The following may give you an idea of the abominations committed here. Whilst some prisoners were digging sand for building purposes in front of the commandant’s house he noticed that they sat down for a rest. Accordingly, without moving from his place at the window, he drew his revolver, fired, and killed and wounded several of the party. Upon that the prisoners went on hunger strike; and on this coming to the ears of Moscow, a commission of enquiry was dispatched to Portaminsk, and the commandant removed. But the new commandant, a sailor from the “Gangut,” is just as cruel as his predecessor, and haphazard shootings of prisoners by guards before their comrades’ eyes are as common as ever.
The mere fact that in six months, during the years 1921 and 1922, 442 prisoners out of 1200 died should show us what were the conditions of confinement in the North.
At Kholmogory prisoners would be thrown into a pitch-dark cell, or confined in buildings known respectively as “the cold tower” and “the white house”—the latter an isolated edifice the one small room of which had no lavatory attached, and at times would be made to hold as many as forty persons. Typhus patients confined there had to spend the ten days before the “crisis” of the malady without any sort of medical attention, and it was quite a common thing for prisoners to lose their reason whilst in the building.
And since we in Moscow could gain only fragmentary news of such happenings, and were ourselves in the power of officials who stood indemnified against punishment for their acts, how could we voice a protest with safety, even if it had been possible for us to voice one? More than once during my time in the Butyrka Gaol I have known prisoners whom I had seen undergoing ill-treatment whilst under examination subsequently beseech me to keep silence on the subject. The prison doctors themselves were forbidden to disclose that floggings of prisoners were being practised, and once when a Dr. Sheglov gave some Socialists a certificate that they had been subjected to physical outrage he was sent into exile at Archangel, and allotted for his portion of hard labour the task of clearing away sanitary refuse. Of floggings outside the prison we did hear news, whilst also we heard of a Social Democrat named Treigav being thrust into a cell which measured three paces by two, and made to share it with a Chinese lunatic who had homicidal mania. These and other instances of the sort are to be found detailed in Nos. 1 and 14 of Revolutsionnaya Rossia. Again, a letter secretly conveyed to us from a Left Social Revolutionary named Shebalin told how he had been tortured (in Petrograd) by having his arms and legs beaten with a revolver butt, his eye-sockets and testicles prodded and compressed until he had swooned with the agony, and his body flogged in such a manner as to leave no weals or blood, but cause the blood of the flagellation to pour from his throat alone.[209] And similar to his statements concerning compression of the testicles was evidence given by Sinovary before the tribunal at Lausanne. Besides, I myself knew Shebalin, who for six months had been my fellow-prisoner in the Butyrka, and therefore can testify that he was a man incapable of telling a lie, or even of exaggerating.
I can assure you (he wrote), that this letter is being sent to you from a torture establishment the régime and the resources of which outdo even those of the ancient “Bastilles of Russia,” the Fortress of Schlüsselburg and the Fortress of Petropavlovsk—in both of which I have been imprisoned for offending the Imperial Crown.
Also, the letter mentioned certain cunningly devised cells which had just been contrived on the Gorokhovaya Street premises of the Petrograd Che-Ka—little cramped, icy-cold rooms walled with double linings of cork so as to prevent all sounds whatsoever from reaching the outside world. And there, our informant said, prisoners were “questioned” by being frozen and burnt and otherwise tortured—usually for between five and ten days at a stretch, or even for a month.[210] And in a book written abroad, but based primarily upon materials which the author had brought with him from Russia, S. S. Maslov has stated that it was a common, almost a universal, thing for prisoners to be kicked and beaten with rifle and revolver butts all over their bodies. Also, he cites an instance of barbarism which is the more characteristic of the Bolshevist “justice,” whose principles are so enthusiastically extolled in the Soviet press as “tending less to punish than to reform” in that the instance had no sort of relation to politics.
In Moscow, during the May of 1920, some juvenile pickpockets of from eleven to fifteen years of age were arrested, thrown into a cellar on the Che-Ka’s premises, and kept separate from the rest of the prisoners. For the Che-Ka had decided to put these children to an official use, and obtain, through them, the names of pickpockets with whom the children had associated in the past. Yet, though the authorities cajoled and threatened, the children persisted in saying that they knew nothing whatsoever on the subject, and all inquiries proved fruitless. Next, employees of the Che-Ka entered the cell, and beat the children with their fists, and, as the victims fell under the blows, stamped upon them with their heels. And then the children did promise to inform against their late companions, but, never having known those companions’ real names, had to be driven about the streets in motor-cars and tram-cars, or else taken to the railway stations, on the chance that, en route, they might be able to point out one or more of the culprits wanted. And though on the first day the children persistently avoided denunciation of any former comrades, they were so cruelly beaten for this when they returned to the Che-Ka building in the evening, and every evening afterwards, that at last they did begin to betray old associates, and then, through fear of further floggings, even to inform against perfectly innocent persons, persons whom they had never known at all. And when this had been going on for three weeks or so, orders were received for the children to be transferred from the premises of the Che-Ka to the Butyrka Gaol: by which time the children were emaciated, bruised all over, clad in rags, stamped with fear until they had come to look like little animals constantly confronting death, given to trembling, and apt to moan and weep even during their sleep at night. Then, after two or three weeks in the Butyrka Gaol, orders came for them to be restored to the Che-Ka premises: and I have since been told by prisoners who had often and long been confined in gaol that they had never before in their lives—no, not even during their imprisonment in Siberia—heard such terrible cries as those children uttered when they realised that they were going to be taken to the Che-Ka’s cellars again. Indeed, my informants said, they had never before felt such burning hatred of their oppressors as when their tear-dimmed vision beheld those young creatures’ suffering, and saw their young forms being marched away to the yard in a frenzy of weeping.
And only recently I heard that at Irkutsk an old revolutionary named Kulikovsky had been done to death during examination by an agent of the O.G.P.U. And I have since read in the journal Dni the details of the occurrence: how that when Kulikovsky refused to reply to his torturer’s questions the latter battered him with a revolver-butt until, with skull fractured, the old man fell and died.
The Amount of Licence accorded to Executioners
I have said that Saenko was a sadist, and described some of his doings. And from writings by the Socialist Karelin we obtain also items concerning Saenko’s chief assistant, the sailor Edward, a fellow who would fall to friendly talk and jest with a group of prisoners, and then suddenly draw his revolver and shoot one of the wretches through the back of the neck.
And from a writer named Averbuch, a man well acquainted with affairs in Odessa, we hear of the abominable doings of Kalinchenko, the head of the Che-Ka of that city. To his fantastic whims and crazy dispensation of “justice” many stories are due. For example, once he celebrated his nameday by sending to the local prison for “three of the fattest bourgeois to be obtained,” and, in his drunken frenzy, shooting them then and there. And Averbuch also has written:
Once when I called at the Café Astra (a place frequented almost exclusively by Bolshevist officials) I heard from Vaska the executioner’s own lips the story of his shooting of two bourgeois. Yes, he described to me their agonies of mind before death, their kissings of his hands and feet, their beggings for mercy. And he added: “After all, I have only done my duty as a revolutionary.”
At Odessa, too, there was an executioner named Johnson, a man sent thither from Moscow. And of him Averbuch has written[211]:
Before long the fellow’s name became a synonym for everything that was cruel and vile. For only he, only this Johnson, only this negro executioner, could skin a victim before killing him, or cut off a prisoner’s limbs, one by one, during the ordeal of examination.
Yet was Johnson the only ruffian who could do such things? At a Bolshevist exhibition held in Moscow during the years 1920–21 one of the exhibits was a pair of “gloves” which had been ripped from the human hand; and though the Bolshevists represented this pair to be an example of atrocities committed by the Whites, rumours as to Saenko taking “gloves” from victims at Kharkov had reached Moscow much earlier than that, and “gloves” of the sort had actually been found in the basement of the Che-Ka’s premises, whilst Anarchists subsequently brought from Kharkov to the Butyrka had unanimously testified to perpetrations of the abomination in question. Yet Lounacharsky, a member of the Party thus exhibiting Saenko’s “gloves” as a sample of cruelty committed by the opposite side,[212] had said at a session of the Soviet held on December 4, 1918: “Although we are accused of a Hottentot standard of morality, we are not going to admit the impeachment”!
With Johnson was associated a young woman executioner named Vera Grebenninkova (or “Dora”). This female’s talent for barbarism rivalled that of the negro himself, and amongst other stories of her ferocity we may include the item that she would tear out victims’ hair by the handful before doing the same with them limb by limb—cutting off ears, dislocating jaws, and the like. Her activities may be summed up in the fact that during her two and a half months with the Odessan Che-Ka she shot over 700 persons—a third of the whole tale![213]
In Kiev it was the practice to make the condemned prostrate themselves amongst the curdled blood on the floor before being shot through the back of the head, or brained. And in certain cases they were even made to prostrate themselves upon victims shot a moment or two earlier, or were taken out into the garden for the purpose of a “human hunt” of the kind related by the Kievan Sisters of Mercy. “Mikhailov, the spruce, immaculate chief of the Che-Ka, had a particular love for stripping prisoners naked, and then chivying them about the Che-Ka garden with a brandished revolver.”[214]
There is a similar reminiscence recorded by the French authoress, Odette Kun, a self-styled Communist whom untoward circumstances caused to be confined in Che-Ka cells at Sebastopol, Simferopol, Kharkov, and Moscow. In one passage this writer describes a Petrograd hunt of women prisoners which she had had related to her by an actual eye-witness of the “sport.”[215] It seems that in 1920 her informant had, with twenty other women, been incarcerated for “counter-revolutionary activity.”
One night a band of soldiers arrived at the building, and drove some of my companions out into the yard; and the next moment, when a chorus of almost inhuman cries reached our ears, and we looked through a window into the courtyard, we saw that the women had been stripped of every shred of clothing, and were being bundled into a wagon. Later, we learnt that they were taken out into the country, and told to run for their lives, with a promise that the first who reached a given goal should have her life spared. Needless to say, all of them were killed.
S. N. Volkonsky’s memoirs, again, state that in Briansk it was the practice to shoot prisoners in the back as soon as ever an examination was concluded[216]; also, that in Siberia prisoners were brained with an iron “rattle.” And a woman has related:
Just under our window I saw an ex-agent of the Okhrana (the old secret political police force) being killed in the Che-Ka’s courtyard. He was killed with a pole or a rifle-butt. It took over an hour to finish him off, and all the time he was beseeching the men for mercy.
At Ekaterinoslav, too, a fellow called Valiavko who shot “counter-revolutionaries” by the hundred would release from ten to fifteen prisoners in a small garden around which he had had a special fence constructed, and then enter with two or three friends, and fall to shooting at the “game.”[217] In the same city “Comrade” Trepelov, head of the Che-Ka, would select victims for execution merely by the process of marking names on the lists whose appearance displeased him, and so, with a “Raz.”[218] in thick red pencil, sign the victims’ death-warrant. Another device of his was to pencil the lists in such a manner as to render exact determination of which names were meant impossible. Also, when the local prison was being evacuated he saved time by having the whole of his listfuls of persons (fifty in all) shot indiscriminately.
In the Revolutsionnoyé Dielo (“The Revolutionary Cause”)[219] of Petrograd we find the following details of how sixty persons were shot after the Tagantsev trial:
The shootings took place at a station on the Irinovskaya Railway, where the prisoners were led out at dawn, and told to dig their own graves. Then, when the graves were half dug, they were told to remove their clothing.... From all sides came groans and cries for mercy, but the victims nevertheless were pushed into the holes, and fired upon—one lot being pushed upon the top of the previous lot, and shot even as the latter had been shot, until all the graves had become filled up with dead and groaning.
The executioners of Moscow did their daily work in dungeons fitted with asphalt floors and gutters and trap-falls to carry off the blood. We find a good description of the ruffians in an article entitled “The Ship of Death,” and included in the collection The Che-Ka. The three executioners most prominent in Moscow were men named Emelianov, Pankratov, and Zhoukov—all of them registered members of the Communist Party, and therefore persons accustomed to live on the fat of the land. Like all other executioners, too, they were paid by piece rate, and received their victims’ clothes and jewellery for their perquisites. Hence many of them amassed perfect fortunes from gold-mounted teeth torn out, and pectoral crosses filched.
An eye-witness has stated in the journal Echo of Kovno that at one time shootings in the cellars of Nos. 13 and 14 Bretenka Street, Moscow, were carried out by so poising a rifle on a stand at the nearer end of the basement as to point towards the precise place where the head of a victim would naturally come, and that if the victim was too short to reach the place, steps were placed beneath his feet.[220]
Again, S. S. Maslov speaks of a woman executioner whom he frequently saw during the year 1919. Every two or three days this woman would make her appearance in the central prison hospital with a cigarette between her teeth, a whip in her hand, and an unsheathed revolver at her waist. And as she traversed the wards whence the next batch of victims was about to be removed for execution, she would revile and flog like dogs any patients who were so benumbed with terror as to be slow in collecting their belongings, or who sobbed too audibly as they bade their comrades farewell. Quite a young woman she was—not more than twenty or so. Nor was she the only female executioner in Moscow.
And from the same Maslov, who, as ex-member of the Constituent Assembly for Vologda Province, was well acquainted with events in that region, we have a description of a non-professional female executioner named Rebekah Plastinina-Maisel who was a surgeon’s assistant in a small town in Tver Province, shot, single-handed, over 100 victims. Of this harpy and her second husband, the notorious Kedrov, a woman named E. D. Kouskova who then was living as an exile at Vologda has stated that the pair would question prisoners from their travelling saloon at railway stations, and then and there shoot the wretches as soon as Rebekah had finished belabouring them, and shouting at them, and attacking them with her fists as ever and anon she cried hysterically “To be shot! Put them up against the wall!” And, adds Maslov, “I myself know of at least ten cases in which women executioners amused themselves for a while with ‘potting’ holes in their victims’ heads.” And from a correspondent of the journal Golos Rossii (“The Voice of Russia”)[221] we have a description of similar activities in Archangel during the spring and summer of 1920, with, for “heroine” again, the same Rebekah Plastinina-Maisel.[222]
In Archangel (says the correspondent), after the mock funeral procession of empty red coffins, Rebekah fell to wreaking vengeance upon her old party foes. Indeed, she became a maniac upon whose head there must have fallen the curses of hundreds of mothers and wives, for her malice surpassed even the malice of her male colleagues on the All-Russian Che-Ka. To begin with, she repaid petty insults once shown her by her first husband’s family by having that family crucified en masse.... So cruel, mad, and hysterical she was that also she invented a story that once some White officers had tied her to a horse’s tail, and started off the animal at a gallop. And she came to believe this self-imagined legend so firmly that, as soon as she reached Solovetsky, she took over from her husband the post of director of atrocities in that establishment, whilst later she had the victims whom Eydouk’s commission had arrested and dispatched to Moscow returned thence, forwarded by steamer to Kholmogory (that graveyard of the flower of Russia’s youth!), stripped, loaded on to barges, shot, and thrown into the sea. To the end of the summer the town groaned under the burden of her terrorism.
And in another communication to the same journal the correspondent adds: “In Archangel alone this Rebekah Plastinina-Maisel killed eighty-seven officers and thirty-three citizens with her own hand. And on another occasion she with her own hand scuttled a barge laden with 500 refugees and Miller soldiers.”[223]
Take also the following thumbnail sketch by an eye-witness who was present at the shooting of fifty-two persons in a single evening:
The chief executioner, a Lettish woman with a face so brutalised as to have earned for her, amongst the prisoners, the sobriquet of “The Pug,” was a female sadist. Always she wore breeches; and always she carried two revolvers at her belt. But subsequently this same “Comrade Louba” (she hailed, I believe, from Baku) was herself shot for stealing Government property.[224]
Another such woman was the female chief of the Che-Ka of Ounech, who, a brute beast rather than a human being, and a fit match for the Lettish hag, never stirred a step without revolvers and a goodly stock of cartridges in her leathern waist-belt. Once a refugee just come from Russia said of her to me: “The inhabitants of Ounech speak of her literally with bated breath.” May history preserve her name for the benefit of future generations!
And the town of Rybinsk too had its beast-woman, a creature named Zina. And Ekaterinoslav, Sebastopol and other places similarly evolved female monstrosities.[225]
For the rest, human nerves are fallible, and even Bolshevist executioners can weary of “a task for the people’s benefit.” Hence, in many cases it was by ruffians sunken in intoxication, in the requisite condition of “irresponsibility” for slaughtering their fellows, that massacres were carried out. Frequently I myself, whilst in the Butyrka Gaol, could see that its most hardened administrative officials, from the Commandant downwards, had indulged in cocaine or some other drug before the functionary whom we called the “Commissary of Death” was due to call at the gaol for his victims, and they would have to be collected from the cells by the officials. “In almost every cupboard,” says Nilostousky concerning the Che-Kas in Kiev, “and, for that matter, in almost every drawer, we found empty cocaine bottles in piles.” Thus drugged, of course, executioners would lose the last semblance of humanity, and a trustworthy witness has given us a particularly good instance of this, as related to that witness by a high official of the All-Russian Che-Ka[226]:
Once (the informant said), the chief executioner of Moscow, a man named Maga, a fellow who had shot thousands with his own hand (and the informant gave the almost fantastic estimate of 11,000!), completed the shooting of fifteen or twenty victims by throwing himself also upon the director of the special branch, Popov, who had attended the batch of executions merely for the pleasure of the spectacle. Maga’s eyes were bloodshot, and his frame bespattered with blood and brains. Indeed, he looked mad and horrible. Fortunately, though Popov lost his head, and ran for his life, and a scuffle followed, some other Che-Ka officials came to the rescue, and overpowered Maga.
Yet even drugging did not always enable executioners’ minds to stand the strain. In the report of the Kievan Sisters of Mercy to which I have more than once referred we read that sometimes Avdokhin, head of the principal Kievan Che-Ka, so felt the nerve-tension that actually he would go and pour out his troubles to the Sisters! “I am ill, Sisters,” he would say. “My head is burning, and I cannot sleep. All night the dead men keep torturing me.” And says another of the Sisters:
Never can I think of the faces of Terekhov, and Nikiforov, and Ougarov, and Abnaver, and Gousig and other members of those Che-Kas without feeling more than ever convinced that they are abnormal, sadists, cocaine fiends, men who have lost the last semblance of humanity.
At all events, it stands beyond doubt that for a while the lunatic asylums of Russia registered large numbers of cases of a disease which became known as “executioner’s dementia,” owing to its tendency to render its subjects a prey to real or imaginary remorse for bloodshed done, and to the most harrowing hallucinations. Similarly, eye-witnesses have told of Bolshevist sailors suddenly being seized with paroxysms in public places, and a Muscovite correspondent of the Dni once wrote: “The State Political Department has been trying to dispose of these madmen by shooting them—a resource which alone has enabled more than one such sufferer to find release from his terrible, haunting nightmares.”
Also, there were executioners evincing the clearest possible symptoms of mental degeneracy. Well do I remember a boy executioner who, aged only fourteen, shared my imprisonment in the Butyrka. So intellectually deficient was this lad, and so insensible of the enormity of what he had done, that he would boast of his exploits to his fellow prisoners, and relate them in the fullest detail. And when, during the January of 1922, a female “people’s prosecutor” of one of the Che-Kas of Kiev (Remover, a Hungarian), was arrested on a charge of having, without authority, shot a batch of eighty prisoners, most of whom were young men, she was found to be sexually deranged, and to have shot not only persons actually suspected, but also witnesses who unfortunately had excited her diseased craving during the time that they had been testifying before the Che-Ka. Lastly, a medical man has described for us a woman commissary named Nesterenko who would compel Red Guards to violate helpless women and girls—yes, and young children—in her very presence.[227]
Again, one needs but scan the records of the Denikin Commission to see that in dozens of cases higher officials, functionaries who in no way stood charged with the actual performance of executions, killed victims with their own hands. An example is Vichmann of Odessa, who had six executioners at his disposal (one of them, by the way, officiated under the pseudonym of “Amour”!) yet would go into the cells, and slaughter prisoners for his personal pleasure. And Atarbekov of Piatigorsk is known to have stabbed victims with a dagger, and Novar of Odessa to have killed a man named Grigoriev and his twelve-year-old son before witnesses, and another Che-Ka official to have had a weakness for “making his victim kneel down in front of him, and compressing the unfortunate man’s head between his knees, and shooting him through the back of the neck.”[228] Such instances, in fact, are endless.
Also, so common, in Russia, did death become that, as previously mentioned, a special phraseology of cynicism crept into the official press when detailing lists of shootings: examples being seen when victims were said to have been “paid over,” or to have been “given a change,” or to have been “sent to meet their father,” or to have been “dispatched to Doukhonin’s headquarters,” and when Voul of Moscow adopted the practice of writing that he had “played the guitar upon” them, or “sealed” them, and when Piatigorsk journalists took to speaking of “giving” victims “the natsokal” (an onomatopœic word based upon the sound of a revolver trigger snapping), and of “sending” them “to the Mashouk to sniff violets.” Lastly, once the Commandant of the Che-Ka of Petrograd himself was heard shouting to his wife over the telephone: “To-day I am to take some woodcocks over to Kronstadt.”[229]
An equal amount of brutality and cynicism marked the actual carrying out of the executions. In Odessa, when the death sentence had been pronounced upon an accused, the executioners stripped him naked, hung a numbered tab about his neck for identification purposes whenever the moment for slaughter should arrive, and forced him to sign a paper acknowledging that he had himself heard his doom proclaimed. It was in Odessa, too, that the cells of the condemned would be visited by officials who mockingly charged the condemned to supply biographical details for their own obituary notices! And a similar instance of mocking condemned prisoners is described by Madame Vyroubova—a party of sailors under an ex-lawyer named Levitsky, in this case, driving round and round a prison with songs, accordion music, and shouts of “Hi, you bourgeois! We are chanting your requiem!”[230]
But Petrograd, rather, went in for scrupulous observance of “legality” in the carrying out of executions. It even set aside a room specially for the purpose of informing prisoners of their fate: with the result that the room came to be known as “The Chamber of Departures.” True, the Pravda once took it upon itself to ridicule an English press assertion that military bands were wont to play during the progress of executions; yet this is no more than what actually happened on an occasion during the Terror of September, 1918, when Moscow shot some ex-Tsarist Ministers and others. In passing, it should be said that at that period all Muscovite executions were carried out by Red Guards on the Khodynka Plain, but later some Chinese replaced those Guards, and later, again, a special corps of paid executioners, assisted by, when necessary, amateurs. Again, witnesses examined by the Denikin Commission testified that both in Nikolaev and in Saratov ordinary criminals were set to execute their political fellows, and conceded their own lives as a reward, whilst in far Turkhestan judges themselves would act as executioners, and the custom seems still to obtain. Of course, it is a debatable question whether the person who has passed a death sentence ought not also to carry out that sentence; but, however that may be, there lies at our disposal a statement that as late as in 1923 a Judge V—always killed his own condemned, and as soon as he had sentenced them caused them to be divested of their clothing in an adjoining room, and shot. And of the Che-Ka of Odessa it is said that in 1923 it devised, for execution purposes, a dark, narrow passage-way which had a gaping cavity in the flooring at its further end, and an embrasure in each of the flanking walls, so that as the condemned man walked unawares along the passage way he fell into the pit, and could be fired upon from the embrasures without the executioners having even seen his face.
For only one more description of the kind need I make room—a description published in the fourth issue of the suppressed Left Social Revolutionary Bulletin,[231] and telling of shootings perpetrated by the Muscovite Che-Ka at the period when the “rights” of provincial Che-Kas and revolutionary tribunals were under discussion. But, as a description, it is the more valuable in that it was obtained from an actual onlooker at what was done.
Nearly every night a certain number of prisoners are removed from the cells for “dispatch to Irkutsk,” as our modern oprichniki now express it. Formerly the condemned were taken out to the Khodynsky Plain for execution, but since then their destination has become, in the first instance, Number 11, Varsonofievsky Pereonlok, and then Number 7, where, in batches of thirty, or twelve, or eight, or four, as the case may be, they are led to a room on the fourth floor to be stripped to their shirts, and then marched downstairs again and, half-naked as they are, stationed against stacks of fuel at the end of a snow-covered yard, and shot through the back of the head. And if any shot does not prove fatal, and a victim falls with life still left in him, he receives a whole volley, or else some of the executioners run and jump upon his chest, and stamp upon it, and rain blows upon his head. It was thus that on the night of March 10–11 a Madame Olekhovskaya was shot for an offence for which a sentence even of a day’s imprisonment would have been absurd. And it proved so difficult to dispatch her that, even when her head and bosom had been struck with seven bullets, her body still was quivering: whereupon Koudravtsev, an ex-Tsarist officer employee of the Che-Ka (and therefore a man fired with all the zeal of the Communist convert), ran and seized the woman by the throat, tore from her her blouse, and twisted and kneaded the vertebræ of her neck until life had fled. Her age was nineteen only.... Recently, seeing that the snow in that courtyard had become red and brown with the blood with which everything else in the yard is bespattered, the Che-Ka decided that the snow had better be melted away; and as there was plenty of fuel ready, large bonfires were lighted not only in the yard but also in the street outside it. Unfortunately, as the snow dissolved, it did so in a blood-red, curdled stream, and ran out of the yard and formed pools in the street, and had to have improvised, for the removal of its damning traces, a trapfall. Yes, mingled with that dark, accusing, terrible stuff there was blood come from the hearts of people recently as alive as the executioners themselves!
Arrogantly the Bolshevists proclaim that “we have no guillotine.” Ah, I know better. I know that, to an accompaniment of motor engines kept running to drown the sound of the shots, executions still are taking place in secret dungeons and basements.
And it was not only by night that shootings took place. There was a small square in front of an Archangel factory, where they took place by daylight, “where crowds of children from the neighbourhood could collect to witness them.”[232] And similarly in Odessa were people executed by daylight. And the same in Mogilev, and before the very eyes of their relatives.
Every evening between five and seven o’clock a motor-lorry would halt before the premises of the revolutionary tribunal of the Sixteenth Army; and when there had sprung into it a dozen executioners provided with a perfect armament of weapons and a couple of spades, the persons about to die also would be loaded into the vehicle, and it would be driven away. And when, an hour later, the lorry returned, the executioners would drag thence sackfuls of boots and clothing which the deceased had recently been wearing. And all this was done exclusively in the day time (the clocks were advanced three hours for the purpose), and in the presence of the victim’s relatives and friends—men, women, and children.[233]
But the conditions under which the late Tsar and his family were murdered at Ekaterinburg constitute the episode which is bound to transcend any other such episode in striking disgust to the heart of any person not either dead to human sentiment or drunken with political fanaticism: the episode of the night when a Tsar, a Tsarina, and their children were taken into a cellar, and killed before each other’s eyes. Subsequently a Red Guard named Medviedev, a witness of the executions, stated to the Commission of Enquiry that was held during the February of 1919 that the victims made their preparations slowly, as though they guessed what was in store for them. All history contains no parallel to the murders wrought at Ekaterinburg during the night of July 16–17, 1918.[234]
The Condemned
We know that in a past age persons ascended the scaffold singing the Marseillaise. Similarly, when, in Odessa, the Left Social Revolutionaries sentenced to execution had been lashed together in pairs and loaded on to a lorry, they sang their Marseillaise, even when the weight of thirty-five corpses had been heaped upon them. But, above all, it was within the prison gates of Russia that death came to seem an everyday incident. In The Che-Ka we find described the emotions of a prisoner when first he found himself in a condemned cell.
A strong posse of Red Guards brought us to this horrible dungeon at seven o’clock in the evening: yet hardly had we realised our surroundings before the bolts of the iron door rattled, and the door itself creaked upon its hinges, and the commandant entered with a bevy of warders. “How many?” he inquired. “Sixty-seven.” “Sixty-seven, when a grave has been dug for ninety?” And the commandant seemed puzzled, but, still more, supine and ennuyé. And we? We just sat benumbed. Already death seemed to be breathing upon us. We sat like men paralysed. “Of course, though!” cried the commandant presently, “I had forgotten that there are thirty prisoners to come from the special branch.”... And so there began horrible, infinitely long hours of waiting for death. By some miracle a priest imprisoned with us had contrived to retain his pectoral cross; and now he produced this, fell upon his knees, and began to pray. Yes, and a Communist prisoner followed his example. Yet all the while that sobs could be heard within there were making themselves heard, without, the sounds of a hackneyed waltz on a cracked piano, and of gay folk-songs. Ah, how those songs tore at our hearts! The sounds were coming from what had been the prison chapel, where some young Communists were holding a musical practice! Thus closely had the irony of fate caused life and death to stand intertwined![235]
Waiting at death’s door to the sounds of a cracked piano!—It is to Nilostonsky’s book that we owe this description of a condemned cell, whilst also we know that in many such cells and cellars permanent darkness reigned, and that from fifteen to twenty persons would be confined in a place 4 arshini (9½ feet) long by 2 arshini wide, and that amongst those people there would be both women and old men, and that, as none of them were allowed ever to leave the cell, natural functions had to be performed on the spot. And in Petrograd condemned prisoners were kept like this for as long as thirty-six hours after sentence of death had been pronounced, with neither food nor water conceded them, nor permission to leave the cell for a single moment.
And think of the mental torture endured by anyone who, like myself, has had to watch victims preparing to be shot. In particular I remember an evening in the July of 1920 when I was lying in the Butyrka prison. That evening, as a “privileged” captive, I was sitting alone in the prison yard when the following experience befell me, an experience which still leaves me doubtful as to whether I was most horrified or most awed, but not at all doubtful as to the fact that the unnatural contrast which the experience presented stabbed my senses like the point of a needle. It happened that from the portion of the prison building reserved exclusively for Communist inmates there was issuing a boisterous revel of piano music and gipsy songs and a telling of tales, for there was in progress one of the entertainments, with special artists engaged, which the administration periodically arranged for the amusement of the “privileged offenders.” But suddenly, as the sounds of song and piano were echoing over the prison yard, and I was listening to them in silence, I happened to glance towards the window of the “Chamber of Souls,” and saw behind the bars a face—a face convulsed with agony, a face pressed hungrily forward to inhale the free air. And I recognised it as the face of a victim who was to be shot that night, and remembered that several other such victims, over twenty of them, were awaiting their turn to die.... Later that night all were fetched away by the “Commissary of Death.”... What happened after the vision I scarcely remember, but I know that never afterwards did I feel inclined to enter the prison yard save when other prisoners were present. Often since then have I thought of the lines from Korolenko’s An Incident of the Past—lines supposed to have been written by a prisoner when a death sentence was about to be carried out within the prison’s walls. “... The place is silent with a silence that is the silence of death, and therefore a silence which, for all our usedness to the valuelessness of life in Russia, none would willingly break....”
Next let me quote a description of a certain incident in Mogilev. My source for it is a correspondent of the Posledniya Novosty.[236]
On the eve of the session of the Gomel circuit court we saw it announced on the street corners that the court was going publicly to try some deserters from the Red Army; and later, when the trial opened in the local theatre, I attended it. There I saw the three men who were supposed to be sitting in judgment upon the accused (of whom there were about a hundred) do no more than shout at them for a while, and then sentence them to death.... As I passed out of the building through the foyer I saw people calmly buying tickets for the theatrical performance of the coming evening!
And the condemned in general? Well, most of them went to the slaughter silently, and without protest or resistance, after submitting to be pinioned with barbed wire.
If (wrote Sister Medviedeva in the Kievan report)[237] you could see our condemned being taken to execution, you would see that they are practically dead already. But the few who either resist or make abject, useless petition to the executioners are beaten and kicked before being dragged down to the basement where slaughter awaits them.
And take another reminiscence of Kiev, as related by Madame Kourakina:
We stood horror-stricken, and our very hearts seemed to stop, when night fell, and some men arrived to fetch away the condemned. The room lay hushed in a silence as of the grave. Yet the unfortunates knew how to die: they went to their doom without a sound, with truly amazing calmness. Only the pallor of their faces and the abstraction of their gaze showed that already they had ceased to belong to this present existence. Yet a few poor creatures did rebel against the thought of death: and it was these who produced upon me the most harrowing impression of all as horribly, to the last moment, they struggled against the guards’ violence, and clutched at bunks and corners and doors, and wept and shrieked in the frenzy of their terror. Yet the guards only laughed at them, saying: “So you don’t want to be put to the wall, eh? Yet to the wall you must go.”
Apparently, those of the condemned who committed suicide before execution did so less through fear of death itself than through fear of death through official slaughter. For example, I remember a Tartar in the Butyrka who went to immense pains to cut his throat with a fragment of glass rather than be executed. And suicides included many cases of self-incineration, as mentioned both in The Che-Ka and in the materials amassed by the Denikin Commission. But always the executioners tried to restore the suicides to life. And why so? Because always they wished to put an end to the unfortunates with their own hands—it was against the Communists’ rule to let a single victim, when sentenced, escape “revolutionary justice.” There are many staggering instances of such insistence upon fulfilment of “justice” included in the data compiled by the Denikin Commission, and I will cite one of them. Once when some bodies of persons who had been executed were being driven to the Odessa mortuary, the driver noticed a woman victim’s eyelids flutter, and pointed the fact out to the mortuary attendant. And, sure enough, the woman had no sooner been carried into the mortuary than she regained her senses sufficiently to cry out (though still half-dazed, and for the reason, as a witness has asserted, that she had caught sight of her dead husband near her): “I am cold!” and “Where is my cross?” And though the attendant besought her to be quiet, she persisted until some executioners heard her, and came and gave her the coup-de-grâce. And by another deponent it has been related that when a man was already in his coffin he regained consciousness, and promptly was finished off. And there is on record a case where, on the lid of a coffin slowly opening and emitting a cry of “My comrades, I am still alive!” a telephone message was sent to the Che-Ka, and elicited the reply, “Settle him with a brick,” whilst a further appeal to the head of the Che-Ka himself (Vichmann) called forth the jest: “We are to requisition the best surgeon in Odessa, I suppose?” and finally a Che-Ka employee had to be dispatched to the scene, to shoot the victim a second time with a revolver.
As regards relatives seeking information concerning the fate of imprisoned kinsfolk, I myself know how often the Che-Ka of Moscow got rid of such inquirers by giving them permits to see captives whom the Che-Ka knew already to be lying in the Lefortovsky Mortuary. And even women and children attending with parcels for prisoners would be met with the answer: “No person of that name is confined in this prison,” or with the enigmatical statement that “that person has been removed to another place in the city.”
Finally, in S. M. Oustinov’s reminiscences we came upon the following horrible, yet apposite, picture: “In the main street a barefooted, bedraggled woman was whirling madly to and fro before the advancing troops. The previous night, before leaving the town, the Bolshevists had shot her husband.”
Bolshevist Treatment of Women
As one reads accounts of Bolshevist outrages upon women one scarcely wonders that these outrages should have provoked a desire for revenge. Take the following description of sufferings endured by women in the concentration camp at Kholmogory: