The red terror in Russia

Uritsky, People’s Commissary of the Northern Commune, and a leading spirit of the Che-Ka of Petrograd, was assassinated on August 17, 1918, by a Socialist ex-student named Kannegiesser, who during the war had been a military cadet. In the official report of the assassination it was said:

On August 28 another Socialist—in this instance a Madame Kaplan—attempted similarly to assassinate Lenin. And how did the Soviet Government respond to these terrorist acts? A semi-official communiqué published in the issue of the Che-Ka’s Weekly of October 20 reported that, by a decree of the Che-Ka, 500 hostages had been shot! Nor yet is the true number of these victims known. And probably it never will be known. And the same with regard to the victims’ names. Nevertheless, it can at least be asserted that the real figure greatly exceeded the figure given in the semi-official communiqué, and that the original of the report was never published at all.

On the following March 23 the Rev. B. S. Lombard, a British military chaplain, wrote to Lord Curzon[2]:

Will this be deemed an exaggeration? Yet Moscow and Petrograd still contain numbers of persons who could confirm the facts, whilst another source tells us that as late as the year 1921 the Bolshevists were disposing of their political opponents in the same barbarous manner.

From another eye-witness of events in Petrograd of the period we have the following details:

Interviewed by a newspaper correspondent at this period, Peters, one of the chiefs of the All-Russian Che-Ka, described the Terror as “a terror simply of hysteria.” Then he went on:

For the moment let us pass over the mendacious statement that no cases of capital punishment occurred in Petrograd before Uritsky’s assassination, and not comment upon the fact that Moscow shot a whole batch of ex-monarchical Ministers because one solitary Socialist—and a woman at that!—had made an attempt upon Lenin. Not at all did it deter Peters that scarcely a week had elapsed since there had been published, in No. 6 of the Weekly, an abridged list of the persons shot in reprisal for the act. Ten months later a further list (of ninety names) was published,[5] and included ex-Crown Ministers, military officers, co-operative society employees, lawyers, students, and clergy. And even so, we do not really know how many were shot, since nothing further was published. All that we know is that during the same period Moscow, for its part, shot over three hundred persons.[6]

Those of us who were lying in the Butyrka Prison at that terrible time, in the prison into which persons were thrown by the thousand without distinction of social status, will never forget the soul-racking experience. Life there at that period has been aptly described by an eye-witness as “a bacchanalia of Red madness and terrorism.”[7] Especially horrible, especially heart-rending, was the necessity nightly of hearing, and sometimes of seeing, prisoners removed for execution. Every moment motor-cars would arrive to fetch them away. Not a prisoner in the building could sleep. He could only lie and tremble at every blast of a motor-horn. Every now and then some warders would enter a cell, and shout to one or another of its inmates to follow them and “bring your belongings with you.” And so they would go to the “Chamber of Souls,” to the place where the condemned were to be lashed together with barbed wire before actual execution.[8] The horror of it all! For I myself was a prisoner in the Butyrka, and had to go through that appalling succession of nightmares.

From another eye-witness we have the following:

A sub-lieutenant named Semenov was thrown into the Butyrka merely because, whilst watching the flames consume some trucks at the Koursk railway station, he had been heard to remark that, as likely as not, the Bolshevists had fired the trucks themselves in order to cover up their lootings thence. And his father and brother were arrested with him. Three months later he was examined by a “people’s prosecutor,” and informed that he was going to be set at liberty again. Yet to him, as to so many others, came the summons, “Across the yard, you and your belongings!” And a few days later, again, his name was figuring on a list of shot. Only when another month had gone by, and the deceased’s father was being examined, did the “people’s prosecutor” tardily admit that, “owing to the great mass of condemned, your son has been shot in error!”

Again, once it happened that a lad of about eighteen, who had been arrested during mass seizures carried out near the church of Christ the Saviour in July 1918, was removed from our corridor unexpectedly, and as unexpectedly restored to us again. On his return he told us that, awakened from sleep a few nights after his examination before the Che-Ka, he had been thrust into a motor-car, as though for removal to execution (at that period prisoners still were being shot outside the city—it was only later that they were put to death in the basement of the Butyrka), and driven away. En route, however, the official in charge had happened to remark that his orders for the night were to shoot, not the lad, but a middle-aged man of the same name; whereupon, on enquiries being made, it had been found that there were two prisoners possessed of the same Christian name and surname, though of different patronymics, and that the man appointed to be shot was aged forty-two, whereas the lad was only eighteen. To what a small accident, therefore, did that lad owe his life!

Also there were thousands of captives over whose heads the Red Terror kept the Damocles’ sword so long and so constantly suspended that at last they would even refuse to leave their cells if told that they were going to be released, since the announcement seemed to them merely a trap to induce them to go quietly to execution; whilst in other cases prisoners who had left their cells in the belief that they were going to be set free, and had smilingly received the congratulations of their fellow prisoners, would, a few days later, be figuring amongst the shot, or have been shot without having had their names published at all. Nor were Petrograd and Moscow the only towns where revenge for the Lenin affair was taken by shooting hundreds of victims: the wave of slaughter swept right across Soviet Russia, and submerged cities large and small, villages and hamlets. None the less, the Bolshevist press issued very little information about the provincial executions. The Weekly alone occasionally mentioned shootings under the heading of “The following persons have been shot in reprisal for the Lenin attempt,” whilst the organ of the Che-Ka of Nizhny Novgorod, for its part, said:

And to this statement the journal appended a list including officers, priests, civil servants, a forester, an editor, a watchman, and so forth. And the same day 700 more were seized in Nizhny Novgorod, and held as hostages on the plea (thus stated the Rabochy-Krestiansky Nizhgorodsky Liest, or “Workmen’s and Peasants’ Journal of Nizhny Novgorod”) that “every murder, and every attempted murder, of a Communist must be replied to with shootings of hostages selected from amongst the bourgeoisie, now that already we have the blood of killed and wounded crying out for vengeance.” And the Che-Ka of the canton of Soumy (Kharkov Province), for its part, ordered “the assassination of Comrade Uritsky, and the attempt upon Comrade Lenin, to be avenged with an application of Red Terror” to 3 airmen; the Che-Ka of Smolensk to 38 landowners from the Western Area; the Che-Ka of Novorzhev to a family consisting of Alexandra, Natalia, Eudoxia, Paul, and Michael Rosliakov; the Che-Ka of Poshekon to 31 persons, including 5 belonging to a family named Shalaev, and 4 to a family named Volkov; the Che-Ka of Pskov to 31 persons; the Che-Ka of Yaroslavl to 38; the Che-Ka of Archangel to 9; the Che-Ka of Seboshsk to 17; the Che-Ka of Vologda to 14; and the Che-Ka of Briansk to 9 (who, however, are described as “burglars”). And with these reprisals ordered by the All-Russian Che-Ka for the attempt upon “the leader of the world’s proletariat” went executions of a Bolshevist commissary for purloining 400,000 roubles; of 2 sailors for a like offence; of a commissary for “attempting to sell a revolver to a militiaman”; of 2 counterfeiters; and of others, with the names published in the third issue of the Che-Ka’s Weekly. In fact, dozens of similar lists could be cited, as well as lists which never saw the light, for there was not a single locality where shootings “because of Lenin” failed to be carried out.

A good example of a “Lenin attempt” press utterance is that of a sheet which, issued by the Che-Ka of Morshansk “to combat counter-revolutionary activity,” said, amongst other comments on current events:

This, so far as I know, is the first official allusion to hostages, to the system of local settings aside of citizens “to be shot in case of further manifestations of counter revolutionary activity.” In like manner did the Che-Ka of Torzhok announce to “the inhabitants of our town and district” that “for the head and life of any leader of ours hundreds of heads of the bourgeois, both of principals and of dependants, must fall.” And then the Che-Ka appended a list of proposed hostages which included engineers, merchants, a priest, and a batch of Social Revolutionaries of the Right—in all, twenty persons. And at Ivanovo-Vosnessensk 184 persons were seized to be held as hostages, whilst Perm’s vengeance for Uritsky and Lenin was the shooting of 50 hostages.[10]

These facts at least refute the official statements which I have quoted, for they prove that the Uritsky and Lenin affairs brought to their deaths several thousands of people who could not possibly have had any connection with those two tragedies, but nevertheless had been seized as hostages. And as regards what happened to other hostages, a typical example is seen in the case of General Roussky after that, with Radko and Dmitriev and others to the number of 32, he had been thrown into confinement at Essentouky, and, to quote the official communiqué, “informed, by order of Comrade Petrovsky, People’s Commissary of the Interior, that he and his companions will be executed out of hand if the slightest attempt at a counter-revolutionary rising, or the slightest attempt upon the life of a proletarian leader, be made.”[11] Hostages were seized also in Kislovodsk (33) and elsewhere, whilst at one time the number of hostages lying in the Piatigorsk concentration camp amounted to 160. And at Piatigorsk the following took place. On October 13, 1918, the chief commissary of the Che-Ka, one Sorokin, conceived the idea of bringing about a rising “to emancipate the Soviet Power from the Jews”; wherefore he arrested and executed members even of his own Che-Ka, and then, to vindicate his action, produced documents purporting to prove that the executed officials had been “holding communication with the White Army.” Unfortunately, evidence subsequently furnished to Denikin’s Commission showed that Sorokin’s real intention had been previously to safeguard himself by obtaining from a local “extraordinary congress of deputies of the soviet of Piatigorsk, and of revolutionary representatives, and of Red soldiers,” which he convened to meet him at Nevinomiskaya Stanitza an acknowledgment that he had acted rightly, and with proper authority, but that before he had been able to present himself to his congress his enemies had branded him with “outlawry” and “treason to the Revolution,” arrested him, and executed him out of hand.[12] But one result of Sorokin’s fate was to seal the fate also of the majority of the hostages who had been thrown into the local concentration camp, and in No. 157 of the local Izvestia we find published a decree (signed by Artabekov, chief of the local Che-Ka) saying:

And to the decree there was attached a list of 59 names, including those of General Roussky, an ex-Senator, a financier, a priest, and others. And the statement that later these men were “shot” is a lie, for the truth is that they were hacked to pieces with swords,[13] and their goods converted into “communal property.”

Everywhere the same system of hostages flourished. A trustworthy witness has stated that when a certain P., a student, killed a commissary in Chernigov Province, P.’s father, mother, and two brothers (the younger one a boy of fifteen) were executed at once, with the family’s German governess and her niece of eighteen, though it was only later that P. himself was found and arrested.

Indeed, that year the Terror assumed such ghastly dimensions as to throw into the shade any similar phenomenon known to history. During the year, also, a group of Anarchists and Left Social Revolutionaries who at first had supported the Bolshevists, and helped them to organise Che-Kas, revenged the deaths of certain comrades of theirs whom the Bolshevists had executed as hostages by committing a terrorist act on their own account. The affair began by Latzis, head of the All-Ukrainian Che-Ka, issuing, on June 15, 1919, the following statement:

The Anarchists’ retort to this statement was a pre-arranged explosion in the Central Che-Ka’s very building—the building (which stood in the Leontievsky Pereoulok) being partially demolished, and more than one leading Communist who happened to be within it at the time either killed or wounded. In turn, the Muscovite official press published, on the following day, a notice signed by Kamenev. Said the notice:

And a further notice in the Izvestia added:

Whence another wave of bloody terrorism swept over Russia as the Government “fittingly” avenged itself upon people who could not by any possible means have had anything to do with the explosion, and accomplished that end through the simple course of shooting anyone and everyone who happened then to be in prison, even though Anarchists alone (as their party subsequently acknowledged in the pamphlet published in Berlin in 1922) had committed the terrible act. And in Saratov also the same Muscovite throwing of a bomb was avenged by shootings of twenty-eight persons, from members of the Constitutional Democratic Party and ex-candidates for the Constituent Assembly to an ex-member of the Narodnaya Volya Group and a number of agriculturists and priests.[15] Or such, at all events, was the official figure given. As a matter of fact, the number of persons shot was the number needed to bring Saratov’s quota of the contribution to the “All-Russian blood-tax” up to the total of sixty specified by Moscow’s previously despatched telegram. And from an ex-inmate of the Butyrka Prison we receive still further light upon Moscow’s methods (for by now that city had become the centre of government, in place of Petrograd) of compiling its death lists. Says this ex-inmate[16]:

Whence, merely the verbal command of an individual gave the signal for innocent deaths by the thousand! The exact number of victims hurriedly shot that night, and on the morrow, is not yet known. All that can be said is that even the most moderate official estimate placed the number at hundreds, and that not until the following evening was the order rescinded.

When another year had passed the central authorities officially instituted the system of seizure of hostages, for on November 30, 1920, it proclaimed that “inasmuch as certain White Guard organisations have decided to perpetuate terrorist acts against leaders of our Workers and Peasants’ Revolution,” every representative of the non-Communist parties then in custody was to be seized and segregated. And such was the tenour of this decree that the aged Anarchist, Prince Peter Kropotkin, felt bound to protest against it, and write[17]:

Kropotkin, however, was already old, infirm, remote from life. He did not live to behold the full enormity of the Bolshevists’ manner of expression of physical force. Hostages? Why, they were seized and held from the Terror’s very earliest days, and especially during the civil war period—north, south, and east. Particularly with regard to the large number of them held in Kharkov did Kovy, head of the local provincial Che-Ka, write: “The bourgeois viper will need but to raise its head for hostages’ heads to fall.”[18] And fall those hostages’ heads did. In Elizabetgrad, in 1921, thirty-six were executed because of the assassination of a single official of the local Che-Ka. We have confirmation of the fact (which was first made known through the instrumentality of Bourtsev’s journal, Obstchoyé Dielo, “The Common Cause”[19]) from analogous items cited later in this work. In short, the saying “Blood for blood” received wide practical application, and as early as on November 10, 1918, we find Mr. H. B. Lockhart, British Consul in Moscow, writing to Sir George Clarke[20]:

Yes, women and even children were arrested. Sometimes, also, they were shot. For example, Red Cross workers in Kiev have told us that a group of ladies seized in place of some officers who had been forcibly impressed into the Red Army, and escaped thence and joined the White forces, were put to death in their husbands’ stead, whilst in addition we know that in March, 1919, the relatives of all the officers of the 86th Infantry Regiment were shot when that corps went over to the Whites,[21] and that in a memorandum addressed to the All-Russian Executive Committee by Madame U. Zoubevich, a well-known Social Revolutionary of the Left, that lady said of certain executions of hostages in Kronstadt during 1919, that the officers in whose stead those hostages had been shot had merely been suspected of designing to transfer their allegiance to the Whites.[22]

Another plan, and an easy one enough, was to transfer hostages from their category as such to the category of “counter-revolutionaries.” Witness this extract from The Communist[23]:

And the sentence was carried out on the following day.

During the peasant risings in the Tambov area peasant women and children were made hostages by the hundred at a time, and sometimes forced to spend upwards of two years in prison in Moscow, Petrograd, and elsewhere; whilst on September 1, 1920, “acting headquarters” prescribed that rebel peasant families should “have applied to them ruthless Red terrorism, and all persons over the age of eighteen, regardless of sex, be arrested, so that if the bandits continue their activities the same may be executed.”

Likewise, from villages “special contributions” were exacted, with confiscation of lands and other property to follow in case of non-compliance with the demand.[24] The precise manner of official fulfilment of these instructions we learn from one and another official communiqué published in the Izvestia of Tambov, where that journal says “On September 5 five villages were burnt to the ground,” “On September 7 over two hundred and fifty peasants were shot,” and so forth, and so forth. We learn, too, that during the years 1921 and 1922 the Kozhoukov concentration camp near Moscow had thrown into it as many as 313 peasant hostages, and that, though these hostages included children between the ages of sixteen and a month, and typhus raged throughout the autumn of 1921, the half-starved, half-naked captives were allowed no winter clothing. Lastly, in an issue of the Krasny Voïn (“The Red Soldier”) of November 12, 1919, we find long lists of hostages seized for deserters from the Red Army. They constitute the first instance of the category known as “conditionally condemned.”

Parents were shot with their children—the facts stand officially certified, registered. Children were shot in their parents’ presence. Parents were shot in the presence of their children. And the Special Branch of the All-Russian Che-Ka, under a maniac named Kedrov,[25] did especially bloodthirsty work in this way as from his station “at the front” he either sent to the Butyrka Prison or shot on the spot batches of “young spies”—in other words, children between the ages of eight and fourteen. I myself had many such cases come to my knowledge whilst I was still in Moscow.

As for the spiritual tortures which Peter Kropotkin vainly denounced, they were practised both by provincial and metropolitan Che-Kas in addition to the usual physical cruelty. For Peter Kropotkin’s voice had been but “the voice of one crying in the wilderness,” and in any locality where executions of hostages failed to occur for a while, the failure meant merely that that particular district had not recently witnessed a political assassination.

So another year passed, until the Kronstadt rising saw fresh hostages seized by the thousand, and detained in the new category, even as were the Social Revolutionaries condemned to death at the famous trial of that party—all of these were kept (and were being kept until at all events quite recently) under a permanent and indefinite threat of conditional execution.

The only possible explanation of why the assassination of Vorovsky was not followed by mass shootings (or, more correctly, by publications of official information of mass shootings) is that the assassination occurred on Swiss soil, and attained wide publicity. As a matter of fact, what happens in the secret places of the executive organ with which the All-Russian Che-Ka has now become replaced, is never really known. Yet we do know that as soon as ever Vorovsky’s assassins had been acquitted all Russia became threatened with renewals of terrorism towards hostages, and the German journals Dni and Vorwaerts of the day stated that Stalin had informed his Che-Ka of Moscow that

“Hostages are capital of exchange,” once remarked the notorious Latzis. But the meaning of the term “hostage,” as applied to foreign subjects captured during a military campaign abroad, bears no relation to Russian subjects seized in Russia; the latter resource was purely a form of mental intimidation which summed up in itself the whole basis of the Bolshevists’ internal policy and governmental system.

And how remarkable that we should see the Bolshevists vainly attempting to carry out a policy which reactionary circles found to be impossible as long ago as the year 1881! A propos of that policy, V. N. Chaikovsky once wrote:

Similarly, the appeal issued by the “Union of Russian Publicists and Journalists Resident in Paris” in 1921 stated:

But who heeds it? An outrage—yes.