CHAPTER II
A FAMOUS "AMNESTY"
My Foolish Credulity — A Boy Tchekist — Taken Out to be Shot — Mutual Reprisals — A Gallant Mountaineer — Identified by an Imbecile.
In November, 1922, in honour of the anniversary of the October Revolution in 1917, the Council of People's Commissaries of the R.S.F.S.R.[3] (Russia then still lived under that pseudonym) extended a full amnesty to all opponents of the Soviet power. This amnesty, which was signed by the flower of the Communist Party, formally promised complete oblivion of every manner of offence committed by White Guards of all ranks and categories.
I cannot say how I, who knew better than anyone the value of Bolshevist promises, who had waged a life-and-death struggle with the Soviet power for so many years, could have believed in the good faith of people who always lie. I paid for my unpardonable stupidity by my sufferings in the Solovetsky prison. May my fate serve as a warning to other credulous people!
On April, 1923, I presented myself at the Tcheka offices at Batoum. I was interrogated by an examining judge remarkable for his youth — an impudent lad of seventeen. The detective service in Soviet Russia is brilliantly staffed! When he had totted up my "offences" in detail, the boy Tchekist concluded his interrogation with the jeering cry:
"Ha, we don't use kid gloves with fellows like you!"
Nor did they. When I referred to the formal phrases of the amnesty, the examining judge roared with laughter.
"Take him to the cells. They'll show him the amnesty there."
They did.
I will not describe in detail my moral and physical sufferings, the blows, the insults, the attempts to extract information from me by provocateur methods, which I endured while in the custody of the Batoum Tcheka. Suffice it to say that I was finally taken to be examined at two o'clock in the morning. They again went through my biography for the last few years with the greatest exactitude, and proposed that I should confess everything and name my principal accomplices, ten in number (the number was given quite correctly). Persuasion was exchanged for abuse, and abuse for revolver shots over my head to intimidate me.
I denied my guilt, and refused to name any accomplices. I and three other men were taken into the yard to be shot. They killed one prisoner two paces from me. The second likewise was shot dead. The third fell, covered with blood. They yelled at me:
"Now it's your turn!"
I stood beside the bodies of my companions in imprisonment. Almost touching my head with the muzzles of their revolvers, the Tchekists exclaimed:
"Now confess!"
I was silent. For some reason they did not kill me. Probably my life was still useful to them in some way.
I spent a few days in the prison of the Batoum Tcheka. Then they took me to the Trans-Caucasian Tcheka at Tiflis; its headquarters were in the Sololaki quarter, in the centre of the town. As regards cruelty, there was no difference between the regime there and that at Batoum. The president and omnipotent master of the Trans-Caucasian Tcheka was at that time the well-known Tchekist Mogilevsky,[4] who was killed not long ago in an aeroplane accident.
Blood was flowing in streams in the Caucasus. The Communists were taking a triple vengeance on their prisoners for the murder of Vorovsky in Switzerland, the insurrection in Georgia and Lord Curzon's ultimatum. In the countless prisons of the Caucasus thousands of people were being slaughtered daily.
The Caucasus has not yet been finally pacified by the Communists, and at the time of which I write the whole country was ablaze with civil war. Insurgent bands burst into the towns and hanged all the Bolsheviks. The latter replied by intensifying their already merciless reign of terror.
One day the rebels descended on the "Kursk settlement," close to Vladikavkaz, and, among other things, drove off the herds belonging to the Soviet. A pursuit was set on foot, headed by the celebrated executioner, the Lett Shtybe, President of the Gpu[5] of the Mountain Republic. The rebel band went into hiding in the mountains, taking the cattle along with it, and could not be traced. The Tchekists succeeded in discovering and surrounding in the mountains only one rebel leader.
The mountaineer, with a precipitous wall of rock behind him and plenty of cartridges in his pocket, withstood an attack from several squadrons of Communists for several hours. One of his well-aimed shots killed Shtybe himself. Although several times wounded, he killed eleven more Communists. At last he fell mortally wounded. In his rifle, which his cold fingers held close to his face, not one cartridge was found; he had fought to the last. He was tied to a horse's tail and dragged to Vladikavkaz.
The executioner Shtybe was buried with pomp and ceremony in the Pushkin Square at Tiflis. The death of this rascal was made a pretext for reprisals against the prisoners.
The cowherd in charge of the beasts which the insurgents had driven off into the mountains was a boy, deaf and dumb from birth, and clearly half-witted. This imbecile creature was ordered by the Tchekists to identify, from among all the prisoners in the gaols of the Caucasus, "those concerned in the murder of that unforgettable champion of the happiness of the proletariat, Comrade Shtybe."
The presidential body of the "Gortcheka" (Tcheka of the Mountain Republic)[6] did not trouble to ask itself how we, who had been in a Tcheka prison at the time of Shtybe's death and long before it, could have been concerned in his "murder." We were drawn up in two ranks. If the cowherd stopped in front of a man, uttered an inarticulate sound, or simply smiled foolishly, it was considered sufficient proof that the man who had attracted the half-witted boy's attention had "murdered the unforgettable Comrade Shtybe." He immediately received the order, "Two paces to the front!" and a bullet was put through his head.
Several dozen men were killed in this manner before my eyes. Then, walking along the second rank, the cowherd stopped before me. Death seemed inevitable. But, apparently, the public prosecutor of the Mountain Republic, Toguzoff, who was walking behind the cowherd, and who had interrogated me only the night before and knew perfectly well that I had absolutely nothing to do with Shtybe's death, felt a momentary prick of conscience, and led the cowherd on just as he was distorting his countenance in an idiotic grimace before me.
This public prosecutor is a characteristic figure. Kazbek Toguzoff, an ex-officer, in 1917 carried on a desperate struggle in the Caucasus in support of the Provisional Government, demanding the dissolution of all the Soldiers' and Workmen's Councils by armed force and the immediate hanging of all Bolsheviks. By unascertainable methods he entered the Communist Party, and to-day he is still hanging men — but now anti-Bolsheviks!
[3] "Russian Socialist Federated Soviet Republic." The present official designation of Soviet Russia is "Union of Socialist Soviet Republics" (U.S.S.R.).
[4] Mogilevsky was Mrs. Stan Harding's examining judge during her imprisonment in Moscow in 1920; see her book "The Underworld of State" (Allen & Unwin).
[5] Gpu (Gosudarstvennoe Polititcheskoe Upravlenie), the present official designation of the Tcheka. The sham "abolition" of the Tcheka in 1922 and its "replacement" by the Gpu are ironically described by Mr. George Popoff in his book "The Tcheka." The synonymous terms "Gpu" and "Tcheka" are used indifferently by the author.
[6] In Russian Gorskaya Respublika, hence the portmanteau-words "Gortcheka" and "Gor-Gpu."