Chapter IV: The CIVIL War

The truth was dragged from them by torture under their
finger-nails; explosives were rammed down their throats;
they had the flesh of their shoulders cut into the form of
shoulder-straps and stripes; they were converted into unicorned
devils.... To think of the lies that must have been employed,
during those years of damnation, to drive mad, and to slaughter,
a whole army, a whole realm, a whole people!--MAXIMILIAN
VOLOSHIN.

In its general report on Bolshevist activities during the years 1918 and 1919 the Denikin Commission has stated that the number of victims during the two years totalled 1,700,000; and, seeing that the materials collected by that Commission have not yet been fully, or anything like fully, examined, and I myself have confined my figures exclusively to deaths resultant from “legal” or “administrative” action, to deaths following upon sentence passed directly by a revolutionary authority, there can be little doubt that the actual total of the Terror’s victims has been incomparably larger. This the reader will have seen for himself when I touched upon the quellings of rebellions. The peculiar difficulty lies in distinguishing between excesses born of civil war, or revolutionary “restorations of order” of the kind carried out by such forces as the detachments of brutish sailors and female “punitives” whom the ex-gaol bird Maroussia led to Essentouky during the March of 1918, and wreakings of Red Terrorism on a preconceived plan. For upon the heels of an advancing Bolshevist force there never failed to follow a wreaking of vengeance equally upon a defenceless foe and upon an innocent civilian population, and a formation of a military Che-Ka, since the name of an agency of massacre does not matter where massacre is concerned.

I should have been glad to spare the reader’s feelings in this regard. Yet, for all that, I must bring to his notice a few instances of what I mean, even if in such instances I am not presenting absolutely the worst examples of the animal and human fury which they illustrate.

I will begin with “Case No. 40,” taken from the Denikin materials--the report of an inquiry held into Bolshevist activity in Taganrog between January 20 and April 17, 1918. Says the report:

On the night of January 18 the Bolshevists of Sivers’ Army
entered, and set to work in the town of Taganrog. And on the
20th the cadets of the Military School concluded with them an
armistice--they surrendered on condition that they should be
allowed to leave the town without hindrance. But the Bolshevists
did not observe the agreement. On the contrary, they began,
that very same day, an exceptionally cruel series of executions
by seizing both officers and cadets and all others who had
in any capacity acted against them, and either shooting them
in the street as soon as captured, or sending them to one or
another of the factories to be shot. Also, for several days
and nights they carried out house-to-house searches in every
quarter of the town, that they might thoroughly round up the
“counter-revolutionaries,” and showed no consideration even
for the wounded and sick, but penetrated into the hospitals,
dragged thence all wounded officers or cadets whom they found
there, and shot them forthwith in the street. Nor did the
mere deaths of these men satisfy the Bolshevist assailants.
The latter also made sport both of the dying and of the dead.
Particularly brutal was the murder of the Adjutant of the
Military School, a staff-captain who had been seriously wounded.
For some of the pro-Bolshevist nurses of the hospital took
the wounded officer by the arms and legs and dashed him to and
fro against a wall until he was dead. But in most cases such
“counter-revolutionaries” were removed to a metal or a tanning
factory for execution--most of all to the Baltic Works, where
they were killed in fashions so bestial as to lead even some
of the pro-Bolshevist factory hands to stand appalled at the
deeds, and to voice protests against them. For example, in a
metal factory some Red Guards bound the arms and legs of a
batch of fifty cadets so as to bend the victims’ bodies double,
and threw them, bound, into the flames of the blast furnaces.
And later the victims’ remains were found on the refuse heaps
outside--fused with the slag. In addition, mass shootings and
executions by other means took place in the factory compounds.
Some of the corpses subsequently found there were too disfigured
even to be identifiable. And there they lay (the relatives being
forbidden to remove them) until, in some cases, dogs and swine
dragged them away into the open country, and devoured them.
Only when the Bolshevists had been expelled from the Taganrog
district were police able to exhume some of the corpses, and
have them examined, and reported upon, by medical experts.
Subsequently an assistant in the task of exhumation deposed
before us that beyond a doubt some of these victims of the
Bolshevist Terror had been subjected to agonising tortures
before final dispatch. And so remarkable was the uncalled-for
cruelty with which some of those unfortunates must have been
slaughtered as to afford a vivid illustration of the lengths to
which class hatred and human brutality will run. For on some of
the corpses were not only wounds of the kind which rifle fire
ordinarily causes, but also wholesale cuts and stab wounds,
obviously inflicted before death. And sometimes the number
of such wounds was so large as to show that the victim had
literally been _hacked_ to death, whilst in other cases the
head lay shattered, and in others the head had been transformed
into an almost shapeless mass in which the last trace of the
facial contours lay lost. Lastly, there were corpses whence the
limbs and ears had been cut off, and yet others which still
had surgical dressings upon them--clear proof that it was from
hospitals and infirmaries that the victims had been dragged to
their deaths.

Descriptions of Bolshevist advances and massacres during the March and the April of 1918 are similar. In the Kuban district not a single _stanitza_ (Cossack village) occupied by the Bolshevists’ Don Army failed to pay a full toll of victims. This was particularly the case with the _stanitza_ of Ladishen, where seventy-four officers and three women were hacked to pieces. And in Ekaterinodar, again, wounded men were chopped to fragments with hatchets, and others had their eyes gouged out. And even as brutally were forty-three officers slaughtered at Novocherkassk. Naturally, such massacres provoked rebellions; and of course there followed upon the rebellions reprisals. In his book, _Notes on the Russian Turmoil_ (Vol. III, p. 153), Denikin remarks: “The history of these Cossack risings is as tragic as it is uniform.” To give an example: in some villages in the district of Labin, which rebelled in June, 770 of the inhabitants were executed by the Bolshevists over and above those who had fallen in the actual fighting. Scores of such appalling and inhuman massacres could be cited.

And similar scenes were witnessed in Sebastopol, Yalta, Aloushta, Simferopol, Theodosia, and other towns of the Crimea. In “Case No. 56” we find related the story of the so-called “Saint Bartholomew’s Eve” which was perpetrated in Eupatoria on January 14, when, on the Red Army reaching the town, there began such mass arrestings of officers and the well-to-do and all who were reputed to be “counter-revolutionaries” that within three or four days over 800 persons were lying in Bolshevist places of confinement. And some of the executions there we find described as follows:

The condemned were led forth on to the upper deck (the scene
was aboard of the S.S. _Roumania_, an auxiliary
cruiser), and made sport of, and then shot and flung into the
water. Also, a few were thrown into the water alive, with
their arms tied at the elbows and the wrists, and twisted
backward, or else with their legs tied, or else with their heads
wrenched backward with cords, and tied to their arms and legs,
or else with gun-wheels lashed to the legs.... And on another
day forty-six of the captured officers were lined up beside
the bulwarks of the transport _Truvor_, and, after they
had had their arms bound, kicked, one by one, into the sea by
a sailor, so that all were drowned. And these slaughterings
the relatives and wives and children of the slaughtered had
to witness as they stood weeping ashore, and beseeching mercy
for their kinsmen. As for the sailors, they only laughed. The
most terrible incident of all was the death of Staff-Captain
Novatsky, the officer accused by the sailors of having led the
Eupatoria rising. Though already he was seriously wounded,
the Bolshevists restored him to consciousness, and flung him
into the cruiser’s furnace. And many other executions took
place on board the _Truvor_. Before each such execution
on that vessel (the details had been arranged beforehand by
the local “trial commission”) sailors were dispatched to the
open hatchway to call aloud the name of the next victim; and
upon that the man summoned was surrounded with an escort, and
marched through other armed Red Guards to the precise spot of
execution, where armed sailors took him over, removed from him
all his garments, fettered his arms and legs, laid him flat upon
the deck of the ship, cut off his ears, nose, lips, generative
organ, and (though this last only in certain cases) arms, and,
finally, threw him into the sea: after which they washed down
the deck to remove the traces, and turned to the next item in
their filthy work. All the night was taken up with that work,
for each execution occupied from fifteen to twenty minutes.
And whenever the victims’ terrible cries and moans threatened
to become audible to the remaining prisoners in the hold, the
cries were drowned by starting the vessel’s engines, and so
leading the prisoners to think that the vessel was leaving the
harbour. In all, during those three days January 15, 16, and 17,
the transport _Truvor_ and the cruiser _Roumania_ saw
drowned, or otherwise done to death, no fewer than 300 officers.
And later a Bolshevist sailor named Koulikov stated to a meeting
of his comrades that he had thrown sixty victims into the sea
with his own hand.

Again, when some thirty or forty persons disappeared from the
town during the night of March 1, it was found later that they
had been taken to a spot on the seashore five versts away,
and there shot with explosive bullets. Moreover, it was found
that, before being shot, they must have been lined up before
a huge open grave, and then stabbed with bayonets and slashed
at with swords. Also, it came out that in many cases a man
had not been killed outright when he was shot, but had merely
fallen wounded and unconscious, and, in that condition, been
buried with the rest; and that once when the executioners had
been dragging a fallen man to the graveside by his legs he had
suddenly recovered consciousness, regained his feet, and run
for his life--whereupon, before he had covered more than twenty
_sazheni_, a second bullet had laid him low.

Again we find written in Krishevsky’s reminiscences:

When Bolshevist rule was established in the Crimea it was
established in the most bloodthirsty, cruel, and ruffianly
forms possible, as a rule based solely upon crude, tyrannical
local authority. And whole rivers of blood began to flow in the
towns, and Bolshevist sailors to rage everywhere, and robberies
to occur, until there had become formed a general, permanent
atmosphere of plunder and pillage of the citizens.

And to this Krishevsky adds a description of shootings of eighty officers in Yalta, of sixty in Theodosia, of 100 (with sixty ordinary citizens) in the prison yard at Simferopol, and so forth. Then he continues:

During the same February Sebastopol saw a second massacre of
officers, but this time a massacre so well organised that the
victims were slaughtered according to a regular schedule. And
not only were naval officers killed on this occasion, but also
_all_ officers, and likewise many prominent citizens. So
that, in all, the victims totalled something like 800 persons.

We know, too, that these victims were done to death in the foulest fashion, after first having had their eyes burnt out. And the Tartar population of the Crimea similarly perished in hundreds, for the Bolshevists knew that that population had no liking for the Bolshevist _régime_. “To establish the number of victims with any precision is impossible”--thus ran the Denikin Commission’s report with regard to the Bolshevists’ doings in Stavropol between January 1 and June 18, 1918. “As a matter of fact, people were shot with no previous examination or trial, but solely on the strength of verbal orders issued by town commandants, or by leaders of the Red Guard detachments.” Further confirmation of which is to be found in certain reminiscences written by B. M. Krasnov, ex-procurator of the district on behalf of the Provisional Government, and published by J. V. Hessen in _Archives of the Revolution_: in which reminiscences we read of precisely similar deeds, and also of outrages committed upon Kalmik women and children, and of cuttings off of victims’ ears, and of wholesale rapings and torturings of the pupils of a high school for girls.[139]

The materials collected by the Denikin Commission portray also things done in Kharkov and Poltava and other towns of the region. Here, again, we find ourselves confronted with every sort of outrage, and read of “corpses with hands chopped off,” “bones broken in half,” “heads wrenched from the trunk,” “jawbones shattered,” or “generative organs missing.” For every common grave yielded dozens of such bodies, and there was included amongst them that of the seventy-five year old Archbishop Rodion, who had been scalped before death.

And whenever advances or retreats of the Bolshevists during the civil war brought them to a place for the second time they took care that that second visit of theirs was even more terrible than the first, and marked by orgies no longer unpremeditated and elemental, but organised and systematised into a regular wreaking of brutish revenge. For example, let us take a description of the sanguinary scenes witnessed in Armavir when, in 1918, the Kuban Terror was drawing to its close. A significant feature is the fact that in this case revenge ceased to be directed exclusively against Russians, for the Denikin Commission has reported:

Earlier, in July, when General Borovsky’s division had entered
Armavir, the Armenian population of the place had welcomed
the General’s troops with bread and salt, and borne the whole
expense of burial of the officers who had fallen during the
advance; but now, when strategical considerations compelled
General Borovsky to leave the town, and the Bolshevists
returned, mass executions at once became the rule. The first to
be hacked to death were 400 Armenian refugees from Persia who
had pitched for themselves a camp beside the railway line. And
their women and children were slaughtered with the men. And,
that done, the executioners turned their attention to the town
itself. Over 500 peaceable citizens were either bayoneted or
sabred or shot in the town’s buildings, streets, and squares;
whilst Ibn Bok, the Persian Consul, also was hacked to death,
and, the Bolshevists having by this time forced their way into
the courtyard of the Consulate, 310 Persian subjects who had
fled thither for refuge and protection were massacred with
machine-gun fire.

Also, the remarkable book _Seventy-four Days of Bolshevist Rule_, written by A. Lokerman, and published in Rostov during 1918, gives us a description of like events in Rostov, and, referring to the local mass shootings in general, and to the massacres of hospital patients in particular, says:

After being divested of their clothing at Sivers’ headquarters
(save that a few were allowed to retain their trousers and
boots, and a few even their shirts as well, since those
garments could, of course, be removed after execution), the
prisoners, men naked and barefooted, were, in this twentieth
century, marched along a snow-covered street to the churchyard,
and shot. And though most of them died praying and crossing
themselves, it need hardly be said that such concessions to
“_bourgeois_ prejudice” as a blindfolding of the prisoners,
or a permitting of a priest to be present, were ignored.

Moreover, boys of fourteen and sixteen, including high school lads and students of the local training college, were shot for having enlisted in the Volunteer Army: Sivers’ headquarters had peremptorily ordered the killing of every ex-member of that Army, regardless of whether or not the victim had taken any real part in the Army’s activities, or of his age. Again, persons who set foot outside a dwelling after eight o’clock at night were shot--shot without delay; the patrol catching them in the deed at once carried them off to the nearest secluded spot, and made an end of the business. Another feature of the affair was that shootings were carried out against the walls of the local hippodrome, where everyone could view the spectacle, or against a railway embankment--and in both cases in broad daylight. And not infrequently the corpses were subsequently mutilated to the point of becoming unrecognisable. And of course the executions were accompanied with such catch cries as “Death to the _bourgeoisie_!” and “Death to the capitalists!” even though obviously the vast majority of the victims had had no sort of connection either with capitalists or capital, but were secondary school students, and _alumni_ of the local university, and representatives of the professions. Of course, also, the latter circumstance might make the affair seem, at first sight, to have been a massacre of intellectuals alone; but as a matter of fact the slaughtered were drawn from every class, but, above all, from the peasantry. In 1918, before their withdrawal from the district, the Bolshevists capped these revolting atrocities with a retreat as merciless in its progress as the advance had been; so that when, for example, they abandoned Sarapol, and found the task of evacuating the prisoners from the local gaol to be one of some difficulty, they effected a speedy clearance by at once shooting the whole of the gaol’s inmates.[140] Mr. Alston confirmed this by writing to Lord Curzon (on February 11, 1919): “One of the Bolshevist leaders stated publicly that, if the Bolshevists should be obliged to leave the town, they would first massacre a thousand of the local inhabitants.”[141]

The same British White Book has given us some interesting information concerning certain features of the civil war in North-Eastern Russia in 1918 and 1919. Sir Charles Eliot then wrote to Lord Curzon:

Usually victims were shot, but also they were either drowned or
sabred. As regards Perm and Kungur, victims were massacred at
the rate of thirty or forty or sixty at a time; whilst in many
cases these massacres were preceded with torturings and other
outrageous acts. For example, at Omsk some labourers were first
flogged and beaten with butt-ends of rifles and pieces of iron,
to make them give evidence; and often enough such victims have
had to dig their own graves before death, or to stand with their
faces to a wall whilst their executioners fired shots round and
about their ears, and only after a considerable time fired to
kill. I have been told this by persons actually respited from
such massacres.[142]

General Knox wrote to the British War Office:

At Blagoveschensk we found officers and men of Torbolov’s
detachment who had had gramophone needles thrust under their
finger-nails, and their eyes gouged out, and iron nail-marks
on the flesh where the shoulder-straps had been, so that the
bodies, frozen as stiff as statues, made a spectacle truly
hideous to look upon!... Removed to Blagoveschensk, the victims
had nevertheless been slaughtered at Metzanovaya.[143]

Below follows a report sent to Lord (then Mr.) Balfour by Mr. Alston on January 18, 1919, on the basis of statements made by the then Czech Chargé-d’Affaires, and with, for subject, certain remarkable events at Kiev.

Even the ferocious behaviour of the Turks in Armenia pales
before what the Bolshevists are doing in Russia.... During
the July fighting in the Usuri district a Dr. T---- found
bodies of Czech soldiers mutilated to the frightful extent of
having had generative organs cut off, heads cleft open, faces
slashed, eyes gouged out, or tongues extracted. Moreover, it has
been stated by Dr. Girsa, the Czech National Council’s local
representative, and by his assistant, that a year ago when the
Bolshevists captured Kiev and shot several hundred officers,
these officers were haled from their quarters, and, in spite
of the terrible coldness of the weather, stripped to the skin
except for their caps, bundled into carts and motor-lorries, and
forced to stand naked for hours in the piercing frost, until
their Bolshevist executioners should receive word to shoot them
either individually or in groups as best suited an individual
executioner’s fancy. Dr. Girsa then was surgeon in Civilian
Hospital No. 12, and, from the first, owing to the ruthless way
in which the Bolshevists attacked all officers and members of
the educated classes, this hospital became terribly overcrowded
with wounded men. And these had to be hidden in closets lest the
Bolshevists should drag them out into the street, and shoot them
out of hand. Even as it was, many of them were dragged out, and
massacred without mercy--officers in some cases suffering from
abdominal wounds or broken limbs or other such injuries. Also,
Dr. Girsa has told us that later people saw bodies of officers
being eaten by dogs where they lay, and that his assistant’s
wife beheld a whole car-load of frozen bodies being driven to
a dumping-place outside the town. Everywhere people were taken
from their homes in the middle of the night, and hospital
beds emptied, and patients in a gravely serious condition
slaughtered, and men shot without trial.[144]

In the same fashion Mr. Alston wrote to Mr. Balfour on January 14, 1919:

The number of brutally murdered, but innocent, civilians in
this town has run to hundreds, whilst officers who have been
taken prisoner by the Bolshevists have had their shoulder straps
nailed to their shoulders, and young girls been raped, and
civilian bodies found with the eyes scooped out and the noses
missing. At Perm twenty-five priests have been shot. Also,
Bishop Andronik has been buried alive. I have been promised the
totals of killed and other details later.

Hence, no matter whence it comes, or to what locality it relates, our information shows a uniform monotony of horror. Esthonia, Latvia, Azerbaijan--none were an exception to the rule. And German State Papers have said the same of Valk, Dorpat, Wesenburg, and elsewhere in that region; and the same with the British White Book--uniformly one reads, in these publications, of hundreds of persons with eyes gouged out, and the like. Also, the author of some reminiscences dealing with the rebellion in Transcaucasia has stated that, during an insurrection in Elizabetpol in 1920, 40,000 Mohammedans perished at the Bolshevists’ hands.[145]

Only by noting facts of the sort can we grasp the full extent of the phenomenon known to us as “The Red Terror,” for they appeared wherever civil war broke out. And the deeds which those facts represent were not deeds done in the heat of conflict, in the moment when the animal passions of humanity are most easily aroused, nor yet deeds which can be put aside with the comment either that they were “excesses of warfare,” or that they were perpetrated only by Chinese executioners, or by the “International Contingents” which became exceptionally notorious for their cruelty, and led Vershimir to make the typical comment that the “International Battalion” of Kharkov “committed atrocities exceeding even what we know as horrible.”[146] No; so far from the Bolshevists’ excesses being deeds born of a momentary impulse, they were deeds born of a regular system of cruelty, of a settled policy of preconceived intent. And a proof of this is that, shortly before the date of the attempt upon Lenin’s life, Latzis evolved, and published in the _Izvestia_ (he did so on August 23, 1918), “new regulations for civil war” which were to replace the old code evolved of custom and of convention, and, in particular, to do away with the rule about shooting prisoners of war. This rule Latzis considered to be especially “ridiculous.” “In a civil conflict,” he wrote, “we should take for our one law the maxim that all persons bearing arms against us must be slain, even if already wounded.” And the Bolshevists did not merely unchain the elemental passions: they also, for guiding those passions into the channels which they desired, evolved a regular propaganda system--an example of this being that they caused the doings in the Kuban district of March 1918 to be accompanied everywhere with the slogan of “Long live the Red Terror!” afterwards that slogan was adopted in due form by the Piatigorsk branch of the Communist Party.

From a Bolshevist who took part in the civil war in Southern Russia we have the following description of an amazing scene:

One day I found some Bolshevist Cossacks shooting officers
against a haystack. Truly I was pleased at this, for it showed
me that we had no aimless sport here, but civil war of the
right kind. So, riding up to the men, I saluted them. And they,
recognising me, cheered, and one of their number said: “So long
as we have Red officers like yourself we shall not want also for
White officers. Here are a few of them now being finished off.”
And I replied to this: “Quite right, my friends! Continue the
good work in constant remembrance that only by leaving not a
single White officer alive shall we attain freedom.”[147]