CHAPTER V
“CLASS TERRORISM”
Proletarians, never let it escape you that cruelty is a remnant of slavery, and a testimony to the brutality which still lurks in us all.—Jaurès.
So far the data concerning risings which I have extracted from the British White Book deal exclusively with the suppression of peasant outbreaks—outbreaks of the kind which never failed to occur where the Bolshevists had been in occupation; but also I have at my disposal data dealing with the suppression of risings of industrial workers in the towns. On March 5, 1919, Sir C. Eliot wrote to Lord Curzon:
Industrial workers who oppose the Bolshevists are treated precisely similarly to peasants who do so. Last December a hundred labourers belonging to Motovilyky, near Perm, were shot merely for having protested against the Bolshevists’ doings in the locality.[148]
Nor do English reports alone furnish an endless succession of such facts! Similar reports appear both in the ordinary Russian press and in the Bolshevists’ official sheets (for at that period it was still possible for a private Russian journal to describe the outbreaks which Bolshevist tyranny in general, and seizures of food stuffs in payment of the grain tax in particular, periodically evoked amongst the rural classes). And always suppression of these risings was accompanied with bloodshed: even the history of Russia, rich as it is in peasant outbreaks, cannot show any suppressions of popular outbreaks comparable with those perpetrated by the Bolshevists—no, not even the serfdom period.
Of course, one reason of this is that modern improvements in mechanical equipment, and the invention of tanks and machine-guns and poison gas, enabled greater resources to be brought to bear against the rebels than had ever before been the case.
During 1918 and 1919 I collected abundant material on this particular subject; and though I lost it all again during the house-to-house searches which subsequently became the rule in Moscow, as in every other city of Russia, I can at least cite an interesting document which gives a summary of events in Tambov Province just before the Antonov rising—before the rising which, once started, spread like wildfire, and was, primarily, a retort to the anti-peasant policy known as “class terrorism.” Of date the end of 1919, and with, for subject, the suppression of the Tambov “disorders” of the recent November, the document represents a memorandum presented to the Council of People’s Commissaries by a local group of Social Revolutionaries. The late ebullitions of popular wrath in the Tambov region had been due to many causes, including mobilisation, power to requisition stock, and compulsory registration of Church property; and, having started in one volost, or minor district, the unrest speedily spread until it had involved the province as a whole.
The Soviet Power (the local Social Revolutionaries’ memorandum stated) has sent thither punitive expedition after punitive expedition, and we venture now to submit to the Council a brief exposition of bloodthirsty doings which throw into the shade even those once perpetrated in the same region by the oprichnik[149] Louzhenovsky. For every volost in the Spassk district whither a punitive expedition was dispatched has seen peasants flogged as abominably as indiscriminately, and many of them shot. Also, ten peasants and a priest have been publicly executed in the square of the town of Spassk, whilst the inhabitants of the villages whence the victims came had to attend the spectacle, and then supply transport for the bodies’ removal. Also, thirty men have been shot behind the prison of Spassk after first being compelled to dig their own graves. In the Kirsanov district their frenzy of cruelty has led the “forces of pacification” even to keep victims locked up in a shed for days with a hungry boar, until some of those subjected to the torture of fear became bereft of reason. And the head of the Nashtchokin Committee in Aid of the Destitute presumed to perpetrate unauthorised executions long after the last punitive expedition had left the neighbourhood; and in the Morshansk district hundreds have been shot with shell fire, and thousands wounded, and villages almost destroyed with the same, and the peasants’ property looted by Red Guards and civilian Communists, and their stocks of meal and grain taken away. But the fate of the Michaevsk peasants has been worst of all. For in Michaevsk every tenth hut has been burnt to the ground, and the men, women, and children all driven into the woods. And at Perkino, though the villagers took no active part in the rebellion, but only elected an independent soviet of their own, a detachment from Tambov has come and put all that soviet’s members to death. And when fifteen peasants of Ostrov were brought to the prison at Morshansk they were seen first to have been horribly injured, whilst at this very moment there is lying in that prison a woman who has had all the hair plucked from her head. And dozens of cases of rape have taken place in Morshansk, and eight peasants, after being grossly maltreated by Red Guards, have been buried alive. And as regards the Bolshevist officials who have most distinguished themselves in this region, they are Tsufirin, the leader of the punitive expedition, a Communist named Parfenoy whom the Tsarist Government brought back from exile in answer to a petition, and Sokolov, an ex-sergeant-major. In short, in this district of Tambov whole villages have been destroyed—some of them by incendiary firing, and some by shell firing—and many inhabitants executed. And Bondary has had its local clergy shot for having held a service after the Bolshevists had deposed the local soviet.[150]... The extent to which the Bolshevists have shown tact and decency in their suppressions of the risings is best illustrated by the fact that they commissioned a sixteen-year-old youth named Lebsky to lead a punitive expedition, and appointed to the post of head of the Tambov Che-Ka a certain A. S. Klinkov—an ex-fraudulent bankrupt trader, an ignoramus, an extortioner, a drunkard, and a man who, up to the outbreak of the October revolution, was engaging in discreditable speculative operations. And that post he is still holding, and it gives him a right of disposal over all prisoners’ lives, and he uses that right for shooting prisoners indiscriminately. And in addition to dispatching punitive expeditions, the authorities have initiated a practice of dispatching certain Communist nuclei, in order that those nuclei may “acquire” a taste for fighting, although they are nothing better than bands of ruffians, and spend most of their time in carousing, committing arson and theft, and transforming the great principles of “liberty, fraternity, and equality” into the horrible principles of the medieval Tartar invasions.... Also, we must call your attention to the sanguinary work perpetrated by the Lettish detachments. Universally they leave behind them terrible memories. And every prison and dungeon under the Che-Ka is filled to overflowing, the number of persons arrested having come to amount to thousands, with cold and starvation causing disease to become rampant amongst them. And their ultimate fate, in most cases, is certainly that they will be shot. And that will continue to be prisoners’ fate so long as commissaries and Che-Kas like the present ones hold power.
The result of the constant increase in peasant risings was that eventually they overflowed from the villages into the towns. The Berlin-published Russian journal Roul gives us a particularly vivid description of a peasant upheaval in Petropavlovsk. True, the peasants figuring in that rising are described as “White forces,” but the movement was a purely popular one, and I will cite the conclusion of the eye-witness’s narrative:
Here the Red Terror began as soon as ever the Red soldiers had entered the place. And with the Terror went mass arrests, and mass shootings with no preliminary trial. Also, every telegraph and telephone pole soon was bristling with posters to the effect that, in the event of another raid by a White detachment, the town would be razed to the ground by the Red artillery. A doctor of ours who was taken prisoner by the White forces, and subsequently restored to us, has since told us that the Red Terror has assumed even more ghastly forms in the villages than in the towns—that in the villages every single hut has been pillaged, and all the cattle stolen, and a great number of families killed without a sparing even of the aged and women and children. And in other huts there are left only the aged and the infants, for the adult members of the household have all escaped to the White army, whilst both the open roads and the village streets are lying heaped with peasant corpses so mutilated as to defy identification, but thrown there “to serve as a warning to others,” with the people forbidden to take them away for burial. Also, the doctor has told us that in some cases the peasants have wreaked such ruthless vengeance upon the Communists that the public hall of Petropavlovsk is standing lined with rows of mutilated Communist corpses, and on each Sunday between February and May last the Communists accorded choral rites of burial to fifty or sixty of these slain comrades at a time, whilst both the market square and what used to be the butchers’ market are lying strewn with (again, “as a warning to others”) bodies of anti-Communist hostages who were slaughtered as soon as ever the Bolshevists had consolidated their position in the town, with, amongst them, the mayor, the deputy mayor, the local magistrate, and several prominent merchants and other citizens. Moreover, a huge number of unknown victims has been shot in the Che-Ka’s courtyard; both by day and by night, for months past, firing has been heard there. And in some cases the victims were not shot at all, but slashed to death with swords: in which case their cries of agony reached the ears even of the surrounding inhabitants. And amongst the executed were the local bishop and most of the local cathedral staff, on the accusation that they had rung the cathedral bells in welcome to the Whites—the Communists having ignored the fact that when the Whites had entered the city the time had been just four o’clock in the afternoon, when, of course, the bells were tolling for evening service! At this very moment the bishop’s body is lying, as a further “warning,” in the public square near the road leading to the railway station, where the Eastern Siberian Army has its headquarters. And I have been told that as soon as the staff of those headquarters entered the town they ordered all prisoners arrested before the arrival of the White forces—even prisoners arrested merely for trifling offences, and sentenced merely to a few weeks’ or a few months’ imprisonment—to be shot. I myself left Petropavlovsk on May 10. Everything then was quiet in the town, despite that many Red Guards still were there. Only in the surrounding districts was the rebellion not yet wholly quelled, and peasant prisoners still were being brought in from the villages, and mutilated remains of Communists being given musical burial on holidays. Also, I know of a case in the district of Mozhaisk where the peasants had become so embittered that, after catching a commissary, they divided him in two with a wooden saw.
The first volume of the Bulletin issued by the Social Revolutionaries of the Left gives, under date of January 1919, similar details with regard to other localities. We read that in the Elifansky district of Toula Province, towards the close of 1918, 150 peasants were shot; in the Medinsk district of Kalouga Province, 170; in the Prousk district of Riazan Province, 300; in the Kasimov district, 150; in the Spassk district, several hundreds; in Tver Province, 200; and in the Velizhesk district of Smolensk, 600.
And as regards risings which took place in two villages around Kronstadt during the July of 1921, our information is exact. We know that in the one village 170 persons were shot, and in the other 130, and that in each case the principle observed was to select every third man. Again, during a rising in Kolivan (Tomsk Province), during 1920, over 5000 peasants were shot,[151] while a like rising in Oufa Province has been declared to have been suppressed so ruthlessly that even the official data had to admit to 10,000 being the number shot, whilst unofficial data gave the number as 25,000, or more.[152] And from a correspondent of the journal Znamya Trouda (“The Labour Standard”) we have it that “in the Volkovsky district of Kharkov Province hundreds of peasants were shot”—the Left Social Revolutionaries of Moscow having contrived to have the statement conveyed to and published in the city itself. In one village 140 persons are said to have been executed.[153] And the following description of some mutinies in White Russia during 1921 constitutes a page from the history of a regional struggle the causes of which were the food tax and the punishment of acts of opposition to the tax:
The whole of the Liaskovicheskaya volost in the Bobrinsk district has been fired by the Bolshevists [the description says]. Peasants have been arrested, and exiled either to Vologda or to the famine-stricken areas, and had their property confiscated. And the Bolshevists still are seizing hostages by the dozen wherever a peasant insurgent band appears. The punitive expedition operating in this neighbourhood is Stok’s. Before execution he tortures his prisoners, and seeks to extort confessions, by crushing their fingers in door-cracks.[154]
Now let me cite a document that was published at the time of the suppression of the Antonov rising. The document is an Order issued by the “Plenipotentiary Committee of the All-Russian Central Executive Commission.” Of date June 11, 1921, it says:
(1) Citizens refusing to divulge their names shall be shot without trial. (2) The decree authorising seizure of hostages shall be read to all villages guilty of concealing arms, and hostages shall be seized and shot unless the arms first be handed over. (3) Households harbouring bandits (peasants in rebellion) shall be arrested and exiled, and deprived of their property. Also, the chief worker in each such household shall be shot without trial. (4) Households harbouring members of bandits’ families, or concealing those families’ property, shall themselves be treated as bandits, and have their chief worker shot without trial. (5) The property of a bandit whose family may succeed in escaping shall be apportioned to any peasants who have remained faithful to the Soviet Power, and his dwelling be burnt. (6) Let this Order be carried out with the most ruthless severity.[155]
Tambov and its neighbourhood, therefore, were drenched with blood, and Gan, the Left Social Revolutionary, in no way exaggerated when, in addressing a Bolshevist revolutionary tribunal, he said[156]:
Thousands of our peasants have been shot by you and other circuit tribunals and provincial Che-Kas. You have mown down defenceless people with machine-gun fire; you have exiled peasant families to the northern provinces not merely in thousands, but in tens of thousands, and pillaged and burnt their property.[157] And members of my party possess also data referring to other provinces—to the Provinces of Samara and Kazan and Saratov. And both from there and from everywhere else our information is the same.
In Bouzoulok, during 1920, 4000 persons were shot; in Christopol 600[158]; in Elatina (where you forced the victims to dig their own graves) 300.[159]
All of which applies to Central Russia—rather, to Great Russia—alone, without mentioning the Ukraine and Siberia.
Another device utilised by the Bolshevists was mock shootings; on which occasions the prisoners were divested of their clothes, compelled to dig, as it were, their own graves, and, on the order to fire being given, fired at merely with shots above their heads. Many such cases occur in Maslov’s well-known book, Russia after Four Years of Revolution.
“In Arskaya volost (Kazan district) thirty peasants were placed in a row, and had their heads slashed off with swords.” Such is the statement to be found in No. 1 of the Bulletin issued by the Social Revolutionary Party! And the journal continues: “Floggings? Floggings take place everywhere. Rods, ramrods, cudgels, whips, fists, rifle butts, and revolver stocks all are used for the beating of peasants.”
Officially it has been stated that floggings have ceased to be inflicted in Russia, “for the reason that corporal punishment lies beneath the dignity of a Peasants’ and Workers’ Government”; but the facts do not coincide with the statement. In his book The Moral Aspect of the Revolution[160] Steinberg, ex-Bolshevist Commissary of Justice, adduces an interesting collection of communications relating to floggings which he and his fellow Communist administrators carried out during the earlier days of the Bolshevist régime. And the collection carries the more weight in that its basis rests upon reports published by the Soviet press itself—by the Pravda, and by the Izvestia. Certainly the former journal published an article entitled “Derzhimordi[161] under the Soviet Flag,” which told how a grain surplus was beaten out of a reluctant rural population, and a rebellion of koulaki suppressed, by the Che-Ka of Nikolaevsk (Province of Vologda):
The Che-Ka collected a multitude of peasants into an icy-cold barn, divested them of their clothing, and beat them with ramrods. And in the Brilsky district (Vitebsk Province) peasants were beaten by order of the local Che-Ka. And in the village of Ouren (Kostroma Province), though peasants donned five shirts apiece to soften the blows, it was in vain, since the whips, made of twisted wire, cut right through the material, and drove it into the wounds until it dried there, and had later to be soaked out with warm water.[162]
Again, a letter sent to the Central Committee of the Communist Party by Madame Spiridonova quotes an informant as saying: “A third of the men of our volost were lined up, and beaten with clenched fists in the presence of the other two-thirds. Anyone trying to escape the beating with fists received also a flogging with whips.” To which the informant adds an account of the doings of a “requisitionary expedition”:
Whenever ... the expedition reached a fresh village its officers made the members of the village council kneel down before them, that the peasants might conceive a proper respect for the Soviet Power. “And flog them too,” the officers said, “so that they may remember us the better.”
After this can one wonder that the Pravda had eventually to admit that the term “Communist” had come to be synonymous with “hooligan,” “ne’er-do-weel,” and “charlatan”? “We are treated like senseless beasts,” once a peasant said.
But what a Terror of requisitionary expeditions and formations of “committees of poorer peasants” and armed, hooligan dictatorship really meant in a rural district can be realised only by trying to imagine the conditions of peasant life whilst that Terror was in force. I quote some villagers of Makarievo: “Whereas we used only to have the police commissioner riding upon our backs, now we have the commissary riding there.” And in a passage from a report published in the Pravda we read:
Whenever an expedition that was collecting the grain tax in the Khvalinsky district (Saratov Province) reached a village the peasants were commanded to surrender their best-looking girls to the officials.
In the same spirit a grain-tax commissary instructed a local “committee of poorer peasants” to
inform your inhabitants that within three days they shall render me 10,000 pouds of grain, and that any person not complying with this Order shall be shot with my own hand, which finished off, only last night, a disobedient rascal in the village of Varvarinka.... Also, I empower so-and-so to shoot in the same way anyone not complying with my Order in this rascally volost of ——. And the name of the volost followed.[163]
Hence we see that shootings and floggings were the two symbols of “the period leading to Socialism.”
But neither real life nor life in fiction could furnish a parallel to an incident which occurred in the Shatsky district of Tambov Province, and is to be found described by Steinberg in his book:
In this district the peasants had a particular veneration for an ikon of the Vishinskaya Madonna; and when influenza broke out in the district a solemn procession was held in the ikon’s honour, and a celebrating of Mass. And, on the Bolshevists seizing both ikon and clergy, and the peasants learning later that the Che-Ka had insulted the ikon, and “dragged it about the floor,” they set forth to “rescue Our Lady,” with women and children and the aged and everyone else joining the throng. And then the Che-Ka turned machine-guns upon them, and mowed them down in rows as, “with terrible eyes which saw nothing,” they moved forward over the bodies of dying and dead, and mothers, flinging themselves before their children, cried: “O Holy Virgin and Defender, bless us as gladly we lay down our lives for thee!”
Always the Bolshevists made it clear that the Terror was directed not so much against the bourgeoisie as a class as against all classes in general, and that the intelligentsia happened to become the special victim of the Terror because the intelligentsia happened to comprise all classes.
“The prime object of the Terror,” said a leading article in the Che-Ka’s Weekly, “is the destruction of the spiritual leaders and directors of the enemies of the Proletarian Government.” True, sometimes decrees of local Che-Kas and tribunals stated that a sentence had been remitted “because of the accused’s proletarian origin,” but this was a blind, a mere masking of the Terror’s true nature, and for a time deceived the less thinking sections of the Russian population, but soon ceased to deceive even them.
It has been related of a certain Bolshevist official that, when holding an inquiry in a village, he obtained such “evidence” as he required merely by shouting out, “Show me your hands!” And if he next cried “Strip the fellow!” the clothes were at once torn from the prisoner’s back, and the prisoner himself set against a lorry, bayoneted, and thrown into one of the cavities locally known as “plague pits” through cattle having been thrown into them during an earlier season of cattle plague. And a match for this official in rude arrogance was a certain Mousikin who had been an artisan in the Lefortovsky Quarter of Moscow. The Pravda itself has told us how, at the time when the Muscovite Soviet was debating the question of suspending the Che-Kas, and Latzis propounded the thesis that legal trials were not needed, Mousikin capped this by saying:
Why even question prisoners?... Personally I should just walk into the accused’s kitchen, look at his stock pot, and, if the pot should contain meat, account him an enemy of the people, and shoot him against his own kitchen wall.
Yet if this truly “proletarian” procedure had been followed in 1917 and subsequently, not a man of the privileged Communist Party would have escaped execution! Yet they have a saying that “if a man will not work, neither shall he eat”!
Again, how are we to credit Latzis’ assertion that his Party never permitted the Terror “to touch peasants and industrial workers who have erred merely in being misled,” or Mousikin’s statement in No. 3 of the Weekly that “in no instance have we directed terrorist persecution against the working-classes”? For, to take only a single instance, the inhabitants of Odessa had no sooner begun to protest against the mass shootings instituted by the local Che-Ka during the July of 1919 than that Che-Ka issued an order that:
Inasmuch as certain counter-revolutionaries are spreading false rumours, and saying that industrial workers have been shot, the Praesidium herewith announces that in no instance has such a worker, nor yet a peasant, been shot, but merely a few proven bandits and murderers.
And the document added that “any counter-worker so disposed” might come and inquire into any allegation of a worker having been shot by the Che-Ka. Finally, “from now onwards the supreme punitive measure allowed by the law during a state of siege shall be applied to anyone from whom a false rumour shall emanate.” Which warning would scarcely leave anyone “disposed” to indulge in inquiries of the kind indicated, or in any inquiries at all![164]
In 1920 there took place in Astrakhan massacres exceptional in their scope even for Soviet Russia. And in September of the same year sixty representatives of the workers of Kazan were shot for requesting an eight hours day, a revision of the scale of wages, and the deportation of the Magyars who had long been making trouble in the district.[165] Later these doings led the Left Social Revolutionary Party of the country to appeal to the workers to refrain from participating in the ensuing May Day celebrations, on the ground that “ever since the October Revolution the Communist Government has been shooting toilers in their thousands—peasants, soldiers of the ranks, industrial workers, and sailors alike.”[166]
On an official building in Soviet Russia there stands inscribed the motto, “For the Bourgeoisie, Prison! For the Peasants and the Industrial Workers, Comradely Persuasion!” And in the ravine near Saratov which I have described the contained abomination is made up of peasants and industrial workers just as much as of bourgeois and intellectuals and prominent politicians. Nay, it even includes members of the Socialist Party! Similarly, the concentration camp near Kharkov which witnessed most of Saenko’s exploits was, though nominally a camp for bourgeois alone, a camp crowded with representatives of all classes, but most of all with representatives of the peasant class.
In fact, what was the amount of peasants’ and workers’ blood shed during the Red Terror? The question is one which will never admit of an answer. Once I attempted, with my card index library, to make a table of social statuses. True, this applied to the year 1918 only, and the data were far from complete; but at least I succeeded in arriving at the following improvised classification:
| Intellectuals | 1286 |
| Hostages (from the professional classes exclusively) | 1026 |
| Peasants | 962 |
| Urban Dwellers | 468 |
| Persons Unknown | 450 |
| Criminal Elements (which in many cases represented persons arrested, in reality, for political reasons) | 438 |
| Officials convicted of professional misconduct | 187 |
| Domestic Servants | 118 |
| Soldiers and Sailors | 28 |
| Bourgeois | 22 |
| Clergy | 19 |
And though the above grouping is a casual grouping only, it is sufficient to refute the statements of leading Bolshevists, and to dislodge the corner-stone on which Communists strive to rear apologiae for their system. It was inevitable that the internecine struggle for power should become what it was. Inevitably that struggle came to resemble the parallel struggle witnessed during the French Revolution. And though this incontrovertible thesis is sometimes contested, the day will come when it will stand corroborated. Take another illustration of it. On August 21, 1919, an ex-warder from the Che-Ka gaol at Nikolaevsk testified before the Denikin Commission that the lot of workers and peasants in that prison who lacked the means to purchase its alleviation was far harder than was the lot of their fellow workers and peasants, and that many more of the latter were shot than of intellectuals. And a Denikin Commission document declares that when the municipality of Nikolaevsk was assisting the Commission to make local enquiries, and to attempt to fix the total of shot, it finally obtained proof of a total of 115 (though the real number must have been much larger, seeing that many burial pits could not be located, and advanced decomposition rendered two such pits impossible of examination, and the Che-Ka had published only partial lists of its victims, with no information whatsoever as to local deserters from the Red Army) and then helped the Commission to determine the social status of 73 out of the 115, with the result that the list was found to be headed by 25 merchants and other bourgeois, and filled up with 15 members of the working intelligentsia (engineers, doctors, students, and the like) and as many as 33 peasants and industrial operatives.
In fact, as the Terror spread, the Bolshevists’ prisons became more and more filled with the proletariat and the working intelligentsia, and the shootings of the latter proportionately more numerous.
In addition to which there has now become added the category of Socialists.
The statement that the Red Terror was a response to a White Terror, a war of extermination against “enemies of our class who constantly plot the ruin of the industrial and agrarian proletariat,” is a statement explicable only on the hypothesis of political exigency. For it was the Bolshevists’ own appeals to their Red Army that caused the civil war to become the cruel, truly brutal thing that it became, added to the fact that with Bolshevist propaganda went misrepresentations designedly calculated to demoralise certain social sections. Such was the call (and the menace) to volunteers to engage in “espionage” work—an order issued by Piatakov, head of the Donetz Che-Ka, and proclaiming that “any failure of any Communist to denounce a traitor will be regarded as an offence against the Revolution, and punished with all the vigour of the laws of the present war-revolutionary period.”[167] Thus denunciation of one’s neighbour was elevated into a civic duty, into a civic virtue! Bukharin, for his part, said:
Henceforth all of us must become agents of the Che-Kas, whether in our houses, or in our streets, or in our public places, or on our railways, or in our soviet institutions. Everywhere and at all times must we watch for counter-revolutionaries, apprehend them, and consign them to the nearest Che-Ka.
And Miasnikov, the Communist who assassinated the Grand Duke Michael, and subsequently fell into disgrace for having published a pamphlet opposing Lenin’s policy, advised that:
Every one of us workers do become an agent of a Che-Ka, and keep the Revolution apprised of what is being done by Counter-Revolution. Only so shall we become strong and secure towards future efforts. For an honest citizen no other mode of procedure is possible. It is no more than his duty.
That is to say, the Communist Party was to become one huge politico-police force, and Russia herself one huge Che-Ka for the purpose of stifling freedom and independent thought. And take a suggestion tendered to Moscow by the Che-Ka of the Alexandrovskaya Railway:
That all railway workers be charged to inform their railway Che-Ka of any public meeting known to be pending, so that representatives of the Che-Ka may attend the gathering, and note the gathering’s proceedings.
And not only were the people as a whole called upon to engage in “espionage.” Also the people as a whole were requested to sanction the most odious forms of tyranny. For example, the Kievan revolutionary tribunal cried:
Communists, Red Guards, and others, fulfil your great mission by keeping constantly in communication with our investigation department, so that wherever you may be—whether in a city, or in a village, or a few paces away, or ten versts distant—you may telegraph to us your information, or else call in person, and so enable our inquiry agents to hasten to the spot.[168]
And the same city of Kiev saw its provincial committee of defence empower not merely individuals, but the population as a whole, to:
Seize and detain any and every person soever who shall be found seeking to thwart the Soviet Government, and to select hostages from the wealthy, and to shoot such hostages if any counter-revolutionary manifestation shall take place, and to subject villages to military investment until arms have been surrendered thence, and to undertake indemnified domiciliary searches after the expiration of dates for surrender of arms, and to shoot all persons found still in possession of the same, and to fix general contributions, and to deport leaders and instigators of rebellion, and to make over those leaders’ property to non-affluent dwellers.[169]
Frequently, also, the Soviet’s provincial press displayed such advertisements as: “The Provincial Che-Ka of Kostroma herewith proclaims that it is the duty of every citizen of the R.S.F.S.R. to shoot at sight Citizen Smorodinov, now standing convicted of wilful defection.” And once a “Comrade Ilyin” wrote from Vladikavkaz: “Each of you Communists possesses the right to kill any agent-provocateur, or person guilty of sabotage, or person seeking to hinder you from winning the victory over your foeman’s body.”[170] Lastly, in 1918 a revolutionary tribunal in the South went so far as to confer upon all its Communist supporters “power of life and death over counter-revolutionaries of every species,” and a Red Guard association in Astrakhan to order that, if a single shot should be fired at either a Communist worker or a Red Guard, hostages from amongst the bourgeoisie “shall be executed within twenty minutes.”