Denikin's Failure — Guerilla Warfare — An Unexpected Blow — The Elusive Tchelokaeff — A Treaty that is Observed.
Before proceeding to my main task — an account of the conditions in the Soviet prisons in the Solovetsky Islands — I should like to dwell briefly on the period of my life which immediately preceded my transportation to that place. I think that this period is of more than merely personal interest. As far as I know, the punitive activities of the Soviet power in the Caucasus after the crushing of the armed anti-Bolshevist rebellion there have not found a place in any book of memoirs.
At the time of the final retreat of General Denikin's forces I was in the ranks of the Caucasian Army (on the Tsaritsin front). The disaster to the Volunteer Army compelled us all to take refuge in the mountains. Keeping touch all the time with the attacking enemy, our cavalry brigade reached the river Terek, where it was dissolved. The most reliable elements of it crossed the frontier of Georgia, at that time still an independent State.
In Georgia, the members of the brigade who were fit for service were incorporated by Keletch Sultan Hire in a cavalry regiment. Its duties were to execute raids on the Soviet rear and throw it into confusion, to destroy roads and excite rebellion against the Bolsheviks.
The raid into the Kuban planned in the summer of 1920 by the staff of General Wrangel, who was then in the Crimea with his army, gave Sultan Hire the idea of sending us also to the Kuban in the hope of inciting the Cossacks to rebellion. In the Kuban, we took part in the retirement of the invading troops to the Crimea, the raid having considerably outgrown its original dimensions. The bold plan of bringing about a rising did not succeed. We were dissolved once more.
In exceptionally difficult conditions, surrounded by troops of the Red Army, we formed a new detachment under the command of Colonel X (I cannot give the colonel's name; he is still carrying on guerilla warfare with the Soviet power in the Caucasus). Our detachment, despite its small numbers, waged warfare of a kind with success, and we were beginning to think of operations on a larger scale, when we unexpectedly lost the support on which we absolutely depended and counted; the famous "national rebellion" took place in Georgia. In reality the country was occupied, almost without resistance, by regular troops of the Red Army. Our detachment retired fighting through the wild mountains to Batoum. Here part of it was broken up and turned into larger or smaller bodies of insurgents, part left for Anatolia.
I made my way to Ajaristan. Thence communication was established with Trebizond, where Y lived; his name, too, I cannot give in full for the reason stated above. Until the autumn of 1922 we and Y organised frequent raids on the Soviet Russian frontier.
Then, as now, the unofficial direction of the whole insurgent movement in the Caucasus was in the hands of the well-known Colonel Tchelokaeff. Thanks to extensive help from the population, which sympathises with the "Whites," and to his own bravery and skill, the Bolsheviks have found Tchelokaeff quite uncatchable.
I know for a fact that the "Gruztcheka" (Georgian Tcheka) and "Zaktcheka" (Trans-Caucasian Tcheka)[1] have repeatedly attempted to buy him; they have repeatedly offered him huge sums in gold simply to leave the Caucasus. They even offered him a villa in any country in Europe he liked to name. The elusive colonel, however, rejected these proposals with disgust, and is still carrying out surprise attacks on one or another stronghold of the Soviet power in the Caucasus.
Between Tchelokaeff and the Communist authorities of the Caucasus a peculiar treaty exists. The colonel's family has for several years been confined in the Metekh[2] at Tiflis, a prison notorious for the cruelties practised there. The Bolsheviks, of course, would have shot them long ago, had not Tchelokaeff captured and hidden in a remote spot, as hostages, several of the most prominent representatives of the Soviet power.
When the colonel heard that his family had been arrested, he sent the following letter to the presidential body of the Georgian Tcheka:
"I shall send forty Communists' heads in a sack for each member of my family murdered by you. — Colonel Tchelokaeff."
So the Tchelokaeff family and the Communist hostages are still alive.
[1] i.e., Gruzinskaya (Georgian) and Zakavkazkaya (Trans-Caucasian) Tcheka.
[2] The former palace of the Georgian kings, used as a prison for many years past.