The red terror in Russia

The instigators of the Red Terror did more than afford full scope to lawlessness outside Che-Ka premises; they also established within those premises a complete system of illegality, and a mere glance at official comments on lists of shot will bring before the imagination an unforgettable spectacle of outrage. Frequently persons were shot by order of officials who did not so much as know what the accusations had been, or even the victims’ names. “Shot—Names unknown”!

On June 18, 1918, Gorky’s journal, the Novaya Zhizn or “New Life,” published an interview with Dzherzhinsky and Zachs, who expounded to the journalist the policy of the Che-Ka, whilst Dzherzhinsky, in particular, said:

True, the correspondent of the Novaya Zhizn next referred to rumours as to employment of physical violence during examinations of prisoners; but Zachs at once replied:

Whence, as I will show, the interview constituted a tissue of lies.

Callousness in Executions

For one thing, the above-named officials’ assertion that eighteen members were required to pass a death sentence was false. All too frequently such a sentence was passed by two or three members alone—even by one after a “people’s justice” had been empowered with the capital penalty.[171]

“It is swiftly that we deal out justice.” Well, possibly Dzherzhinsky and his kind did deal out justice swiftly on occasions of mass shootings. At the same time, I know of innumerable cases when things were otherwise, and months passed before the accused was even questioned, and, from first to last, the proceedings with regard to a given prisoner occupied more than a year before they reached their inevitable end in execution.

“We are accused of secret murder.” Quite so. Seldom were shootings officially reported, even though on September 5, 1918, during the height of a wave of Red terrorism, a resolution of the Council of People’s Commissaries called for “compulsory publication both of names of the shot and of reasons for applying the supreme punitive measure!”

The exact manner of fulfilling this resolution, so far as practice was concerned, can be gained by perusing casual announcements in the Central Che-Ka’s Weekly, whose purpose was “co-ordination and direction of the provincial Che-Kas[* Ka’s?]’ activities.” To take a particularly instructive illustration. On Oct 26, 1918, six weeks after Madame Kaplau’s attempt upon Lenin, No. 6 of the Weekly published what purported to be a list of the persons shot for the deed. Yet though, in reality, the number of the shot had amounted to several hundreds, the list’s total amounted only to ninety, and in sixty-seven instances gave no Christian name or patronymic, and in two instances only some initials, and in eighteen instances only a surname and the social status—“Razoumovsky, ex-lieutenant-colonel”; “Kotomazov, ex-student”; “Mouratov, co-operative employee”; and so forth. And only in ten instances was any reason for the execution appended, with, even so, the accused merely described as “an obvious counter-revolutionary,” or “a White Guard,” et cetera, et cetera. And though the list also contained such entries as “Khvostov, ex-Minister of the Interior, and a counter-revolutionary,” and “Vistorgov, Arch-Priest,” the reader was left to guess that a bare entry of “Maklakov” referred to another man who had been a Minister of the Interior. True, in the latter case, the identity was easy enough to discern; but what of the many plain Zhichkovskys and Ivanovs and Zhelinskys and so forth who figured with him? No one was to be allowed to know who they had been. Nor, probably, will anyone ever know.

And if the central authority’s orders were carried out by that authority’s central subordinate organisations in such a manner, what must have been the case in provinces remote from the centre? Well, there the Terror assumed forms truly bestial, and official reports of shootings became even more obscure than reports of shootings in the metropolitan neighbourhood. “Thirty-nine prominent landowners have been shot after arrest for connection with the counter-revolutionary organisation known as ‘The Union to Support the Provisional Government’”; “Six adherents of the late Imperial régime have been shot”; and so forth. Or a few names would be published over a note that the remaining, unnamed persons in the list had met with a like fate.

And the same procedure continued even after what Moroz, the notorious Che-Ka employee, described (in No. 6 of the Weekly) as “chaotic disorder” had passed away. Whence Dzherzhinsky’s denial that his Che-Ka committed secret murder was out of place. It did so in every sense of the term. Sometimes it passed a death sentence without even having seen the person whom it was condemning, or even listened to a plea on his behalf. Also, it was seldom that the names of the condemners themselves appeared, or that the permanent identity of a Che-Ka’s personnel became public property. (In passing, shootings carried out without any notification of occurrence, or of names, acquired the special or technical name of “blind-alley” shootings.)

Hence, what impudence must have been needed for a man like Chicherin to reply to a correspondent of the Chicago Tribune, when the latter inquired how many persons had been shot “by order of secret tribunals,” and what the fate of the surviving members of the Tsar’s family had been:

Again, Dzherzhinsky spoke of “confessions of guilt from the accused himself.” Well, I myself have heard such “confessions” made—made under pressure of threats, at the point of a revolver. So also have many other inmates of Che-Ka gaols.

“Rumours that we employ physical violence are false.” We shall see about that, and in the meanwhile it may be said that Che-Kas inflicted the most excruciating of tortures, and that the Che-Kas which inflicted them were not exclusively Che-Kas sitting in the more remote provinces. For human life came to be so valueless in Soviet Russia that Golodin (a deputy sent from Moscow to sit on the Che-Ka of Kungur) put things in a nutshell when he said: “Nowadays, neither suspicion nor investigation, nor even proof, is needed for the shooting of an accused. When the step is deemed advisable one can just shoot, and have done with it.”

Next, let us consider some of the published reasons for executions, as occasionally set forth in the official and semi-official Bolshevist press. They are significant. Sometimes we come across a reason at least definite to the point of describing the “criminal” as “a cunning and crafty counter-revolutionary,” or as “a wife fully cognisant of her husband’s activities,” or as “the son,” or “the daughter,” “of a general” (these examples are from the registers of Petrograd); but more often was the “crime” set down, with amazing effrontery, as, in the case of Gorokhov, a peasant, and others, “assaulting a commissary”; in the case of Rogov, a shopkeeper, as “using his premises for intrigue against the Soviet”; and so forth, and so forth. Moreover, many were just described as “Shot in the ordinary course of the Red Terror,” and there is nothing excessively explicit about “twenty well-known White Guards,” “Zvierev, a doctor and a White Guard,” “sixteen koulaki,” “an ex-member of the Constitutional Democratic Party,” “a counter-revolutionary by conviction,” and entries of the same kind. In fact, I possess a host of cuttings from the official press to swell these instances, but anyone could obtain them by scanning the first six issues of the Weekly.

One list brought especial grief to all who had known the victims named. That list was a list comprising the names of men once prominent in the educated world of Russia, and including, amongst others, such intellectuals as N. N. Stchepkin, A. D. Apferov, A. S. Apferov, A. A. Volkov, A. I. Astrov, V. I. Astrov, N. A. Ogorodnikov, K. K. Chernoevitov, P. V. Gerasimov (who was shot under the name of “Grekov”), S. A. Kniazikov, and many more—the names numbering, in all, sixty-six, and appearing in the journals of Moscow on September 23, 1919. These murders the conscience of Society will never to the end forgive. And this applies especially in the cases of A. I. Astrov and V. I. Astrov, who were shot as “spies in Denikin’s employ” because in their house there had allegedly been found (1) “a plan for reorganising our legal courts and means of transport and commissariats when the Soviet Power shall fall,” and (2) “a proclamation to the Volunteer Army.”

But why, also, were N. I. Lazarevsky and Prince Oukhtomsky and others shot? The official report is dated September 1, and says of Lazarevsky that

whilst of Prince S. A. Oukhtomsky, the sculptor, it was said in the report that “he had betrayed to an organisation engaged in transmitting information to foreign parts certain items concerning the condition of our Russian museums [!], and prepared an article on the subject for the White press.” And another of those shot was the poet Goumilev.

Similar to this report was a report of the trial of N. N. Stchepkin. The same document added that “Maria Alexandrovna Yakoubovskaya, a member of the Constitutional Democratic Party, and a school teacher, had been found to be in communication with an agent of Kolchak’s”; but as a matter of fact the lady’s real “crime” had been that on August 29, 1919, a few days before the Bolshevists were expelled from the city of Kiev, she had been found in a house where some other arrests (arrests in no way connected with her) were about to be carried out. At the same period the Kievan Izvestia published 127 names of persons as shot for “themselves carrying out mass shootings of workers and members of the Communist Party in localities recently vacated by Denikin and Petlura”: and though these persons may really have been the sworn foes of the workers and the poorer peasants, which the report declared them to have been, we have only the Bolshevists’ word for the fact.

Again, take events in Odessa. We read:

And an old lady named Sigismundova was shot for having received a letter from her officer son at Varna! She was shot, that is to say, for “having been in communication with an agent of the Entente, and of the Entente’s hireling Wrangel.”[173] And in Odessa, in 1919, General Baranov was shot merely for having taken a photograph of the Catherine II Memorial in that city—the said memorial having had the misfortune to be situated in the very square confronting the local Che-Ka’s premises.[174]

We have seen that revolutionary tribunals shot, in addition, persons convicted of such offences as drunkenness and petty theft. And the same thing happened to an individual who was found to be in possession of an officer’s badges, and to another for having “criminally recovered a son’s body,” and to a butcher of Moscow for having “insulted” images of Marx and Engels by calling them “scarecrows,”[175] and to some doctors of Kronstadt for having “made themselves popular with the local workers.” So need we wonder that the Communist officials of Ivanovo-Voznesensk threatened similarly to shoot anyone who concealed, or failed to register, a sewing-machine,[176] or that Mitayev, the commandant of Vladikavkaz, vowed to “cleanse from off the face of the earth” anyone selling intoxicating liquor,[177] or that the commissary of posts and telegraphs at Baku issued an order that any telephone girl found guilty of tardy response to a call, or of response to a call “in an uncivil manner,” should be shot within twenty-four hours?[178]

True, of death sentences passed the All-Russian Che-Ka kept protocols; but did Dzherzhinsky really imagine that protocols like those drawn up in Kiev during 1919 were good enough to go upon? No. 4 of the Berlin review Na Chouzhoi Storonyé (“In Foreign Parts”) published some astonishing Kievan returns of the sort, and also some cognate returns drawn up by the All-Ukrainian Che-Ka under friend Latzis. Which returns, with their original seals and signatures, now lie lodged in the archives of the Denikin Commission. From them let us take an example or two. They show that once (so easy is it to sign a death warrant) the All-Ukrainian Che-Ka decided fifty-nine cases at a sitting, and that on May 19, 1919, the same Che-Ka not only got through its ordinary routine work for the day, but also tried forty “personal” cases, and passed, in twenty-five of those cases, a sentence of death. And the sentences must have been (to use Dzherzhinsky’s word) “well-founded,” for the returns which give them do not so much as mention the antecedent “crimes.” And the same applies to some executions carried out at Kharkov when two Che-Ka employees named Portugeis and Feldmann, as they shot the prisoners, merely achieved such a brief and rough jotting down of notes in pencil as, for example, “Baeva—Shot as an incorrigible criminal.”[179]

But, of course, to a Che-Ka employee, to an individual who despised the old ethics, the old “bourgeois prejudices,” such proceedings would seem no more than “trials in legal form terminating in justified shooting.” Indeed, Sigal of Odessa, an ex-Che-Ka official, and at one time an ex-student of the University of Novorossisk, stated, in answer to a question from the Denikin Commission, that it had been quite a common practice for the Che-Ka’s secretary merely to send out word that “the trial must be conducted in such a manner as to result in at least fifteen persons being sent to the wall.”

And the same callousness with regard to human life frequently caused two or more persons to be shot through the fact that both or all of them bore the same or similar names. This might happen accidentally, or it might purposely be done to avoid any possibility of a mistake. I myself know of such a case when, in Odessa, three doctors named so wholly dissimilarly as Volkov, Valsov, and Vorobiev were shot in a batch[180]; whilst in another case a man named Ozerov was shot before the “people’s prosecutor” had discovered an error to have been made—whereupon the rightful Ozerov was shot as well.[181] We find several such cases in Averbuch’s book The Che-Ka of Odessa.

Again, the same Che-Ka once received information concerning some “counter-revolutionary activities” said to have been carried on by a man called Aaron Chonsir, but not at the same time, unfortunately, the man’s address: wherefore the “people’s prosecutor” engaged in the case ordered the local street directory to be looked through, and then caused eleven persons of the accused’s name to be arrested and imprisoned. Only after a fortnight of enquiries which included several applications of torture were two out of the eleven Chonsirs selected, and shot. And the reason why still as many as two were shot (although the original indictment had called for the arraignment only of one) was that the “inquisitional department” had not been able to make up its mind even with regard to the pair chosen, and so had made sure of bagging the real “counter-revolutionary” by shooting both the one and the other. Similarly a responsible witness who could not well be suspected of attempting to colour his testimony has stated that once an ex-assistant procurator named A. S. Baranov was shot in mistake for an officer of the same name; also, that once the witness was present in a cell when the name of “Vivordtsev, Alexey” was called out, as denoting a certain prisoner destined for execution, and when the only Vivordtsev in the cell was pointed out to the authorities, but stated to possess the initials K. M., the authorities, undeterred, replied: “Never mind the exact name! All that we want is a Vivordtsev.” Lastly, an educated landowner testified before the Denikin Commission that a peasant named Yakov “Khromoy” (“the Lame”) of the village of Yavkino was shot in mistake for a perfectly sound Yakov belonging to the same village, whereas the man executed was (as his name implied) a cripple.

Occasionally, however, the lives of persons placed in such a position were saved at the last moment by a lucky accident. Cases of the sort occurred under the “inquisitional departments” at Moscow, and similar ones are to be found recorded both in the British White Book and in The Che-Ka; whilst Nilostonsky tells of like incidents in Kiev.

In fact, “inadvertent” executions became so frequent as at last to give rise to a special class of victims, and to acquire the name of, in Che-Ka parlance, “mistakes.” In 1918, when the Che-Ka of Moscow discovered a secret organisation of ex-officers known as the Levshinsky Club, all ex-officers, without exception, who happened to live in the Levshinsky Perëonlok[182] were arrested, and thrown into the Butyrka Prison—where, for fellow inmates, they had the persons who had been arrested in connection with the Lockhart affair. And of these ex-officers (who numbered in all, twenty-eight) only six lived to tell the tale. And take the following:

All of which things at least help us to understand passages in Latzis’ statistical articles which state that “shootings had to be employed to intimidate the population,” or “to produce the required effect,” or “to kill any leanings towards sabotage and conspiracy,” and the rest. In Yaroslav, for example, he and his party shot hostages merely on the ground that a rising of koulaki was anticipated, though it had not actually come to pass. And on February 11, 1919, Mr. Alston wrote to Lord Curzon:

But perhaps the vilest episode of all was the shooting of a whole family of hostages in Elizabetgrad during the May of 1920, when the four little daughters of an officer, children from seven to three years old, were shot along with their grandmother of sixty-nine!

A passing thought is: How came “counter-revolutionaries” sometimes to be shot forthwith, and sometimes to be kept until later? There would seem to be a mystery here. When, during the autumn of 1918, a policy of shooting ex-Tsarist Ministers was entered upon, Bouligin, the ex-Minister of the Interior, had his life spared during the year just named, but on September 5, 1919, was brought before the Che-Ka of Petrograd, and tried for having pursued a reactionary policy as long ago as 1905! “Wherefore it is resolved that Citizen Bouligin be shot, and have his property confiscated, and handed over to the Executive Committee, for transference to certain workers in a State factory.”[184]

Perhaps this was one of the protocols which Dzherzhinsky declared to be “well-founded”?

Physical Outrage and Torture

If the reader will recall what has been said in connection with Che-Kas, he will scarcely doubt—nay, he will feel certain—that physical outrage was practised in Che-Ka dungeons. The appeal to European public opinion framed by the Paris Executive Committee of the Russian Constituent Assembly in no way exaggerated when it protested against “the present orgy of political murder in Russia, with employment of physical torture and physical injury.” For all that has ever been written about the ancient Russian prisons—in particular, about “the Russian Bastille,” as the Schlüsselburg Fortress, the repository of olden-time important political offenders, has been called—pales before the prisons and the prison system established by the Soviet Government. And we have seen how Peter Kropotkin declared the Soviet’s prison conditions, and the practice of seizing hostages, to constitute a return to the old methods of torture.

During my confinement in the Butyrka Gaol I became acquainted with a Dr. Moudrov of Moscow, whose “offence” I do not know—I only know that he had never had any definite indictment framed against him, and that, inasmuch as he had spent several months in the Che-Ka building’s dungeons before being transferred to the Butyrka, he had become so acclimatised to the prison atmosphere as to be able to be entrusted by the prison authorities with the duties of medical officer to the establishment (previously no medical staff at all had been in existence there), and dealt so efficiently with the prevailing epidemic of typhus as to be left unexamined by the Che-Ka. But at length a day arrived when he passed from us in the very midst of his mission of healing, and never returned; and soon afterwards we heard that he had been shot. No explanation has ever been forthcoming for this insensate deed of cruelty, and probably it would be impossible to present one. All that the Izvestia of October 17 said was that Dr. Moudrov “had formerly been a member of the Constitutional Democratic Party.”

Another encounter in the prison similarly affected me. When, during the summer of 1922, I was summoned to give evidence in the great trial of Social Revolutionaries that was then held, I happened to walk from the cells to the court beside a thin, middle-aged man whom, on the way, I contrived to engage in a little conversation, and thereby discovered to be a Colonel Perkhourov who had taken part in the Savinkov rising at Yaroslavl in 1918, and been thrown into the Che-Ka building’s cells, and, though those cells were, supposedly, only a place of detention pending inquiry, half-starved, allowed no books or interviews, and conceded no facilities for exercise. And though I could not clearly ascertain whether until now he had escaped the authorities’ memory, or whether he had purposely been held over for the present occasion, at all events I found him being conducted to the court in the same capacity (as a witness) as myself. But no sooner had the proceedings begun than he found himself transferred from amongst the witnesses to amongst the accused! And later he was taken to Yaroslavl, and, according to an officially published statement, shot.

These are examples with which I myself came in contact: but there were hundreds of others. And if this kind of thing could happen in the centre of the country, at a time when the anarchical conditions of the Bolshevists’ early days of rule were supposed to have given place to a semblance of regular and established order, what must have happened in far-removed provinces where there sat enthroned despotism in its vilest forms?

Well, there was torture in progress there. For the mere fact of having to live for months, for years, in daily expectation of death alone constituted torture. And so did the provincial Che-Kas’ universal system of mock shootings; and during the time that I was in the Butyrka I had many such cases of shootings personally related to me by informants whose veracity I have no reason to doubt, seeing that they were confiding to me their narratives whilst the shock communicated to their nerves by their horrible experiences had not yet wholly faded. Amongst others who were subjected to such an ordeal were some prominent co-operative officials of Petrograd who had been “tried” before the Supreme Revolutionary Tribunal during the autumn of 1920: and in their case the torture took the form of nightly being led out as though for execution, and forced, despite the intense frost, to strip to the last shred of clothing, and witness real executions of other prisoners before being led back to their cells for the whole ghastly “rehearsal” to be repeated a few nights later.

But sometimes persons subjected to this mental torture would so lose their self-control as to make any admission rather than be compelled to go through the experience again. An American named Kalmatiano who was sentenced to death at the Lockhart trial, and subsequently reprieved, told V. A. Miakotin and myself, when the three of us were lying in the Butyrka gaol together, that thrice he and a fellow-accused named Fride had been taken out of prison as though for execution, and that though, on May 10, 1920, he was informed that his sentence had been commuted, his sentence of death had been passed as long previously as the year 1918, and meanwhile he had had to spend the whole of the intervening time in daily expectation of being shot.

A Madame E. O. Kolbasina who was imprisoned with us has since related[185] a similar experience told her by a fellow inmate. The scene of the experience was the Che-Ka’s building in Moscow, and the following is the lady’s account of what happened:

And Madame N. Davidova, for her part, has noted the following:

A propos of the Saratov ravine, a narrator has said in The Che-Ka:

Consider also the mental and physical agonies which Ivan Ivanovich Kotov, an ex-member of the Russian Constituent Assembly, must have endured in 1918 as he was being dragged to slaughter from the hold of a barge after having had a leg and an arm broken, and an eye gouged out![187]

The Che-Ka of Ekaterinodar, in particular, went in for intimidatory measures, and an example of them is seen in the case of a Doctor Shestakov who, after being taken across the river Kuban, and forced there and then to dig his own grave, and in every way led to suppose that he was about to be executed, was fired at only with a volley of blank cartridges. And a man named Korvin-Piotrovsky was treated similarly, and again and again, with, as a finishing touch, a cruel flogging, information that his wife and ten-year-old daughter had also been arrested, and an enforced witnessing of their subjection to a “mock” execution similar to those which had so often been inflicted upon himself.

Again, according to an article in The Che-Ka:

In Piatigorsk the head of the local Che-Ka’s “operative department” used to accompany “questionings” with strokes from a rubber whip—as many as twenty strokes at a time. Once, also, the fellow ordered some nurses who had rendered first aid to some wounded Cossacks to be given fifteen lashes apiece.[189] It was the practice of this Che-Ka, too, to thrust pins under prisoners’ finger-nails. In general, it conducted its “inquiries” on a basis of flagellation with whips and ramrods and clenched fists. We have evidence also that similar treatment was accorded to Admiral Miazgovsky at Nikolaev in 1919; whilst the Dielo once published a statement as to how a citizen of Lougansk had been tortured by having ice-cold water poured over his naked body, and his finger-nails wrenched backward with steel pliers, and his body pricked all over with needles, and slashed with razors.[190] And on another occasion a correspondent of the same journal[191] wrote with regard to Simferopol: “The Che-Ka there has invented new forms of torture by injecting into the rectum enemas charged with powdered glass, and holding lighted candles beneath the generative organs.” In Tsaritsin the victims were variously laid upon a heated grid, thrashed with iron rods or metal-tipped flails of rubber, or subjected to twistings of the arms until the bones were broken.[192]

A whole chapter in Averbuch’s book is devoted to the tortures practised in Odessa, with the Che-Ka’s system of fetters, confinement in pitch-dark cells, castigation with rods a centimetre thick and cat-o’-nine-tails of plaited leather, crushings of hands with pincers, and suspensions by the neck. And amplification of Averbuch’s descriptions is to be found in the materials collected by the Denikin Commission, which detail two cases of mock shooting. In the first case the victim was thrust into a crate which already contained a dead body, and shot at so that only one ear was singed—then removed until his tormentors should see fit to repeat the torture; and in the second case the proceedings consisted of forcing the victim to dig what he believed to be his own grave in a condemned cell which had had scratched across one of its walls: “Twenty-seven bodies lie buried here.” This second case, of course, was designed to intimidate only; much as when, in a third case, a man was nightly awakened by the jailor, led out into the courtyard, and, on the jailor being bidden to “take him back again, and let him live through the rest of the night,” restored to his cell. Also, in Odessa members of the Che-Ka used to visit the cells several times a day, and say mockingly: “By to-night you will have become something different.”[193]

In 1919, when an important trial of political prisoners was proceeding in Moscow, armed guards were posted over the prisoners whilst they were in the cells, and the cells would be periodically visited by female Communists, who said to the guards: “These prisoners are spies. Shoot them at once if they attempt to escape.” But most abominable of all were the doings of the female president of the Che-Ka of Penza, a woman called Boche, in the year 1918. They grew so bad that at last the central authorities had to insist upon her retirement. And during the winter of 1920 it was the practice of the twenty-year-old male head of the Che-Ka of Vologda to seat himself on a chair beside the frozen river, have a pile of sacks prepared, send to the gaol for the captives due for the day’s “questioning,” and, having caused the wretches to be thrust into the sacks, keep them immersed in a hole in the ice whilst he subjected them to examination. But at length his case, like the case of the woman Boche, attracted the notice of the central authorities, and, on his being medically examined, he was found to be insane.

In Tiumen the chief mode of torture was to beat the prisoners with rubber rods.[194] And of the Urals Che-Ka’s methods we can form an idea when we read, from the pen of a Madame Froumkina:

In the prison of Novocherkassk a “people’s prosecutor” once thrust two revolvers into a victim’s mouth in such a manner as to hitch the sights upon the victim’s teeth, and bring away both them and portions of the gum bones.[195]

Next, consider the execution of General Roussky and his companions, as detailed in the materials collected by the Denikin Commission:

And now the time has come for me to tell of the “heroic” deeds of Saenko, head of the Che-Ka of Kharkov. This man first came into prominence at the time when, in 1919, the city was occupied by the Bolshevists before their subsequent evacuation of the same. Hundreds of victims then passed through his maniacal, sadistic hands. An eye-witness has related how, when first this witness entered the Che-Ka cells, he was struck with the terrified aspect of the prisoners, and enquired the cause of their fear. Said they: “Saenko has been here, and taken away Syichev and Bielochkin for examination. And he has promised that this evening he will come and see some more of us.” And, sure enough, a few minutes later, the Syichev in question, a boy of nineteen, re-entered the cells leaning upon a couple of Red Guards, and looking like a ghost. His comrades cried, “What has been done to you?” and he replied, “Oh, Saenko has been examining me.” His right eye was one huge bruise, his right cheekbone seemed to have been laid open with a revolver butt, four of his front teeth were missing, his neck was covered with bruises, his left shoulder-blade had been gashed all over, and on his back were thirty-seven contusions and abrasions. And in this manner Saenko had been “examining” victims for five days past, so that in the end one of the victims, the man Bielochkin, died of his injuries in the prison infirmary. A favourite trick of Saenko’s was to keep digging the point of a knife into the examinee’s body for about a centimetre’s distance, and twisting it about. He would do this right in front of the “people’s prosecutor” and the rest of the Che-Ka staff.

And to the foregoing the witness has added an account of the executions which Saenko duly carried out, as threatened, on the evening of the day mentioned.