protested against the order on the ground of many of the prisoners not having been so much as examined, and others having been arrested merely for an infringement of the regulation prohibiting departure from a dwelling-house after eight o’clock at night, with the instruction: “Then separate those eight o’clock prisoners from their companions, and shoot the rest.” This was duly carried out, and a local citizen named Rakitzansky, who was one of the seized, has described how it was done. His account says:

We were led forth from the cells in batches of ten, but were
quite calm, for, on the first batch being removed elsewhere, we
were told that the reason for their removal was that they might
be questioned only. But when the second batch was removed we
realised that the purpose of the removal was _execution_,
and sure enough, those who were taken away were butchered like
cattle.

With which the informant relates how he himself escaped death. He did so only through the fact that, as the Bolshevists happened at the time to be preparing to evacuate the town, the Che-Ka’s documents lay ready packed up, and therefore the executions were taking place without the usual preliminary formalities--merely with a putting to each prisoner, when summoned to slaughter, of the question, “Of what crime do you stand accused?” And since Rakitzansky noticed that any prisoner who stood accused only of having infringed the curfew order was set aside from the rest, he too said, when his turn came, that he had been arrested for having been found out of doors after nightfall, though in reality he had been arrested as an ex-officer--and so saved his life.

[_See page 72._]

These executions were carried out by the Che-Ka’s entire staff,
and on the prison premises. Artabekov, the chief, himself gave
the word to fire on each occasion, and the firings went on for
twenty-four hours, during which time the neighbouring dwellers
must have sat benumbed with terror. Two thousand persons were
shot, but their names and their “crimes” still remain unknown,
and probably always will remain unknown. Not even the
Che-Ka’s employees could throw light upon the point, for such
men have come to look upon shootings as a trade, as an outlet
for their sadistic tendencies, as a resource which calls neither
for ceremony nor for any established procedure.

Again, in Ekaterinodar, on October 30, 84 persons were shot; during November, 100; on December 22, 184; on January 24, 210; and on February 5, 94. And there can be no doubt about these items, for, although the local Che-Ka believed itself to have destroyed all its documents, we have it from an eye-witness that subsequently “whole bundles of papers, inscribed ‘To be shot,’ were discovered in some earth closets.”

Take another picture of life in Ekaterinodar at this period:

Between August 17 and August 20 the tenour of our existence
was disturbed by troops of Wrangel’s landing near
Primorsko-Aktarskaya Stanitza, and proceeding to attack
the town. A panic ensued, and Artabekov, our “Special
Representative,” ordered all persons who had been arrested
by the local Che-Ka, or by its special branch, to be shot
forthwith. At the time the provincial Che-Ka and the special
branch had on their premises 1600 persons, and these were
taken across the Kuban in batches of 100, and slaughtered with
machine-gun fire. And a like course was pursued in the prison
itself; save that there the inmates were shot against a wall.
Lastly, public announcement of the affair was made, and lists
of the executed published in columns headed “Retribution.” Yet
the number of names published was a good deal smaller than the
reality. Also, when the Bolshevists were setting about their
disorderly flight, they told the workers that if they (the
workers) did not come with them they (the Bolshevists) would,
on their return, hang every worker who had remained behind to a
telegraph pole.[77]

Similar events befell when Wrangel came to menace Ekaterinoslav, and the town was evacuated.[78] Indeed, everywhere such events befell, and when the Bolshevist forces were retreating from Vinitza and Kamenetz-Podolsk the Kharkov _Izvestia_ (the organ of the All-Ukrainian Che-Ka) published lists of hostages shot to the number of 217, with names of peasants, thirteen teachers, several doctors and engineers, a rabbi, and a number of landowners and ex-officers included. The same, again, whenever the Bolshevist forces were on the _advance_. For example, no sooner was Kamenetz-Podolsk retaken than eighty Ukrainians were shot, and 164 seized and dispatched to the central provinces.[79] Also, a correspondent of the _Revolutsionnaya Rossia_[80] gives us the following description of Rostov-on-Don doings during the first few months of the new Government’s rule:

Merciless, shameless looting is going on, with the Bolshevists
robbing the shops and houses of the _bourgeoisie_, but,
still more, the co-operative stores. And they keep shooting
officers, or else hacking them to pieces with swords--sometimes
in the street as soon as caught, and sometimes in the officers’
homes.... Recently, too, they set fire to the military hospital
on the corner of the Taganrog Prospekt and Temeritskaya Street,
although the building was crowded with sick and wounded officers
at the time, and many of the latter were too weak to move. In
fact, forty were burnt to death.... The exact number of shot and
hacked is not yet known. All that is known is that the number
must have been very large. And with each addition to the local
soviet’s power its methods are growing bolder. First it placed
the whole of the Cossack population under surveillance. Then
it brought into operation a Che-Ka under Peters, and kept the
engines of two motor lorries in constant running, that the sound
of the shots might not be heard outside the building.... Peters
frequently attends the executions in person. They take place in
batches, with perhaps as many as ninety persons shot in a single
night.

Also, Red Guards have told us that Peters’ little son of eight
or nine will run after him and cry: “Daddy, daddy, let _me_
do it too!”

Associated with the local Che-Kas were local revolutionary tribunals and soviets. Nor, frequently, were captured persons looked upon as prisoners of war, but dubbed, rather, for the purpose of being shot, _agents-provocateurs_, or else “bandits.” This is how the “trial” of Colonel Sukharevsky at Rostov was engineered; and the same with a “trial” of a Cossack named Sniegirev at Ekaterinodar, and with the “trial” of a student named Stepnaov and others at Touapse.

In and around Stavropol wives were shot for having failed to notify that their husbands had fled. And even children of fifteen and sixteen were shot, and persons of sixty--yes, shot with machine-guns, or else hacked to pieces with swords. Nightly shootings took place in Piatigorsk and Essentouky and Kislovodsk, whilst the lists of the slaughtered (amounting to some 240 names apiece) would be headed “Blood for blood,” and conclude with the words “To be continued.” And as regards a pretext for the orgy, it was found in the assassination of one Lenitzov, head of the Che-Ka of Piatigorsk, and of a certain Lapin, a military commissary--both of these fellows having been stopped in a motor car by a _posse_ of horsemen.[81]

_The Crimea after Wrangel’s Departure._

For months after the “liquidation” of the Denikin _régime_ exploits like the foregoing were continued. Next, Wrangel came and went, with the numbers of victims growing to tens of thousands, and the Crimea coming to be known as “The All-Russian Cemetery,” and refugees thence reaching Moscow with terrible tales of what had happened. Indeed, at this period the journal _Za Narod_ (“For the People”) estimated the total of those shot in the Crimea to have reached 50,000, whilst other computers have placed it variously at 100,000, at 120,000, and at 150,000. But it is impossible to say which of these figures approaches most nearly to the truth. All that can really be said is that, even if the total was smaller, far smaller, than any of the figures given above, that does not lessen the cruelty, the abomination, of slaughtering persons after Frunze, the then Commander-in-Chief, had guaranteed them an “amnesty.”[82] And another functionary active in the Crimea was Bela Kun, the notorious Hungarian journalist, who was not ashamed to say publicly:

Comrade Trotsky has declined to visit the Crimea so long as a
single counter-revolutionary remains alive there. But as the
Crimea is a bottle-neck whence no counter-revolutionary can
possibly escape, it will not be long before we have raised it
from its revolutionary level of three years behind the times to
the general revolutionary level of Russia.

[_See page 76._]

And so the Crimea was “raised” to that level. And the method employed for raising it was the method of perpetrating such a series of mass executions as stands without parallel in history. Not only were people shot by scores at a time; they were also hacked to pieces, and, as often as not, before the very eyes of their relatives. Said an insistent telegram from Skliansky (Trotsky’s temporary substitute on the Central Revolutionary-Military Council): “Let the struggle continue until not a single White officer remains alive on Crimean soil.” Later the All-Russian Executive Committee held an enquiry into the massacres of 1920 and 1921, and, on questioning commandants of towns, found all of them (according to the _Roul_[83]) to cite in their defence a second telegram sent them either by Bela Kun or by Bela’s “secretary” (a woman known as ”Zemliachka,” or “the Country Woman,” though her real name was Samoilova, with her “special services rendered” rewarded, in March, 1921, with “the Order of the Red Flag”[84]) for the purpose of bidding all such town commandants summon for “registration” (and execution) all ex-officers, and all ex-officials of the late War Ministry (under Wrangel’s Government) who might be resident in their districts. At all events, it was upon such a “registration” basis that the executions were carried out. And subsequently, A. V. Ossokin stated to the Lausanne Tribunal that “the queues waiting to register ran to thousands in length, as though each man had been seeking to win the race to the grave.”[85]

And for months the slaughter continued, and a nightly rattle of machine-guns was heard. The first night alone saw thousands of victims fall[86]--1800 in Simferopol, 420 in Theodosia, 1300 in Kertch, and so forth. But at last, in dealing with such large numbers, difficulties were encountered, for though the majority of the victims were stupefied with terror, some did retain sufficient presence of mind to attempt escape, and it became necessary to shoot smaller parties at a time, and to divide the nightly quotas into two shifts each--Theodosia, for example, making the two half-quotas each include 60, or a total of 120 to a night. And during the shootings the occupants of the neighbouring dwellings were forbidden to leave their homes on pain of death--they had to sit and bear the torturing horror of the sounds as best they could. And a special danger beset them in the fact that, perhaps, a half-shot victim would come crawling to their door and moan for help, and so involve the occupants of the dwelling in the risk of losing their own lives if mercifully they should take him in.

At first the corpses were disposed of by dumping them into the ancient Genoese wells; but in time even these wells became filled up, and the condemned had to be marched out into the country during the daytime (ostensibly, “to work in the mines”) and there made to dig huge graves before daylight should fail, and then be locked into sheds for an hour or two, and, with the fall of dusk, stripped except for the little crosses around their necks, and shot. And as they were shot they fell forward in layers. And as they fell forward their own layer of quivering bodies speedily became covered with the following layer; and so on until the graves lay filled to the margin. Only when morning came did any victim who seemed to be still breathing have his brains dashed out with a piece of rock. And, for that matter, many were buried alive.

At Kertch the Bolshevists organised what they called “trips to Kuban,” when the victims were taken out to sea, and drowned, and their terror-stricken wives and mothers flogged with _nagaiki_[87] or, in a few cases, shot along with their sons or husbands. And for a long time bodies of such women, with babes still clasped to their breasts, could be seen lying outside the Jewish cemetery at Simferopol. At Yalta and Sevastopol stretcher patients were carried from the hospitals, and shot. And these victims were not exclusively ex-officers. On the contrary, they included common soldiers, doctors, nurses, teachers, railwaymen, priests, and peasants.

And when the towns’ quotas of victims had become exhausted the Bolshevists began to draw also upon the villages, where, as a rule, the slaughter was carried out on the spot. And meanwhile mass arrests of hostages began in the towns, and in Simferopol alone 12,000 were seized on December 19 and 20. Next, this phase of the delirium having passed, the Bolshevists took to imprisoning people on the strength of certain “inquiry forms.” The procedure in this case was as follows. All ex-officials and persons over the age of sixteen had to fill in several dozen documents requiring answers to forty or fifty questions; and these questions went carefully into every detail of the examinee’s life during the examinee’s every year of existence. Most of all was attention paid to the examinee’s origin and social position, and position _vis-à-vis_ a father’s or a grandfather’s or an uncle’s or an aunt’s property--also to the examinee’s sympathy with, or antipathy to, the Red Terror, the Allies, and Poland, and to the question whether or not the examinee had sided with Wrangel, and, if so, why he or she had not fled to join that General’s forces. Each such query had, willy nilly, to be answered. And after a fortnight or so the “registered” had to attend before the local Che-Ka, and be questioned further, and subjected to a bombardment with unexpected and wholly irrelevant inquiries. Only if an examinee finally passed this test did he or she receive a certified “enquiry form,” coupled with a reminder that thenceforth the examinee’s life stood in fee to the correctitude of the information contained in the form.

Of those who contrived, after all this, to remain in the present world, a large number were sent to the concentration camps of the North, where usually they found their last resting-place. Even if a prisoner did escape from such a camp he brought down summary vengeance upon his non-escaped comrades--an instance being that, once when a party of six officers got clear of the concentration camp at Vladislavlevo railway station, thirty-eight of their fellows were executed forthwith.[88]

For its part, the Che-Ka of Kertch adopted the plan of registering the population simultaneously, _en masse_, and, for the purpose, surrounded the town with a cordon of patrols, and then ordered the local inhabitants to lay in three days’ stores, and forbear to leave their dwellings on pain of death. The subsequent inquiry conducted resulted in a dividing of the population into three categories, with the 800 members of the first category notified in the Kertch _Izvestia_ as “persons who have taken an active part in the late campaign” [against General Wrangel]. When they were shot their surviving fellow townsmen reckoned that their real number had amounted to at least double the official figure given.[89]

But it was at Balaklava and Sebastopol that the greatest number of executions took place, for, if we are to credit certain statements made by eye-witnesses, the Che-Kas of the two townships shot a joint total of 29,000 souls,[90] with, amongst them, at Sebastopol, 500 stevedores for having helped to embark General Wrangel’s army.[91] Also, when the _Izvestia_ published (on November 28) the first general list for the region, that list of 634 names was seen to comprise 278 names of _women_; whilst when, on November 30, a second general list was published, 88 of its 1202 names, again, were feminine names.[92] Hence it has been estimated that during the first week of the Bolshevists’ rule of the Crimea Sebastopol alone saw over 8,000 souls put to death. And it was not only _shootings_ that were carried out in Sebastopol. There were carried out there, and for the first time, also _hangings_. Indeed, hundreds of prisoners were executed in this manner, and both the _Posledniya Novosty_ and the _Dielo_ and the _Roul_ of the period repeat nerve-shattering stories related to them by the few people (mostly foreigners) who subsequently contrived to get clear of the Crimea’s confines. Possibly reminiscences of the sort were partially subjective; yet to discredit them in whole is sheerly impossible. Wrote a correspondent to the _Roul_:

In time the Nakhimovsky Prospekt became simply festooned with
corpses of officers and private soldiers and civilians who,
arrested then and there in the street, had been executed on the
spot of arrest, and hurriedly, and with no previous trial.[93]

And wrote a correspondent to the _Dielo_:

The city is like a city of the dead, with the population
lying hidden in cellars and lofts, and every fence and wall
and telegraph post and telephone standard and shop front and
signboard plastered over with posters saying “Death to the
Traitors!”[94]

And from another eye-witness we have it that “officers were hanged in full uniform, complete to the epaulets, but civilians in underwear only. And there they swung to and fro ‘as a warning to others.’”

Yes, every available pole and monument was used for the purpose, and also every available tree. In particular did the Istorichesky Prospekt become richly garnished with wind-swayed corpses; and the same with the Nakhimovsky Prospekt, Ekaterinskaya Street, Bolshaya-Morskaya Street, and the Primorsky Boulevard. Previously Commandant Bothmer, the lieutenant of the German contingent hitherto in occupation of the Crimea, had ordered the population not to make any complaints against the Soviet’s officials, “since such complaints only help the White Guards in their resistance.” And such was the orgy of madness and slaughter as to include even shootings of sick and wounded from the hospitals--of a batch of 272 persons from the _Zemstvo’s_ sanatorium at Aloupka,[95] and of doctors and Red Cross nurses (we find seventeen nurses’ names in a single list) and _Zemstvo_ employees and the well-known National Societist A. P. Laurier (with, as accusation against him, that he had been editor of the _Youzhniya Viedomosty_ or “Southern Intelligencer”!) and Plekhanov’s secretary, the Social Democrat Loubimov, and many others who had taken no part whatsoever--at all events, no active part--in the struggle.

In fact, these lists might well have had appended to them the words of Ivan the Terrible under similar circumstances: “Together with a great multitude of others whose names Thou alone, O Lord, wilt remember.” And said a correspondent of the Social Revolutionary journal _Volya Rossii_ or “The Will of Russia”: “Even such names of the slain as the Bolshevists reported amounted to thousands.”[96]

_The Year 1921_

During this year also the Terror in the Crimea continued, so that A. V. Ossokin stated before the Lausanne Tribunal:

During July last over 500 hostages were imprisoned on charges
of having communicated with the Greens. And before the year
was out many of these hostages even were executed, with some
twelve or thirteen women included amongst their number--three
in Eupatoria during April, five in Simferopol on March 25
(O.S.), one in Kapasoubayar during April, and three or four in
Sebastopol during the same month, with, as principal accusation
against them, either that they had helped relatives to escape to
the mountains or that they had furnished persons contemplating
such a course with provisions, though in reality the accused had
furnished the provisions without knowing that the persons whom
they thus assisted were not refugees at all, but disguised Red
Guards and _agents provocateurs_.

Also, whole villages were presented with an ultimatum that “unless you people recall those of your inhabitants who have taken to the mountains, you shall have your village burnt over your heads.” Demerdzhi, Shoumi, Korbek and Sabli were amongst the villages so addressed. However, the threat in no case came really to be fulfilled, for, on its utterance, the Greens issued a counter-proclamation that in such a case they would slaughter every Communist family and individual Communist whom they could catch, whether in town or in village.

And in Ekaterinoslav and the Northern Taurus, during the winter of 1921–22, the same policy of hostage seizure shed rivers of blood. Also, wholesale disarmaments of villages took place; the procedure being to fix a given quota of arms for surrender, within twenty-four hours, by a given village, and if (as usually happened) the quota specified exceeded the whole store of arms possessed by the village, to seize ten or fifteen of the villagers as hostages, and then, on definite ascertainment that the village could not comply with the order issued, to shoot the hostages in the fashion which had become stereotyped.

And, on a base used by the Greens being discovered near Theodosia, three boys and four girls (all aged about sixteen) were shot. Similarly, a trial of Greens in Simferopol resulted in the deaths of twenty-two persons, including a local university lecturer, and some others.

And ever as the _Krim Rosta_[97] reported new “conspiracies” there followed upon the discoveries executions, even though the “conspiracies” had seldom had any connection whatsoever with the Greens. And also upon the Tartar population did the Terror descend. During August several scores of Mahomedans were shot for “holding a counter-revolutionary meeting in their Mosque.”[98]

In September two parties of Greens under a Tartar named Malamboutov placed sufficient reliance upon an “amnesty” offered them to descend from the mountains, and, in the case of Malamboutov and some others, to meet with a remarkable fate. The incident has been thus described by the author of a diary published in the _Posledniya Novosty_:

As soon as he descended from the mountains, Malamboutov was
seized by the local Che-Ka, and compelled to sign an “appeal”
to such of his fellow Greens as had remained behind in hiding:
the “appeal” stating, after referring to the Bolshevists’ “love
of peace,” that “the only remaining foe of ourselves, of the
Green Army, is the common foe of us all, the foe represented
by Capitalism.” Then, the “appeal” issued, a _posse_
of officials re-conveyed Malamboutov and his staff to the
mountains, and had pointed out to them by their captives every
hiding-place hitherto used by the Greens: with the result that
for the next two days Malamboutov’s involuntary betrayal of his
comrades caused the peasantry of the neighbouring villages to
sit listening to heavy firing in the country where the Reds were
running down the last remnant of the Greens. Later Malamboutov
and his staff themselves were shot on the usual plea of
“espionage,” and the fact posted up (under the repellent heading
of “This is the class of crime which the soviet power most loves
to punish”) on every street corner in the neighbouring town. In
the list were sixty-four names, but it continued to be whispered
amongst the terrified inhabitants that, though the Che-Ka might
have succeeded in laying by the heels the persons named on the
list, these represented no more than a fraction of the Greens
who had accompanied Malamboutov from the mountains--that, as a
matter of fact, the remainder of the two bands had discovered
the treachery in time, and availed themselves of the fact that
the “amnesty” had allowed them to retain their weapons to fight
their way back again. And later their side avenged the death of
Malamboutov with such cruel, such savage, reprisals upon every
Communist whom they caught as to partake almost of a medieval
character.

In fact, terrorism remained rampant in the south so long as the Greens continued their activities there. In Ekaterinodar, on a “mutiny” being quelled on September 27 and 28, the local _Izvestia_ published a list of 104 executions which included a bishop, a priest, a professor, a military officer and a leading Cossack. And at Novorossisk, in the neighbourhood of which Green activity became especially noticeable, the Che-Ka attached to the Black Sea flotilla executed both rebels and hostages by hundreds, in addition to daily shootings in connection with a “liquidation” of twelve White Guard associations around Kharkov, and of the “conspiracies” which General Ouktomsky and Colonel Nazarov organised around Rostov.

Again, when, towards the close of March, the Che-Ka of Piatigorsk discovered a local “conspiracy,” there followed shootings of fifty of the “conspiracy’s” leaders[99]; whilst at Anapa sixty-two persons were shot for attempting to escape from Bolshevism by way of Batoum, even though (as came out later) they had manifestly been egged-on to the attempt by _agents-provocateurs_ employed by the local Che-Ka.[100]

The following proclamation which Lautzer, “Special Representative of the All-Russian Che-Ka for the Northern Caucasus,” addressed to the populations of the Kuban district and the Black Sea littoral will illustrate better than anything else the state of things when those regions were held by the Bolshevists’ Don Army.[101] Said the document:

(1) Any village or hamlet found to be harbouring persons
connected with either the White Forces or the Green shall be
razed to the ground, and its adult inhabitants shot, and its
property confiscated. (2) Any person found assisting either of
those Forces shall be shot. (3) Inasmuch as members of the Green
Forces hiding in the mountains usually leave relatives behind
them in their villages, such relatives shall be kept under
observation and, if the forces in question advance any further,
and the relatives concerned be found to have got any kinsman
bearing arms against us, be shot, and the families of them
deported to Central Russia. (4) Should anything in the nature of
mass opposition display itself in village, settlement, or town,
we shall, in our turn, be compelled to employ mass terrorism,
and to execute hundreds of the inhabitants for each soviet
worker who may be murdered. For the soviet power is determined
that its heavy, ruthless hand shall sweep away its every foe.

Similarly were all rebellions in the Ukraine quelled, and no difference at all is discernible between the happenings of 1920 and those of 1921, save that sometimes the outbreaks came to assume such varying guises that it is not always easy to distinguish whether a rising was intended to procure the independence of the Ukraine, or to assist Makhno; whether it was connected with the Whites, or involved with the Greens; whether it was a movement of refugee bands, or a movement of purely peasant origin; whether it was a revolt against the weight of the grain tax, or an affair altogether apart from “White Guard conspiracies” and the foregoing factors.[102] The only thing of which we can be certain is that at least the Bolshevists did not differentiate as regards these affairs’ _quelling_. For example, a “Special Order No. 69 Relating to the District of Kiev,” issued in 1920, enjoined not only all necessary employment of mass terrorism, but also infliction of death upon any person found possessed of a single cartridge after the expiration of any date for surrender of arms.

Thus Bolshevist terrorism needed but to encounter the smallest opposition to swell up into a sanguinary massacre. In Proskurovo alone 2000 peasants fell victims, and as soon as ever forces under the _ataman_ Tiutiunik took the field in the neighbourhood of Kiev that city too began to see daily shootings of dozens. Below follows a _résumé_ of an official document which is a copy of the minutes compiled by the five members of a Che-Ka committee which subsequently tried Tiutiunik’s beaten following. Issued on November 21, 1921,[103] the document stated that during the fighting 400 of the enemy had been killed and 557 taken prisoner, and some of the rebels’ leaders, on realising the hopelessness of their position, compelled to commit suicide with bombs and rifles. Then the document added that Tiutiunik and certain of his staff had been guilty of “conduct unworthy of any persons in command,” in that they had assured their own escape from the field before the fighting had well begun. For the rest, the Che-Ka committee referred to tried 443 persons, of whom it shot 360 on the ground that they had been “evil and active bandits,” and forwarded the rest for further examination by “the inquisitional staff.” And later the Petrograd _Pravda_ announced that “because of the conspiracy recently discovered in Kiev, a conspiracy directed by the All-Ukrainian Rebel Committee, 180 officers of Pethera’s and Tiutiunik’s forces have been placed under arrest.” And, that being so, we can pretty safely assume that it was not long before a subsequent _communiqué_ announced those arrested officers’ execution.

Later, when a professor of the Kievan Polytechnic named Koval escaped from Kiev and reached Poland, he reported that yet another “discovery of a conspiracy of the usual type had led to an intensification of the Kievan Terror which involved nightly shootings of from ten to fifteen persons.”

And when an exhibition in advertisement of the doings of the
local executive committee was held in the Pedagogic Museum,
tables of the shootings gave, as a minimum monthly number of
those shootings, 432.[104]

[_See page 89._]

Particularly large was the number of Petlura “conspiracies” then discovered. In connection with them sixty-three persons (including a Colonel Evtikhiev) were shot in Odessa,[105] batches of fourteen[106] and sixty-six in Tiraspol,[107] thirty-nine in Kiev (mostly members of the _intelligentsia_),[108] and 215 in Kharkov--the victims in the latter case being Ukrainian hostages slaughtered in retaliation for the assassination of certain Soviet workers and others by rebels.[109] And, similarly, the _Izvestia_ of Zhitomir reported shootings of twenty-nine co-operative employees, school teachers and agriculturists who could not possibly have had anything to do with any Petlura “conspiracy” in the world.

Everywhere, too, we read in Bolshevist journals such _communiqués_ as: “Five counter-revolutionary organisations, covering the whole of Podolia, have been discovered,” “Sixteen persons have been shot at Chernigov,” and the rest. Hence it is no more than the truth to say that the mass of such official printings renders individual distinction between them almost impossible.

Akin to the fate of the Ukraine was the fate of White Russia, where the year 1921 proved particularly prolific of reports of “rebellions,” and of accounts of punitive expeditions dispatched to shoot--with or without trial--all who had participated, or been reported as participating, in those “rebellions.” “Dozens of persons were shot daily,” a correspondent of the _Dielo_[110] has stated. “In particular were many White Russian leaders put to death. At Minsk a trial of Savinkov supporters has just ended. Seven have been executed.”[111] Also the English _Daily Mail’s_ correspondent at Reval wrote: “Here, during September, forty-five persons were shot.”

To the Che-Kas of Podolia and Volhynia there was entrusted the special duty of “cleansing” the two provinces of all who had displayed pro-Polish sympathies during the Polish occupation; and this process of “cleansing” the Che-Kas was effected with the usual mass arrests, the usual mass deportations to the central provinces, and the usual mass executions.[112]

Hence there seems to have been always an intimate connection between “movements of rebellion” and wholesale shootings of Left Social Revolutionaries, of Anarchists, and even of Tolstoyan Anarchists, the most pacific of the sections of the Anarchical group--mostly, in the case of the latter, for refusals to serve in the Bolshevist Red Army; and an authoritative pamphlet on the subject which has been published in Berlin says, after citing a large number of instances of the kind:

We could go on citing instances indefinitely, and so use them
as to carry conviction that even the most painstaking historian
of the future could never collate a volume of material which,
compared with our own volume, would figure otherwise than as a
drop of water beside all the seas.

To describe the Russian Anarchist movement, or such of its curious manifestations as more than once led the late Prince Kropotkin to dissociate himself from its policy, is no part of my purpose; but at least it may be said that, though the Bolshevists were never averse to availing themselves of the Anarchists’ assistance whenever such assistance happened to seem convenient, they, equally, never were averse to treating Anarchist elements with the utmost brutality whenever those elements anywhere made good a footing.

The above-mentioned Anarchist pamphlet also reprints an important telegram which the Central Government dispatched to Rakovsky, then head of the Ukrainian Council of People’s Deputies, with regard to preparations for suppressing Anarchist organisations in Southern Russia. The message, a confidential one, said:

Let all Anarchists within Ukrainian territory, but more
especially amongst Makhno’s _entourage_, be placed under
surveillance forthwith, in order that there may be prepared
against them any evidence--preferably evidence criminal in
nature--which may prove useful in the future towards indictment
of such persons. But also do you keep both this order and that
evidence secret, and do no more than issue instructions in so
far as the message, for the present, demands. Only, wherever
feasible, let Anarchists be arrested and arraigned _at
once_.

And upon the Crimea followed Siberia[113]: and, upon Siberia, Georgia. Acting by itself alone, the Trans-Caucasian Che-Ka made thousands of arrests, and carried out hundreds of shootings. Relating his impressions of the Bolshevist _régime_ in Tiflis during its first few days of being, a refugee from Batoum told the _Roul’s_ correspondent in Constantinople that, during that time:

The town was wholly given up to pillage and rapine.... One
night a friend of mine saw a huge pile of corpses--300 or so of
them--lying in the Cathedral Square. All the house walls around
them were bespattered with blood, and evidently a very large
number of executions had taken place. In the pile were men and
women, were old and young, were military and civilian, were
Georgian and Russian, were rich and poor.

The officials most active in the region were the infamous Peters already mentioned, the Artabekov who had ravaged the Northern Caucasus, and the notorious sailor Pankratov--the last-named a man who, after assisting to quell the Astrakhan rising, and distinguishing himself in Siberia, had transferred his energies to Baku, where on the island of Nargen he slaughtered over 100 intellectuals and industrial workers.

Meanwhile, what was happening in the centre of Russia, where civil war had been over for a long time past, and the immediate results of such war had faded? There happened what took place everywhere else during 1921; there hundreds of persons were being shot either for having participated in some real or invented conspiracy, or for having vented some hasty protest against the Bolshevist tyranny, or because (this happened most often of all) their execution was capable of being presented in the guise of a belated punishment for a real or an invented criminal offence. Of this latter class a good instance is a Pskov trial of a group of chemists, merely for having sold alcohol, with a brutal execution of eight of their number[114]; whilst a trial of some officials of the State Defence Department in Moscow in October led to ten or twelve more shootings; and other persons were awarded the death sentence for alleged abuses in their work at the Commissariats of Finance and Public Health. Vishniak’s book, _The Black Year_, also records that, taking the month of June alone, tribunals shot, during that period, in Moscow 748 persons, Petrograd 216, Kharkov 418, and Ekaterinodar 315.

[_See page 92._]

As regards the first three months of 1922, figures of Che-Ka exploits are to be gained from the _Posledniya Novosty_ of May 5, which cites an official report for the period, and quotes items of 4300 persons shot, and 114 risings quelled, for the twelve central provinces, added to mass shootings in Yaroslavl, Saratov, Kazan, and Koursk, and to a total of 347 shot in Moscow during the month of January alone. Similarly, the _Golos Rossii_ obtained information from the statistical branch of the Commissariat of Transport to the effect that during 1921 the “railway courts” shot, on their own responsibility, 1759 victims--passengers and employees alike.

Besides, shootings took place from which every human sentiment would instinctively revolt. An instance is the execution of five lads, out of twenty-seven put on their trial, at Orel.[115]

In Odessa, also, the dispersal of the All-Russian Committee for Assistance of the Starving was followed by the shooting of twelve persons whom the Odessan _Izvestia_ alleged to have been connected with that organisation. And when six persons succeeded in escaping from the concentration camp at Ekaterinburg the director of the “Department of Penal Labour” proceeded to the camp from Moscow, had the ex-officers confined in the camp paraded before him, selected twenty-five, and shot them out of hand “as a warning to the rest.”[116]

Again, that autumn sixty-one persons were shot in Petrograd in connection with the so-called “Tagantsev conspiracy,”[117] whilst a rising at Kronstadt so alarmed the Bolshevists that they shot sailors in thousands. Also, according to a statement published in the German journal, _Frankfurter Zeitung_, the naval garrison of Petrograd lost 2500 men between February 28 and March 6. And a few of their number who contrived to escape to Finland reported that the shootings were carried out on the ice of the frozen river before the Fortress of SS. Peter and Paul. Oranienbaum’s quota in the same connection, it has been estimated, was 1400, and included amongst its victims six priests who somehow had got mixed up with the affair.[118]

Similarly, a Saratov Social Revolutionary and Menshevist conspiracy--to be more exact, rebellion--which the excessive taxations in kind had evoked, was followed by local mass arrests and shootings, though, of course, the official _communiqué_ said that only “twenty-seven” had been shot; and we do not know the real figure--we know only that a large number of hostages selected from amongst school teachers, professional men, and ex-Tsarist officers and officials was seized in _anticipation_ of a peasant rising, and eventually shot in the local gaols[119]; and that in connection with that, or with some other, “conspiracy,” a batch of fifty-eight Social Revolutionaries of the Left were executed for “banditism”--in reality for participation in the rising.[120]

Again, a railway workers’ rebellion in Ekaterinoslav had, as a sequel, a list of “fifty-one” victims, which means, probably, that the true number was considerably larger. Indeed, we read in Z. U. Arbatov’s reminiscences, entitled _Ekaterinoslav_, 1917–1920,[121] that after 200 workmen had been arrested, and fifty sentenced to execution at once, the rest were, later, and by night, conveyed in two motor-lorries (the date being June 2) to a spot on the river Dnieper where, with a machine-gun trained upon them from behind, the whole were so shot that their bodies fell into the water, to be carried away by the current, and only a few were left stranded on the margin. And later more railway employees were sentenced and executed by the All-Ukrainian Che-Ka at Kharkov. The foregoing details Arbatov had from Bolshevists’ own statements. A minor rising at Kronstadt was suppressed in the same manner.

At Byisk a “conspiracy” led to 500, or more, arrests and eighteen shootings; a “conspiracy” (of ex-officers and _koulaki_[122]) in the Semiriechen district to forty-eight shootings; and a “conspiracy” at Elizabetgrad to shootings of fifty-five out of eighty-five persons arrested.

Next, the period arrived when Cossack refugees began to be compulsorily restored to their homes from overseas. They reached home to find not an amnesty, but punishment, awaiting them. A Cossack named Chouvillo who contrived to escape from Yisk after he had been repatriated thither subsequently informed certain foreign-published Russian journals that, out of a party of 3500 of his comrades, as many as 894 had been shot.[123] This statement may have been exaggerated, but at least no doubt exists that there were frequent shootings of legally or illegally repatriated Cossack officers; many such cases stand recorded for the year under review (1921). A correspondent of the Parisian Russian National Committee has informed us, in an article entitled “The Return”[124] (an article based upon items which Odessan Bolshevist journals themselves had published), that as soon as the S.S. _Reshed Pasha_ reached Novorossisk from Constantinople during the April of 1921, 30 per cent. of her passenger complement of 2500 were shot, and that the same had been done after a previous trip of hers with 1500.

In our own case the officers and soldiers on board were shot
at once; whilst of the previous party of 1500, 500 were shot
at once, and the remainder dispatched to various concentration
camps of the north, where certain death awaited them.

And even a respite from execution in no way guaranteed security against execution in the future. This we learn from a letter as recent as the November or the December of 1923 which was published in No. 16 of the _Kasachyi Doumy_ (“Cossack Opinion”), and says, amongst other things, that no one who landed at Novorossisk at the period of which I am speaking could have failed often to hear the code phrase, “To be set apart for service in Mogilev.”[125] So much, then, for the system of deporting the compulsorily repatriated to the interior. Only the innocence of a credulous foreigner could have made Dr. Nansen believe that he found social rights still existent in Soviet Russia, or state, on April 21, 1923, that, “with regard to repatriations of Cossacks from the Balkan States, the Soviet Government is keeping faith in this respect, and fulfilling all undertakings given,” seeing that those undertakings had been defined by two clauses saying:

(1) That the Soviet Government binds itself herewith to extend
the amnesties of November 3 and November 10 to all Russian
refugees repatriated through the good offices of the High
Commissioner of the League of Nations; and (2) that the Soviet
Government binds itself herewith to afford Mr. John Garvin
and other accredited representatives of Dr. Nansen in Russia
every facility for holding unhindered converse with repatriated
refugees, to the end that such representatives may verify the
fact that the Soviet Government is applying the amnesties named
to all refugees without exception.

And if Dr. Nansen could add to the above statement the words, “Certainly, two repatriated refugees have been arrested for minor offences, but already delegates from myself are negotiating with the Government with regard to these two persons’ fate,” his faith in the written word of a Bolshevist and his ignorance of Russian realities must alike have been great! For how could a private person--even a delegate from the High Commissioner of the League of Nations--control an independent Soviet Government with regard to that Government’s refugees, seeing that for such a purpose a State would need to have been formed within a State, and provided with its own secret service? Besides, the policy of the Soviet Government is a policy capable always of postponing its wreakings of revenge, so that persons may “disappear,” may be sent into exile, or thrown into gaol, long after they have been granted official guarantees of immunity.

Is any further proof of the existence of such a policy required? Proof can be discovered at every turn. A good instance is a case tried before the Military Tribunal of Moscow. During the year 1919 an officer named Chougounov deserted from the Red Army, but returned to Russia four years later, and was put upon his trial. True, he expressed “whole-hearted repentance,” and, the locality whence he had returned being Poland, he had, before returning thence, obtained from the Russo-Ukrainian Mission in that country a licence to return, and a recommendation to the All-Russian Executive Committee that he should be reinvested with civil rights; yet on May 18 he was arrested, brought before the Military Tribunal of Moscow, and, “in view of his whole-hearted repentance, and of his voluntary return to Russia, and of his class origin” (he was a peasant’s son) sentenced only to a term of--ten years’ “imprisonment in strict isolation”!

_The Years 1922 and 1923._

Certain persons, particularly foreign visitors who have scraped together a superficial acquaintance with Russian life (M. Herriot is an example of the type), declare that terrorism in Russia is a thing of the past.

Well, even if we suppose that figures issued by the foreign-published Russian press were invariably exaggerated (including the figures said to have been derived from the Bolshevists’ Commissariat for Foreign Affairs itself, and stating that 2372 persons were shot during the month of May 1922 alone), the figures, whether exaggerated or not, are still horrifying as indicating the extent to which political life in Russia had become extinct, the country come to resemble a skeleton-strewn field, and all energy to rebel, all will to vent an open protest, fled from an abject, nerveless, supine population. Indeed, I should be only too glad to believe that the figures were exaggerated. Again, according to figures issued by the State Political Department itself, the O.G.P.U., a continuation of the Che-Ka organisation, 262 persons were shot during January and February 1922, and 348 during April, and 164 (including seventeen priests) during the one night of May 7–8, and 187 (at Kharkov) and 209 in Kharkov Province, and 200 in Petrograd, during May in general; even if we suppose that these figures, too, were exaggerated it was at least hypocrisy on Stallin’s part when he informed the Muscovite branch of the Communist Party in August of the year named that “we _shall_ have to resort to terrorism,” and, in defence of the mass arrests of intellectuals then being carried out, to say:

Before long our enemies will be forcing us back upon Red
Terrorism, and compelling us to reply to their activities with
such measures as were necessitated during the years 1918 and
1919. So let those enemies remember that we do not fail to keep
our promises. Already their experiences during the two years
named should have taught them that much.... It is for those
who sympathise with our political adversaries to dissuade
them from going too far, from over-stepping permissible bounds
of opposition to our policy. For unless they cease from those
activities, we shall be forced to resume usage of a weapon which
we should never have used at all if we had not seen our warnings
disregarded. To our adversaries’ stealthy blows we must oppose
blows open, stern, directed against every adverse quarter,
whether actively or passively operative.

For there was no need for such threats: still vivid before the public memory were executions of churchmen for opposing confiscation of ecclesiastical property--the most dastardly executions that could possibly have been conceived, seeing that they were due merely to the mildest of protests against ecclesiastical spoliation, even as was the case in July last, when the Revolutionary Tribunal of Petrograd tried sixteen members of local religious communities, and condemned eleven of them to death--the condemned including Benjamin, Metropolitan of Petrograd, himself. And to this, and to the earlier case in Moscow, when fifty-four ecclesiastics were tried, and twelve of them sent for execution, there must be added instances in the provinces of Chernigov, Poltava, Smolensk, Archangelsk, Staraya Roussa, Novocherkassk, and Vitebsk, where clergy were shot in batches of from one to four on charges of having protested against despoilment of sacred ornaments.

With these executions for clerical “counter-revolution” went shootings after purely political trials on charges of having belonged to non-existent “counter-revolutionary organisations.” And trials of the sort are still going on: as recently as February 22, 1922, the _Posledniya Novosty_ published a striking letter concerning the “liquidations” of some risings in the Ukraine which said: “Such ‘liquidations’ constitute, in reality, a war of extermination whose object is to finish off any intellectuals who have survived previous efforts of the sort.” And take the following extract from a letter written by a refugee from Proskurovo during January of that year. It says:

Owing to the almost incredible terrorism which has been rampant
here (in Proskurovo) during the past few months, people have
been compelled to escape whilst there was yet time. Such
intellectuals as remained behind the Bolshevists are already
arresting.... Koritsky, Chouikov, and my brother have been
shot. Our Elder committed suicide just before he was led out
to execution. And his wife is a prisoner in the local gaol....
Many have been put to death for participating in a “conspiracy.”
Twenty-three were shot on the 18th last.... As the victims were
being led out to be slaughtered nine of their companions burst
through the gaol doors, and escaped. I, too, succeeded in doing
that when my turn came. This was during the fourth series of
arrests.... How you may be thankful that you have got clear of
Proskurovo! At least you have escaped the spectacle of wives
and mothers and children waiting outside the Che-Ka building
on execution days!... None of the persons executed had had
anything to do with political agitation at all. Most of them had
merely agreed with the “Ukraine Movement.” They fell victims to
evidence concocted by the Che-Ka itself. In fact, the Che-Ka has
concocted the whole of this “Proskurovo conspiracy” on the usual
degraded lines which Che-Kas affect.