CHAPTER III
BLOOD STATISTICS
Let us build the new upon the ruins of the old.
The Che-Kas were not instruments of justice: the terminology of the Central Committee, of the organ of “prosecution without mercy,” did not understand them as such. Nor was a Che-Ka a court of inquiry; it was not a tribunal at all. In defining the purpose of the institution, the head of the model Che-Ka laid it down that
We, the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission, are a military organ, with, for our field of battle, the home front in a civil contest. It is not ours to sit in judgment upon the enemy. It is ours utterly to destroy him. Hence, never must a Che-Ka pardon, for its exclusive business is to exterminate all who may be standing on the other side of the barrier.
And the meaning of such “ruthless prosecution” is not difficult to understand when we recall how to “the dead letter of the law” there succeeded “revolutionary experience” and “the revolutionary sense.” For a sense of any kind is a thing subjective; whilst “experience” in such a connection never fails to lead to tyranny as a matter of fact—in the hands of a certain class of personnel, to the most appalling forms of tyranny. “We are not warring against individual bourgeois,” said Latzis’ article entitled “The Red Terror,” published on Nov. 1, 1918,
We are out to destroy the bourgeoisie as a class. Hence, whenever a bourgeois is under examination the first step should be, not to endeavour to discover material of proof that the accused has opposed the Soviet Government, whether verbally or actually, but to put to the witness the three questions: “To what class does the accused belong?” “What is his origin?” and “Describe his upbringing, education, and profession.” Solely in accordance with the answers to these three questions should his fate be decided. For this is what “Red Terror” means, and what it implies.
Nevertheless Latzis’ formula manufacture lacked originality, for he was but imitating Robespierre in the latter’s address to the Convention of France on the legality of mass terrorism. Said Robespierre: “To execute the enemies of one’s country, one needs but to establish the fact that they are themselves. Not their annihilation, but their chastisement, is what is called for.” As an instruction to the judges of a legal tribunal, the dictum needs no comment.
But, fully to grasp the meaning of the Red Terror, we must first determine the number of its victims.
And in this connection the vast, the unprecedented, area of slaughter covered by the Soviet itself will help us to elucidate the Red Terror’s system of application. Not that it is easy to determine the exact death statistics, and perhaps they never will be determined, seeing that the facts (1) that the names of the executed were published to the extent only of one per cent., (2) that most of the death sentences were carried out in secret dungeons, and (3) that many of the carryings-out were so contrived as to leave no trace behind them combine to render precision of fixation by an historian practically impossible.
The Year 1918
In writing his statistical articles, Latzis said:
The man in the street knows as well as do my colleagues of the Che-Ka that by this time the latter has brought about tens, and even hundreds, of thousands of executions.
This is true. Not for nothing do the three capital letters which stand for the title of the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission, of the Che-Ka, stand also for the three Russian words which denote “Death to every man.”[37] And though at first Latzis put forward only the fantastically insignificant figure of “22” as the number of victims slaughtered during the first half of the year 1918, he had later to estimate that the number of persons shot in the twenty central provinces during the second half amounted to 4500.
The only thing of which the Che-Ka can be accused is of excessive leniency of application of capital punishment. It cannot be accused of excessive severity in the enforcement of executions, for our strong iron hand has never ceased to seek to lessen its victims. True, local Che-Kas have not always borne this maxim in mind: yet it would be fairer to accuse the Che-Ka in this respect than the provincial institutions. As a matter of fact, we have been too easy-going, too magnanimous, towards our vanquished foe.
Whence it would seem that Latzis conceived even a total of 4500 victims to be too few, although it can easily be shown that, even at that, the Latzian statistics covered but a very limited field. The first volume of The Che-Ka Red Book (which still exists as a publication, and is distributed to responsible Bolshevist officials) furnishes us with an historical document without a parallel. For in that volume is “Order No. 4,” an Order which, dated July 21, 1918, and signed by one Lieutenant Balke, head of the German Commission which the Brest-Litovsk Treaty established, announced to the citizens of Yaroslavl that, the local detachment of the Northern Volunteer Army having surrendered to the Germans, it had therefore been handed over to the Bolshevist authorities, and 428 of its members shot. True, my card index gives the number of persons then executed as 5004!—but then my data concerning provincial localities reached me only casually, and in driblets, or whenever I could succeed in getting hold of a provincial journal.[38]
Also, it must be borne in mind that formation of correct ideas as to numbers of victims was rendered the more difficult through the fact that officials so greatly cultivated brevity of diction. Examples are that once the Che-Ka of the district of Klin (Province of Moscow) announced that “several” counter-revolutionaries had been shot, and the Che-Ka of Voronezh that “many” had been shot, and the Che-Ka of Sestiorelsk (Petrograd) that, “after careful inquiry, some shootings have been carried out,” whilst at all times the Bolshevist press made it its practice to publish reports with such obviously minimised coefficients as “one,” “three,” and the like.
Moreover, never was any statistical information whatsoever given concerning the mass executions with which it was the rule to accompany repressions of peasant and other risings. And the fact wholly puts out of the question exact fixation of numbers of victims sacrificed during the civil war phase. Therefore, my figures are valuable merely in so far as they make clearer than ever how absolutely incomplete are the Latzian returns.
In proportion as Soviet Russia expanded, in like proportion did the “humane activities” of Che-Kas expand, until by the year 1920, Latzis could come out with some fuller data, and state that from the year 1918 onwards as many as 6185 persons had been executed.[39] Yet still there remains the question whether this figure included the thousands of persons whom British returns reported to have been slaughtered in North-Eastern Russia (at Perm and elsewhere) during the period stated, for to the British returns in question there are added the words: “Constantly are persons of all classes, but more especially peasants, to be found resorting to this Consulate with stories of relatives murdered, and of Bolshevist mob fury wreaked.”[40] Moreover, what of the 2000 military officers massacred in Kiev in 1918, of the victims who were either shot or hacked to death in the theatre whither they had been summoned for “verification of their papers”? And what of the naval officers slaughtered in Odessa before the arrival of the Austrian troops (an English clergyman wrote at the time: “I have been told by a member of the Austrian Staff that the Bolshevists have supplied him and his colleagues with a list of over 400 officers murdered in Odessa and the district”[41]), or of the officers slaughtered at Sebastopol, or of the 1342 persons whom General Denikin’s Commission proved to have been shot in Armavir during the January and the February of 1918,[42] or of the Sebastopol hecatomb which V. M. Krasnov’s memoirs have described as carried out in batches of 67, 97, and over?[43]
The truth is that wherever the Bolshevists made their appearance some tens, or even hundreds, of executions followed; executions which no trial whatsoever had preceded; executions which were carried out merely on the strength of sentences passed by a local Che-Ka or some other temporary tribunal. True, these massacres in no way exceeded the other excesses of the civil war, but, for all that, they deserve to have devoted to them a separate chapter.
The Year 1919
Further on in his blood statistics Latzis states that during the year above-named the Che-Kas ordered 3456 persons to be shot. This makes a total of 9641 for the two years, with 7068 of the victims described as counter-revolutionaries, and the rest (this should be carefully noted) as persons shot, not for “bourgeois leanings” or “counter-revolution,” but for such offences against the ordinary law as “lapses in fulfilment of official duty” (632), profiteering (217), and purely criminal acts (204).[44] All of which constitutes proof that during the period in question the Bolshevists used capital punishment not only for coercion of the bourgeoisie, but also (and to a degree never previously attained by a presumably civilised State similarly placed) for service as a general punitive measure.
But, to proceed. Latzis’ figures purport to show that during the September of 1919 the Che-Kas shot only 140 persons, although for the same month—which, be it remembered, coincided with the “liquidation” of the famous counter-revolutionary plot with which the Socialist N. N. Shepkin was connected—the general press of the day gave 66 persons as shot in Moscow alone, and even the Bolshevist press admitted to a figure exceeding 150. Also, we have reliable evidence that, during July of that year, from 100 to 150 persons were shot in Kronstadt, even though 19 names only were made public, and that the Ukraine (where Latzis was raging in person) saw victims shot by the thousand, so that a Red Cross sister sent to England (for subsequent presentation to the International Red Cross Society at Geneva) an estimate of 3000 victims for the city of Kiev alone.[45] And an equally staggering total of Kievan shootings has been given by Nilostonsky, whom I have quoted already as the author of Der Blutrausch des Bolschewismus, and a writer who somehow contrived to acquire a particularly good knowledge of the doings of Kiev’s sixteen operative Che-Kas, and has proved that knowledge by the accuracy of his topographical description, and by the fact that he did not confine himself to personal observations alone, but also utilised the materials published by the Röhrberg Commission, whose members included lawyers and doctors, and by whom exhumed corpses were photographed. Well, Nilostonsky has declared that the subsequently identifiable persons then shot in Kiev amounted to 4800, and that the general total probably amounted to 12,000. For the Terror assumed such unprecedented forms in that city, and in the Ukraine at large, that at last the central authorities themselves felt forced to despatch a commission to inquire into the doings of the provincial Che-Ka. And, in passing, it is only fair to say that ex-prisoners subsequently examined by Denikin’s organisation were unanimous in their commendation of this Bolshevist-appointed mission.
And for a while the development of the Terror in the Ukraine halted; but as soon as ever Denikin evacuated Kiev mass executions became the rule again, and were continued throughout the July and the August of 1919 on such a scale that on a single day (August 16) the Izvestia published the names of 127 persons shot. And these victims, incidentally, were the last to have their names made known by official command.
On the outskirts of Saratov there lies a grisly ravine. It is the scene of a host of local executions. Let me quote the words of an eye-witness as given in that amazing book or compilation which, issued under the title of The Che-Ka, deals exclusively with Che-Ka activity, and was given to the world by the Social Revolutionary Party in Berlin. The exceptional value of the book lies in the fact that its materials were obtained at first hand from prisoners actually confined within prison walls, or from actual eye-witnesses of events, and that the text of it was drawn up by men who had learnt through bitter experience what they were writing about. For impressions from real life are worth all the dead and dry paper in the world, and I knew those men personally, and know, therefore, with what care they sifted their materials until they had made of The Che-Ka an historical document equally graphic and reliable in its description of the Russian phase of to-day. It was for this book’s benefit that a resident of Saratov has drawn the following picture of the Saratov ravine. The ravine lies on the Monastyrsky Slobodka side of the town; and in future years there will be erected there, I hope, a memorial to Saratov’s victims of the Revolution.
As soon as the snow melted in the ravine relatives and friends of the dead began to make their way thither, singly or in groups, but in every case with eyes glancing from side to side. And though at first such pilgrims were turned back by the authorities, in time the number of them became so great that no one could prevent their coming. In places the spring floods had washed away the sand, and left many of the victims of Bolshevist tyranny uncovered, so that knots of them strewed the bed of the ravine from the bridge to the far end, a distance of from 45 to 50 sazheni.[46] And how many were they? Probably no one could say. Even the local Che-Ka does not know. All that is known is that during the last two years (1918 and 1919) at least 1500 victims have been shot in the locality—some in accordance with sentence passed, and some in accordance with no sentence passed. Moreover, it was only during the summer and the autumn seasons that the condemned were brought to this ravine to be shot. In winter-time they were shot elsewhere.... The topmost layer consists of bodies shot as late only as last autumn: wherefore it is still fairly well preserved. The bodies lie clad in shirts alone, with their arms twisted behind them, and tied with cords. Some are thrust into sacks, and some are just as they fell. Truly the hollow is a terrible, a ghastly scene! But visitors do not hesitate to scan it closely. They are looking for some distinctive marking likely to help them in identifying a beloved one’s body. Daily the ravine grows more terrible as daily it engulfs victims. And each fresh batch of executions causes portions of the sides of the ravine to fall in, and to re-bury recently uncovered bodies. Hence the hollow ever grows wider, and ever fresh sacrifices to the Revolution are exhumed by the spring floods.
Is this all a tissue of lies?
In 1920 an equally gruesome utterance by Averbuch was published in Kishinev under the title of The Che-Ka of Odessa. It estimates that during the three months July-September 1919—that is to say, during the time between the official proclamation of the Terror and the Volunteer Army’s occupation of Kharkov—the Terror took a local toll of 2200 lives. But as a matter of fact executions began at Odessa long before the official proclamation of the Red Terror. They began there within a week or a fortnight of the Bolshevists’ capture of the town. Indeed, witnesses who gave evidence before the Denikin Commission were unanimous in saying that local mass shootings began to be carried out as early as the April of 1919, with public announcements of twelve, sixteen, or twenty-six executions at a time. At all events, during that April the local Izvestia wrote with the usual Bolshevist brutality:
The carp enjoys being seethed in cream, and the bourgeois being slain by a Power which is stern, and ready to kill him.... Even though our souls may revolt from the task, let us use strong measures, and bring the bourgeoisie to their senses, seeing that we need but shoot a few dozen of the fools, of the wastrels, and make the rest clean the streets, and set their womenfolk to scour out Red Guard barracks (though even this is too great an honour for them!), for the bourgeoisie to realise that our Government is a Government come to stay, and that it is useless to look for help from Englishmen or Hottentots.
And, on the Volunteer Army approaching the town in June, executions became more frequent still, and the local Izvestia wrote (the Terror had by then become “official”):
The Red Terror has been set in motion, and henceforth let all bourgeois strongholds be scoured out, and the bourgeois made to hiss, and the counter-revolutionary to crackle, under our sanguinary blows.... Let us dislodge such persons from their fastnesses with red-hot irons, and wreak upon them merciless vengeance.
And wreaked that “merciless vengeance” was. And with it went long lists of names which frequently omitted all mention of the “crime” committed, and adduced only a statement that the individual had been shot in the ordinary course of an officially ordained Terror. Margoulies’ book, Years of Fire,[47] instances many such cases.
Almost invariably, too, our information goes to show that these lists of twenty or thirty names represented, in reality, lists curtailed. For example, a woman whose position enabled her to keep a particularly close eye upon events in Odessa has stated that, on one occasion when only eighteen names were published in the local Izvestia, she herself reckoned the shot to have amounted to fifty, and that on another occasion when only twenty-seven names were published, the list comprised, in reality, seventy, inclusive of seven females, although the official communiqué had made no mention of women at all. Also, an “examining member”[48] who had the misfortune to be arrested by his colleagues afterwards deposed that during the local reign of terror as many as sixty-eight persons were shot in a night, whilst official statistics issued by the Denikin Commission tell us that the number of shot in Odessa between April 1 and August 1 amounted to 1300. Lastly, from Niemann’s memoirs we learn that, taking the South of Russia as a whole, the total of victims at that period cannot have reached less than 13,000 or 14,000.[49]
Again, a strike which occurred in Astrakhan during March simply drenched the district with working-people’s blood.[50] An eye-witness has related:
As a meeting of about 10,000 labourers was peaceably discussing the question of wages, suddenly a cordon of sailors and machine-gunners and bombers surrounded the crowd, and, on its not at once dispersing, poured into it a rifle volley, and followed that up with a rattle of machine-guns and a deafening roar of hand grenades. Through the assemblage there ran a sort of shudder: the people seemed to fall forward upon their faces in a short of horrible silence, for the rattling of the machine-guns was such as to drown both the moans of the wounded and the cries of the dying.... Next day all the town seemed empty. Utter stillness reigned. Many had succeeded in escaping elsewhere, and many gone into hiding; but, for all that, the workers lost 2000 through casualties, and the first act of the Astrakhan tragedy came to an end.
Still more tragic was the workers’ affair which began in Astrakhan on March 12. On this occasion the Bolshevists, after winning the “victory,” lodged a portion of their prisoners in six kommandaturs, and the rest upon barges and steamers, one of which, the Gogol, became particularly notorious for the atrocities which she witnessed. Then telegrams concerning the “rebellion” were dispatched to the centre, and Trotsky, head of the Revolutionary War Council, wired back: “Destroy without mercy,” and by the words sealed the fate of the imprisoned workmen. In fact, there then ensued, afloat and ashore, a raging orgy of bloodshed. Some of the prisoners were shot in the cellars and court-yards of the six kommandaturs, and others were hurled into the Volga from the barges and steamers, with stones tied about their necks, or with their hands and feet shackled. One solitary worker saved himself by hiding in an engine-room, and afterwards stated that during the first night alone 180 persons were thrown into the water. And multitudes also were shot in and about the kommandaturs: indeed, so many that it was only with great difficulty that their corpses could be conveyed to the cemetery, and dumped into heaps as “typhus cases.” And the local Che-Ka likewise had to order that if any bearer should “lose” a corpse en route, he himself should be executed. For days every morning dawned upon streets strewn with half-naked, blood-soaked bodies of workmen, and upon relatives wandering in the half light in search of their lost ones.
Those shot on March 12 and 13, the first two days of the repression, were exclusively members of the working classes; but later the authorities realised that they had been foolish enough to put themselves into the position of being unable to blame the bourgeoisie for the disturbance, and hastened to follow the principle of “Better late than never” (and to divert the public’s attention from their cruelty to the proletariat) by seizing any and every bourgeois, and executing those of them who happened to own any sort of immovable property, whether a house, or a shop, or a fishery, or anything else. “At dawn on March 15 not a dwelling in the town was not mourning a father, or a husband, or a brother. Some families, indeed, had lost every male member of their household.” A house-to-house visitation alone could have established the actual number of persons shot. At first the figure 2000 was mentioned, but this grew to 3000 as the authorities published lists of hundreds at a time. And by the end of the month it had grown to 4000. Yet even this did not cause the authorities to abate their punitive measures. They seemed to have made up their minds that the workers of Astrakhan should be compelled to pay also for the many other strikes that were taking place as far away from Astrakhan as Toula, Briansk, and Petrograd. For the March of 1919 saw refusals to work sweep over Russia like a tidal wave. Only towards the close of April did the shootings begin in any way to diminish; and by that time Astrakhan had become a truly deplorable spectacle with its empty streets, its mourning homes, and its “Orders” plastered on fences, shop fronts, and private windows.
Next let us consider that remote Turkhestan where, in January 1919, the Russian section of the population rose in revolt against the Bolshevist tyranny. The rising was quelled.
The affair began with a house-to-house visitation until the barracks and the railway workshops all were overflowing with prisoners. And during the single night of January 20–21 there were so many executions that the authorities had to throw the corpses in heaps upon the railway line. For over 2500 were slaughtered. On the 23rd the task of repressing the rising was transferred to a local court-martial; and to the end of the year this court-martial continued to arrest and shoot victims.
Were these victims, then, included in Latzis’ statistics? Or, if not, why not, seeing that during the early days of the rising the local Che-Ka was still operating in Turkhestan, and that its successor, the court-martial, was but a repetition of that Che-Ka to its very personnel?
The truth is that the question propounded by the Anarchist organisation Troud i Volya (“Labour and Freedom”) on May 20 has never been answered, either by the Pravda or by any other official publication. For the question was based upon information published by the Social Revolutionaries of the Left in No. 4 of their prohibited journal,[51] and ran: “Is it true that daily during the past few months the All-Russian Che-Ka has been executing batches of from twelve to twenty-six victims?” Never will the question be answered, for its very wording enshrined the truth. And it is manifest that that truth came to strike the Bolshevists as a disconcerting verity, for shortly afterwards an official decree transferred the right of passing death sentences exclusively to the permanent revolutionary tribunals. None the less, to the very eve of the promulgation of the decree we see the All-Russian Che-Ka and the Petrograd Che-Ka publishing lists of executed—yes, though the Che-Kas were just about to cease to be competent to execute except in cases of overt rebellion, and not a single such case had occurred in Moscow or Petrograd!
The data which enabled the Social Revolutionary organisation Narodnaya Volya to estimate that the number of persons executed by the Che-Kas during the first three months of the year 1919 amounted to 13,850 are not known to me. But does that estimate seem improbable—does its discrepancy with Latzis’ figure (3456) render it impossible of belief? For my own part, I believe the former, or larger, figure to be the more probable of the two.
And though an estimate of 138,000 as the number of persons shot up to March 20 of 1919 caused the Pravda to say “If this figure were indeed correct it would be a figure truly appalling!” the figure, “appalling” though it may have seemed to Bolshevist journalists, understated the truth.
The Year 1920
For this year Latzis never published any statistics at all, and I myself, during the same year, was unable to continue my card-index library, for I had been flung into a Bolshevist gaol, and the Damocles’ sword of Bolshevist “justice” was hanging over my head.
On February 20 there took place another official “abolition” of capital punishment, and Zinoviev impudently informed a meeting at Halle that “now that the victory over Denikin is won, no more death sentences will be pronounced in Russia!” But, as Martov pointed out, this statement overlooked the fact that always such “abolitions” proved to be temporary in their validity. And this happened on the present occasion, and before long the death penalty again became so “appallingly” (the Pravda’s word) rampant that I do not hesitate to doubt whether any cessation of executions did take place. I feel the less hesitation about it because I know so well the usual Che-Ka procedure on such occasions. Take their manner of applying “amnesties.” I will explain the idea of their modus operandi.
Amongst the terrible inscriptions which condemned prisoners have left upon the walls of the building of the Special Branch of the All-Russian Che-Ka in Moscow there can be seen the lines: “This night, which is the eve of another abolition [of capital punishment], is being turned into a night of blood.” And in the same way the eve of an “amnesty” always meant a fresh holocaust of executions, so that the Che-Kas might previously get rid of as many victims as possible. Yes, the very night hours which saw the printers setting up the type for the morrow’s proclamation would see the prisons converted into scenes of massacre! Not an ex-prisoner but could testify to the horrors of these “pre-amnesty” nights, and I myself shall never forget the night during the October of 1920 when a fresh “amnesty” in honour of the Revolution’s third anniversary was pending, and I was lying in the Butyrka gaol. For during that night so many victims were shot that it was only with difficulty that they could be conveyed to the Kalomikov burial ground. In every case they were shot with a revolver through the back of the head. And whilst all this was happening in Moscow, similar things were happening in the provinces, and we find The Che-Ka relating that at Ekaterinodar the local Che-Ka imitated the Che-Ka of Moscow in causing its special branch to “shoot as usual” even after that the “amnesty” in celebration of the third anniversary had been declared. The Bolshevist press, too, regarded the proclamation only in so far as that it made it an excuse for publication of impudently mendacious and fulsomely eulogistic articles concerning the “mercifulness” and the “generosity” of a power which could grant so many amnesties, and make them embrace its every enemy.[52]
Similarly, in 1921, when a congress of the Communist International was about to be held, seventy persons were executed. True, the story was that they were being executed for such ordinary criminal offences as bribery and abuse of ration cards and theft of stores, but political prisoners who were previously confined with the executed have since expressed the opinion that the true object of the executions was to make blood-sacrifice to the coming congress. Usually, at such times, criminals of the ordinary type could rejoice, for the fact that political prisoners who were on the list for execution began hastily to be removed told its own tale—the tale that another “amnesty” was toward, and the politicals must be slaughtered before the “amnesty” would fall due and entail their release with the “ordinaries.”[53]
“This night, which is the eve of another abolition of capital punishment, is being turned into a night of blood.” Ample proof exists: ample proof that it was usual for the days before any “abolition” or “mitigation” of capital punishment to be converted into days of intensified bloodshed, until the custom practically became a law. Many of these massacres are explainable by no other method.
On January 15, 1920, the Izvestia published a notice signed by Dzherzhinsky, head of the All-Russian Che-Ka. Addressed to the provincial Che-Kas, it ran:
Owing to the recent annihilation of the forces of Judemich, Kolchak, and Denikin, and to the fall of Rostov, Novocherkassk, and Krasnoyarsk, and to the overthrow of the Supreme Autocrat,[54] new conditions have arisen in the struggle with counter-revolutionaries, and cumulative destruction of those counter-revolutionaries’ organised forces has caused a radical blow to be struck at our enemies’ hopes and calculations based upon a possible thwarting of our Peasants’ and Workers’ Rule by means of conspiracies, rebellions, and terrorist outbreaks. Yet there are counter-revolutionaries in Russia who still cherish hopes of the kind, and the State must be defended from such persons, and from the counter-revolutionary efforts which the Entente also is launching against the Peasants’ and Workers’ Government, and from the espionage and disruptive and subversive activities which, in company with the agents of the Entente, ex-Tsarist generals in the service of the same are carrying on in support of our enemies. At the same time, though counter-revolution, within and without the country, lies practically crushed, and has had its extensive organisations for effecting overt counter-strokes and delivering guerilla attacks exterminated, whilst in proportion soviet power has increased, and we find ourselves able at last to dispense with the supreme punitive measure, with the penalty hitherto applicable to opposers of our authority, and though also it is satisfactory for us to be able to report that the taking of Rostov and the capture of Kolchak have enabled the proletariat and its Government conditionally to lay aside the weapon of terrorism, the proletariat and its Government desire it to be remembered that, should the Entente again attempt to employ armed intervention with or without the assistance of mutinous ex-Tsarist generals, and so to disturb the established position of our soviet power, and the peaceful labours of our peasants and workers towards the construction of a new Socialist State, it will be necessary for us to restore terrorist methods, and to lay the responsibility for the soviet power being forced to resume those methods upon the Governments and the governing classes of the Entente, and upon those Russian capitalists who sympathise with them. Meanwhile, let our extraordinary commissions turn their attention to the task of combating the foes represented by economic disorganisation, by speculation, and by negligence in official duty, so that when those foes have been overcome the extraordinary commissions aforesaid may devote their whole efforts to reconstructing our industrial life, and surmounting the obstacles born of sabotage, lack of discipline, and ill-will. In sum, we, the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission, now decree (1) that from the date of the publication of this decree there be discontinued all applications of the supreme punitive measure, whether in accordance with sentence passed by ourselves, by the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission, or in accordance with sentence passed by a local branch of Ourselves, and (2) that Comrade Dzherzhinsky be authorised to lay before both the Council of People’s Commissaries and the All-Russian Executive Committee proposals pertinent to the due abolition of capital punishment, whether by sentence passed by an extraordinary commission, or by sentence passed by an urban or a district tribunal, or by sentence passed by Ourselves, the Supreme Tribunal of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee. Let this decree at once be circulated by telegraph.
Those of us, however, who were still prisoners in Moscow, indulged in no rejoicing, for we remembered a decree of a year ago, a decree announcing in an exactly similar manner an end to Red terrorism. The following is taken from an article by Norov in the Vecherniya Izvestia (“Evening News”) of Moscow,[55] as written à propos of the fact that the seventeen Che-Kas of the writer’s locality had just been deprived of their right to make independent pronouncement of death sentences:
At length the Russian proletariat has won the victory, and there is no longer need for terrorism, for the sharp, but perilous, weapon which ever tends to harm its wielder by alienating and intimidating elements otherwise inclined to join in the work of a revolution. Let the proletariat renounce further use of that weapon and, instead, take unto itself legality and right.
Already I have mentioned that in January, 1919, the Soviet of Kiev solemnly pronounced that “capital punishment is herewith abolished within the limits of our jurisdiction.” And though the observer of the day might have been led by this to suppose that the Che-Ka in question had derived its inspiration for “abolition of capital punishment” from the Central Che-Ka itself, we know that the case was otherwise—that the Central Che-Ka in no way favoured the new measure, the “abolition,” but, on the contrary, empowered Dzherzhinsky to assume the initiative only when the “abolition” had irrevocably been decided upon. And so in January the Che-Ka made its usual anticipatory haste to destroy its victims, and to shoot (according to my information) over 300 persons in Moscow alone. Madame Ismailovich, a well-known Left Social Revolutionary who was a prisoner at the time, has stated:
During the night before the promulgation of the decree of abolition of capital punishment, the Che-Ka took from this one gaol (not to speak of others) 120 souls.... And though previously, on the condemned hearing that the decree was going to be issued, they had assembled in the ward and, on the strength of the impending measure, implored a reprieve, both those offering resistance and those who were too weak to do so were butchered like cattle. One day, however, their obituaries will be written on the scroll of history.[56]
And in The Che-Ka another ex-inmate of a Muscovite prison has written:
Although the Soviet Council duly passed the decree and published it on January I (O.S.), the 160 persons who still remained in the Che-Ka building, and in the local cellars and dungeons and concentration camps, were all taken out and shot. They were exclusively persons whom the Che-Ka feared might prove troublesome if left alone, and amongst them were some who had already half completed terms of confinement in one or another concentration camp—an instance being a man named Khvalyusky who, involved in the Lockhart affair (the affair which became so notorious because of the severity of the consequent sentences), had been given five years’ imprisonment. All throughout the 13th and the 14th (N.S.) people were shot. And in the course of the morning of the 13th the Che-Ka forwarded to our prison hospital a man so badly wounded in the jaw and tongue that it was only by signs that he could explain to us that he had duly been “executed,” but not killed outright, and then remitted to the surgical ward. And whilst making the signs his face was radiant, and his glance beaming. Clearly he was finding it difficult to credit his good fortune. And though to this day I do not know his name, nor what the affair in which he had become involved, I do know that on the next night he was taken away (his bandages still upon him), and shot a second time.
Similarly in Petrograd the eve of the “abolition of capital punishment” was celebrated with shootings—with 400 of them, so that the slaughter lasted all night. And in Saratov too (according to a private letter) were fifty-two persons shot. And the same, as a matter of fact, everywhere else.
Hence the doing away with the death penalty meant no more than that the Che-Kas continued, unchanged, their high-handed proceedings. Yet one difference there was, and it lay in a certain cunning mental reservation. I will explain. On February 5 of that year the Izvestia reported that the provincial Che-Ka of Kiev had received a telegram from the head of the All-Russian Che-Ka, and that the telegram had explained that the decree concerning capital punishment had never been meant to apply to places at the front, and that the revolutionary tribunals at “places at the front” still might pass death sentences. “That front,” the telegraphic explanation had added, “includes both Kiev and its province.” And this piece of unexampled, unblushing effrontery the Special Branch of the Central Che-Ka clinched with a circular that:
In view of the abolition of the death penalty, it is suggested that persons whose crimes would otherwise have rendered them liable to the supreme punitive measure do now be dispatched to the zone of military operations, where the decree concerning capital punishment has no force!
I myself remember an “examining justice” telling one of my comrades (a man who had been arrested for “counter-revolution” during the February of 1920) that, “although we cannot shoot you here, we can send you to the front for the purpose.” And that “front” (it needs hardly to be added) was by no means limited to the regions where civil war was in actual progress.[57] But in time this subterfuge, “the front,” came to be thought unnecessary. And possibly some of the Che-Kas never resorted to it, seeing that at all times Che-Ka work could be done in secret. Or, if they resorted to it, they did so only in exceptional cases. At times even the Izvestia forgot the “abolition,” and once had the inadvertence to come out with a list of 521 persons shot actually between the “abolition” and the following May—176 of them put to death by one or another provincial tribunal, and the rest by the Muscovite Che-Ka itself! However, on May 24 capital punishment became officially re-established, on the plea that that course had been rendered necessary by the events of the Russo-Polish War. Which re-establishment has never since been repealed.
Peculiarly interesting is an Order issued by Trotsky on June 16; and the more so if it be compared with the appeal of 1917. The Order said:
(1) Scoundrels advocating retreat must be looked upon as defaulters, as having refused to carry out a military command, and be shot. (2) Soldiers voluntarily leaving the front shall be shot. (3) Soldiers throwing away rifles, or selling their equipment, shall be shot.
This after that the All-Russian Congress of Soviets had said: “The capital penalty which Kerensky established at the front is herewith abolished”![58]
Hence both at the front and everywhere else the re-establishment of capital punishment brought in a new orgy of executions. To begin with, in September 1919, a mutiny of the garrison in Smolensk was ruthlessly suppressed with the shooting not only of 1200 soldiers, but also of a large number of civilian participators in the émeute.[59] And though the Central Che-Ka ordered metropolitan journals to cease reporting shootings when they were ordered by the Che-Ka itself, those journals still published information concerning executions when they were ordered by the military-revolutionary tribunals of the provinces.[60] In which connection the official figures given were truly terrible, for, according to them, 600 persons had been shot between May 22 and June 22, and 898 during the following month, and 1183 during the next, and 1206 during the next. But invariably information of the kind was held up until at least a month after the event—the fate of the 1206 victims shot during September, for example, being reported by the Izvestia only on October 17, with names and “crimes” appended. The “crimes” in question read all the more curiously when we recall how Red terrorism usually is justified. For the return says that shot for espionage were 3 persons, for treason 185, for refusal to carry out military orders 14, for mutiny 65, for counter-revolutionary activity 59, for desertion 467, for looting and brigandage 160, for concealment of arms 23, for drunkenness and insubordination 20, and for lapses in official duty 181. Whence it is no wonder that we can only with difficulty trace method in the dispensation of Bolshevist “justice”! Next, on November 12, 1920, the Izvestia reported, as shot between February and September, 283 persons sentenced merely by order of the revolutionary tribunals attached to the Vokhra or “Home Service Army” (the Che-Ka’s real instrument of operation): and as I myself possess a copy of such a sentence, I can see that it was published in the Muscovite Izvestia of November 18, and relates to Trounov, an engineer, to one S. S. Mikhno, ex-head of a minor administrative department, and to one N. S. Mikhno, ex-head of the artillery supply branch of the T.A.O.N.A.—all sentenced to death for “abuse of official functions” by the Vokhra’s head military-revolutionary tribunal. And, adds the document: “This award is final, and cannot be appealed from to a higher court.”
In short, in the maze of blood statistics one could easily lose one’s way. For blood flowed wherever Soviet Russia encountered the smallest check in life. Thus, during the summer of 1920 twenty doctors of Moscow were arraigned on a charge of having connived at exemptions from military service, and shot; whilst later 500 others of the provinces were arraigned and shot in the same manner, and to the official press publication of their names there was appended an intimation that probably their patients would experience a similar fate. “Up to the very last moment,” says a prisoner who lived with these doctors for a time in the Butyrka gaol, “they did not, could not, believe that they were going to be put to death.” Moreover, unofficial sources have given their number as larger even than was given by the official return. And when, during the autumn of 1920, disturbances broke out amongst the Moscow garrison, and the inhabitants heard no more than vague rumours that soldiers were being shot in the Che-Ka building, the foreign-published Russian journal Volya Rossii (“The Will of Russia,” a Social Revolutionary organ) published (under date of November 21) a definite list of those shot, which showed them to have amounted to between 200 and 300, whilst to this the Posledniya Novosty[61] appended 900 for October, and 118 for December. Again, a correspondent of the Volya Rossii estimated the number of persons shot in Petrograd during that autumn to have reached 5000, largely because, at the time, the various “risings” and “conspiracies” in connection with General Judenich’s advance were being “liquidated.” And we read in the Posledniya Novosty[62] of the summer an émigré’s story of the rounding up, medical inspection, and shooting of a number of syphilitic subjects—“with a view to combating prostitution”! And I, too, heard of such an occurrence, though I could not verify it, nor yet some persistent rumours concerning a shooting of Muscovite sufferers from glanders.[63] Yet there can be no doubt that things just as monstrous, just as incredible, did come to be facts, and were not evolved from the imagination, under this unprecedented régime.
The North
Many sources are to hand shedding light upon the conduct of the civil war in Northern Russia. Even in Moscow we used to hear terrible stories concerning the punitive expeditions which the Special Branch of the All-Russian Che-Ka periodically dispatched to Vologda and other northern localities under a man called Kedrov. These expeditions were a sort of circuit assize, a new tribunal of the Che-Ka’s own invention.[64] Kedrov has since, I believe, been certified to be a lunatic, and confined as such; but at the time of which I am speaking he had become renowned for his cruelty, and we gain but a very faint idea of his punitive expeditions from the fragmentary reports published in the local press. True, occasionally that press did state that some hundreds of persons had been imprisoned, and dozens of other persons shot, after an “administrative-operative” (or a “revolutionary-military”) tour of inspection; but more often it gave vaguer news altogether—an example being that it scarcely made any mention at all of an expedition when Kedrov “re-examined” 1000 officers, and despatched to the centre of Russia a veritable multitude of hostages.[65]
Kedrov’s conduct when leading an expedition to the extreme North never failed to be consistent: so that, compared with him, the Eydouk who shot officers with his own hand was a man sheerly humane. Periodically would the Izvestia of Archangel publish lists of persons to whom the Kedrov Commission had applied “the supreme punitive measure,” and such a list lies before me now—a list of thirty-six names which is dated November 2, and includes peasants, co-operative employees, and a citizen who, an ex-member of the Duma, was a well-known inhabitant of Vyborg. And in another such list I find thirty-four names of persons shot for “active counter-revolution” during the Chaikovsky-Miller régime, and, in a third, twenty-two names, inclusive of the mayor of Archangel, of the editor of the Severnoyé Slovo or “Northern Word,” of the local postmaster, of a theatrical manager, of a shop assistant, and of several others. And elsewhere has a correspondent of the Posledniya Novosty testified to “shootings of boys and girls of twelve, sixteen, and so forth,”[66] so that Archangel came to be known as “The City of the Dead.” And we have it from a correspondent of the Golos Rossii (“The Voice of Russia”),[67] from a correspondent able to provide first-hand evidence through having been resident in the town throughout the April of 1920, that: