Before the British troops had long been gone there was held a mock procession of empty red coffins, and then reprisals began.... All through that summer the town fairly groaned under the terrorist scourge; and though I lack figures to check the exact number of persons slaughtered there, at least I know that 800 ex-officers were put to death—officers whom the late Miller administration had authorised to proceed to London by way of the Mourmansk railway whilst the members of the administration crossed to Mourmansk on icebreakers. All of them were seized by the Bolshevists en route, and shot.
But it was in the Kholmogory district that the greatest number of executions of all took place. Said a correspondent in the Revolutsionnaya Rossia:
Last September, when a “day of Red vengeance” was held, over 2000 people were shot. Mostly they were peasants and other Cossacks from the South. For it is not often now that intellectuals are executed. Probably this is because very few of them remain to be executed.
But what is the meaning of that phrase “peasants and other Cossacks from the South”? The meaning of it is that a host of persons had been brought to Northern Russia from the South, for internment in the northern concentration camps, since that was the Southern Che-Kas’ favourite resource with their victims; they sent them to the northern camps, especially to the camp at Archangel, as one would send a person to certain death. And when we come to consider those “abodes of terror” (whence the condemned wretches seldom or never departed alive—they departed thence only after that they had been executed) we shall see that to be sent to such places practically was capital punishment.[68]
And similar methods were the rule in the Don and the Kuban regions, in Turkhestan, and in the Crimea, where the procedure was that suddenly there would be issued orders for a “registration” or a “re-registration” of ex-White officers and men, and that as soon as the loyalists concerned had reached the place indicated (they never seemed to think that anything untoward could be pending) they would be seized, bundled into railway trucks, and, just in the clothes in which they happened to be standing up, dispatched to Archangel, where the fact that they were wearing garments suitable enough for the climate of Kuban and of the Crimea, but not for the atmospheric conditions of the remoter north, would join with the circumstance that the lack of washing facilities inevitably converted their bodies into masses of vermin to bring about, surely and speedily, the desired end—and the more so because the chance of obtaining warmer clothing from their relatives at home was as negligible as was the chance of being able to let those relatives know where the sufferers were.
The same procedure, too, was adopted in Petrograd towards that section of the Baltic Fleet’s officers and men who had failed either to emigrate, or to go into hiding, or to join the forces of Judenich or Kolchak or Denikin. Presumably these men had served the Soviet Power loyally, for but few arrests amongst them had taken place during the four years of the Bolshevists’ administration: wherefore when, on August 22, 1921, a “re-registration” was ordained, the men thought nothing of it as they left their ships, and went ashore, to go through a process to which they had become so well accustomed. But, arrived ashore, they were conducted, one by one, into a room, and there told to wait. And they waited for two days. And then, under a strong escort, they were marched to the railway station, bundled into luggage vans, and forwarded (with no explanation given) to prisons at Orel and Vologda and Yaroslavl and elsewhere. No one ever discovered the subsequent whereabouts of those men. All that official lists said of them was that they had been “sent northward,” though from private conversations with Che-Ka employees it was gathered, in addition, that their chance of long remaining alive was a slender one.
Of Kedrov’s northern exploits we obtain a glimpse when we read in the Volya Rossii[69]: “In Archangel, once, he mustered 1200 officers, took them over to Kholmogory, loaded them on to barges, and riddled them with machine-gun fire. Fully half of them were killed.”
Perhaps such a senseless, vile proceeding seems incredible. Yet it is but a typical example of the fate which befell the vast majority of those who were sent to the Kholmogory camp. First pitched, in May 1921, in a spot some ten versts from Kholmogory, this settlement never ceased thenceforth to witness shootings in batches of from 10 to 100. Indeed, when matters reached the pass that an official investigator had to be sent northward he was told by the local inhabitants that the number of persons who had been disposed of to date could not have reached less than 8000. Not but that in the long run even such cruelty as this may not have proved to be kindness, seeing that in any case the Kholmogory camp, the “camp of death,” saw to it that prisoners perished, slowly and surely, of ill-treatment and neglect.
And though it may be difficult for the moral sense to realise that drownings of people by barge-loads could ever have existed as a Russian official institution, seeing that such a system in the twentieth century recalls the worst doings of the eighteenth-century French Revolution, the barges in question are no fiction; and I can add to the two recent cases already cited a third one, more recent still, to show that the practice, once started, went on unchanged. The case is to be found related in Vladimir Voitinsky’s preface to his work The Twelve Condemned, a work which turns upon the great trial of Social Revolutionaries in Moscow. We read:
In 1921 the Bolshevists took 600 persons from different prisons of Petrograd, dispatched them to Kronstadt, loaded them on to a barge, and scuttled the vessel at a particularly deep spot. All but one were drowned. And he only escaped because he was able to swim to the Finnish shore.[70]
After Denikin’s Departure.
Nevertheless, all these horrors pale, numerically at least, before the happenings in the South after the close of the civil war and the collapse of the Denikin Government. For it is then that we see coming into being a new Government, and that Government entering upon its functions amid a sea of blood, and wreaking both private and official vengeance through terrorism, and replacing civil war with a policy of complete annihilation of the surviving enemy, and of preventive intimidation of the civilian population. As soon as ever, in 1920, the Bolshevists had made their third entry into Odessa, daily executions of 100 or more persons became the rule, and motor-lorries had to cart away the dead in heaps.[71]
“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.
Male and female executioners and torturers active in Eupatoria during 1918.
[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.
Various executioners and torturers active in Eupatoria during the Crimean Terror.
[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.”