The Red Terror in Russia | Project Gutenberg

At nine o’clock he entered the cells with an Austrian staff-captain named Klochkovsky. Sodden with drink or drugs, he then ordered three prisoners named Pshenichny, Ovcherenko, and Bielonsov, to be taken out into the courtyard, and, having divested them of their clothing, fell, with “Comrade Klochkovsky,” to cutting and stabbing at their naked bodies from the lower portions upwards. Daggers were used for the purpose, and the stabbings made to ascend to the victims’ trunks only very gradually. And when he had completed the three executions he returned to the cells and, all covered with blood, said to the rest of the prisoners: “Do you see this blood? Well, that is the fate which befalls anyone who opposes me and the Workers’ and Peasants’ Party.” And, that said, an employee of the Che-Ka seized hold of Syichev (the lad who had been so cruelly beaten that morning), dragged him out into the yard, and forced him to look at Pshenichny’s body. And because the body was still heaving the employee at length killed it outright with a revolver shot; after which he hit Syichev several times with a sword sheath, and drove him back into the cells.

An idea of the mental agonies suffered by prisoners at Kharkov can be gained from inscriptions since found on the dungeon walls. Such inscriptions are: “For four days past I have been flogged. I lost consciousness, and then was forced to sign a ready-written protocol. I signed it because I could bear the torture no longer”; and “I have been given 800 strokes with a ramrod, until I am like a piece of raw meat”; and “At seven o’clock on March 6 —— was shot, aged twenty-three”; and “What a chamber of suffering this cell is!”; and “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here!” And we have further confirmation of the horrors undergone in Kharkov’s “chambers of suffering” from survivors’ stories, from experiences related by persons who contrived to escape from the Che-Ka’s clutches. For the most part, that Che-Ka’s “investigations” were conducted at night-time, and accompanied with such threats of flogging and shooting that often enough victims would “confess” to crimes which existed only in the imagination of the Che-Ka’s agents. But should even such threats be unsuccessful, “confessions” would be extorted with beatings with ramrods until the victim lost consciousness. Two officials prominent in these doings were an ex-hairdresser’s assistant named Miroshinchenko and an eighteen-year-old youth named Iesel Mankin. Once the former threatened a servant girl named Kanisheva with a revolver until she “confessed” to having harboured some officers; and once the latter said to a victim as he covered him with his weapon, “Your life will depend upon your answering me correctly.” And in time the Che-Ka began to add moral tortures to physical: executions began to be carried out in such close proximity to the cells that the other prisoners could plainly hear the rifle shots as they issued from the small, dark kitchen which Saenko had converted into a torture and execution chamber. And when later, in June of the year in question, Denikin’s searchers inspected the room, they found there two pood-weights so tied together with an arshin-long section of rubber piping as to form a kind of flail, with the straw covering of the floor sodden with the blood of the slaughtered, and the wall facing the door seamed and scarred with bullet marks, and the other walls bespattered with blood and fragments of scalp, and hair, and particles of brain, and the floor littered with similar fragments. And when 107 corpses were disinterred in the adjacent concentration camp the most horrible atrocities became revealed—terrible traces of flogging, shattered ribs and leg bones, fractured skulls, amputated hands and feet, heads attached to the trunk only with a strip of cartilage, patches where the skin had been burnt off with red-hot instruments, stripes branded upon the back, and general mutilations.

The first body to be exhumed was the body of Zhakobritsky, an ex-cornet of the 6th Hussars. He must have been cruelly beaten before death, for some of his ribs had been fractured, and there were thirteen scars on the body caused by pressure against some red-hot, circular implement. All the scars were on the front of the body save for a single stripe burnt upon the back. The skull of another corpse was found flattened into a single, smooth, round disk about a centimetre in thickness. Such expatulation of the head could have been caused only by enormous pressure between two flat objects. On a woman whose identity we could not establish we found seven stab and shot wounds. Also, manifestly she had been thrown into the grave before death.

And the Commission discovered corpses of persons who had been scalded from head to foot with boiling liquid, and of persons who had been slowly (beginning with wounds intended only to torture, not to prove of a fatal character) hacked to death.[196] And in every town in the region where concealed hiding-places had been available were corpses in a similar condition brought to light. Particularly was this the case at Odessa, Nikolaev, and Tsaritsin. True, where some corpses with fractured skulls were found in a quarry near the first-mentioned place, the fractures may have been caused by a fall, and what seemed external traces of torture may have been due to prolonged contact with the soil, and the conclusions of the examining doctors may have been made through inability to distinguish between ante-mortem changes and post-mortem, between macerations and scald wounds, between testicles swollen with decomposition and testicles ruptured before death; yet, even so, testimony both oral and photographic goes to show that no natural cause whatsoever could have caused the corpses to look as they did when at length exhumation brought them to light. Again, granted that some of the tales of physical tortures equal to those practised by the Inquisition in Spain may have been exaggerations, our conscience is not likely to feel relieved by knowing that tortures in Russia of the twentieth century can be a degree, but only a degree, less cruel than tortures in Spain of the centuries of the Inquisition; and though one may draw a certain moral satisfaction from the circumstance that the staff of the Anatomical Theatre to which the Che-Ka of Odessa sent some of the corpses of its victims testified that none of those corpses “bore traces of physical violence,” one will scarcely feel satisfied that no tortures at all were practised in Odessa, or do more than conclude that the number of cases in which torture was inflicted may have been small in comparison with the huge total of victims, or that, as luck would have it, no corpses of tortured had happened to be sent to the Theatre concerned. Moreover, it may be added that in most instances the evidence relating to torture that was given before the Denikin Commission came from persons who might justifiably be supposed to have been pro-Bolshevist in their sympathies.

But to return to Saenko’s exploits in Kharkov. An ex-prisoner of Kharkov, a Social Revolutionary, has written[197]:

In proportion as Denikin’s forces drew nearer to the town, the bloodthirsty hysteria of the local Che-Ka increased. And it was then that the real “hero” made his appearance upon the scene. This was Saenko, a man originally a minor official, a member of the local revolutionary tribunal, but now notorious amongst his panic-stricken fellows, and one who held in his hand the lives of all the prisoners in the place. Nightly his motor-car would drive up to the prison to remove inmates. Usually he shot them with his own hand, and once he shot a patient suffering from typhus. A fellow small of stature, with the whites of his eyes gleaming prominently, and his features constantly on the twitch, this Saenko would brandish a revolver in his trembling hand, and rush about the building like a madman. At first he selected for his victims only persons who had actually been sentenced; but during the two days immediately preceding the evacuation he took to selecting his victims indiscriminately from the prisoners at large, and then and there driving them out into the yard, and hitting at them with the flat of his sword as they went. And on the last day of all (though by then the gaol had become strangely silent) the place resounded with volley and individual firing from early morning until late at night—the small prison-yard seeing slaughtered, on that day, 120 persons.

Such the narrative of one of the twenty or thirty prisoners who were fortunate enough subsequently to be evacuated. And another ex-prisoner has given us a description of the previous sorting-out—a terrible process which lasted for three hours:

The rest of us were made to wait in the office whilst the whole odious examination took place. An over-dressed youth entered the office from an adjoining room, a name was called out, and a party of Red Guards proceeded to the proper cell. As we waited we could picture to ourselves the dungeons and their two thousand half-alive, half-dead inmates stretched upon wretched bunks—tossing to and fro in agonised anticipation—tossing to and fro amid a silence of night broken only by gun-fire close to the town, and by single revolver shots from the horrible shambles where human beings were being done to death!... Presently a door could be heard opening in the corridor, and we knew that to a confused accompaniment of heavy footsteps, groundings of rifle-butts, and the rattle of a lock, someone was raising aloft a lantern, and someone else searching lists with a gnarled finger, and someone else—lying upon a bunk, and trembling with a trembling that convulsed both heart and brain.... “Is it I?”... A name would be called. Then slowly, very slowly, fear would temporarily release its grip—temporarily the heart would begin to beat more evenly.... “Is it I?” No. Not, at all events, yet. Then the person summoned would begin to dress himself with fingers benumbed with terror, unequal to the task. Upon that a Red Guard would tell him to make haste. “Hurry up!” the Guard would repeat. “There is no time to waste.”... How many victims passed before us during those three hours I do not know, or should find it difficult to say. I only know that many, many, many did so pass before us—men more dead than alive, men walking with unseeing eyes. Nor did their “trial” take long. “Trial,” indeed! It consisted merely of the head of the tribunal (or his secretary, dressed in a smart tunic) looking at some lists and saying “Remove him.” Whereupon the condemned was led out of the office by another door.

And take this description of the horrible incidents of the Kharkov prison evacuation, as given in the Denikin materials:

Soon after midnight on June 9, the prisoners in the concentration camp in Chaikovskaya Street were awakened by a sound of shots within the prison, and long, as they listened, could hear firing, and footsteps of warders in the corridors, and snappings of bolts, and the heavy, lagging tread of condemned as they were taken from the cells, and Saenko and his assistants marching from door to door, and the officials calling out names, and “Come out, you!” and “Collect your things!” so loudly that they must have been audible even in the farthest dungeons.... And automatically, one after another, too weary in body and soul to protest, the condemned rose, and crept towards the doorway leading to the staircase of death. And presently, clad only in their shirts, or altogether naked, they knelt down before a large, newly-dug grave. And, lastly, Saenko, Edward, and Bondarenko moved from prisoner to prisoner, and methodically shot each of them through the back of the head, so that blood and brains came flying from the shattered skulls, and body after body sank forward upon their still warm predecessors.... The executions lasted for more than three hours, and over fifty persons were put to death. And next morning, when news of the executions reached the inhabitants, and friends and relatives of the deceased assembled in Chaikovskaya Street, and were standing there, suddenly the doors of the kommandatur flew open, and there issued thence two shabbily dressed men, with Saenko and Ostapenko, armed with revolvers, behind them. And just as the two unknown men reached the half-way point of the plank spanning a large, open grave beside the prison wall, two shots caught them, and they sank forward.... Finally Saenko dispersed the crowd by having them beaten with rifle-butts—he himself shouting: “Do not be afraid that I am not going to bring the Red Terror to an end! I am going to bring it to an end by shooting every one of you.”

The same eye-witness[198] has described also the journey from Kharkov to Moscow. And what he says confirms our information concerning Saenko, since he relates how the latter shot further prisoners en route. And confirmation is to be found also in the Denikin materials. Our eye-witness says:

Stories concerning Saenko are still current in Kharkov, and represent no more than the truth. Once I myself saw him shoot a sick prisoner on a stretcher; whilst on another occasion he killed a prisoner with a dagger in the presence of a comrade of ours, who subsequently told us of the deed. Also, once when one of a party of prisoners who were in his custody managed to escape, he atoned for that contretemps by shooting the first upon whom his eye happened to alight. He was a man whose eyes were always bleary and inflamed, like the eyes of a man under the influence of either morphia or cocaine. And whenever he was in this state the symptoms of his sadism would become more than ever pronounced.

And Nilostonsky’s book, Der Blutrausch des Bolschewismus (a work based mostly upon the findings of the Röhrberg Commission, which carried out its investigations immediately after the occupation of Kiev by the Volunteer Army during the August of 1919), gives us an even more harrowing picture:

On the eve of the evacuation of Kiev every possible victim was murdered by the Che-Ka. During the night of August 26, 1919, at 5 Sadovaya Street, no fewer than 127 persons were done to death by the provincial Che-Ka, whilst (as there was little time to spare) 100 others were shot in the garden of the Che-Ka building proper, and seventy in the building in Elizabetinskaya Street, and as many more on the premises of the Chinese Che-Ka, and fifty-one railwaymen on the premises of the railway Che-Ka, and others in buildings belonging to the tribunals of Kiev. The primary reason for these butcheries was a desire to have no prisoners at all to remove, and the secondary reason a lust to wreak vengeance in return for Denikin’s successful advance. In one lot of Che-Ka buildings some prisoners were still found alive, since the Bolshevists had been in such a hurry as to be forced to abandon them. And terrible their condition was when found! They looked like corpses, and could scarcely move, but gazed at us with fixed, unseeing eyes.

And with that Nilostonsky goes on to describe the appearance of a “human slaughter-house” (he asserts that that had come actually to be the official appellation of such places) when, later, the Denikin Commission inspected one.

The place had formerly been a garage, and then the provincial Che-Ka’s main slaughter-house. And the whole of it was coated with blood—blood ankle deep, coagulated with the heat of the atmosphere, and horribly mixed with human brains, chips of skull-bone, wisps of hair, and the like. Even the walls were bespattered with blood and similar fragments of brain and scalp, as well as riddled with thousands of bullet holes. In the centre was a drain about a quarter of a metre deep and wide, and about ten metres long. This led to the sanitary system of the neighbouring house, but was choked to the brim with blood. The horrible den contained 127 corpses, but the victims of the previous massacre had been hurriedly buried in the adjacent garden. What struck us most about the corpses was the shattering of their skulls, or the complete flattening out of those skulls, as though the victims had been brained with some such instrument as a heavy block. And there were corpses the heads of which were altogether missing. But in these cases the missing heads cannot possibly have been cut off. They must have been wrenched off. In the main, bodies were identifiable only if they still had left on them some such mark as a set of gold-mounted teeth—left, of course, only because the Bolshevists had not had time to extract it. And in every case the corpses were naked. Also, though it had been the Bolshevists’ rule to load their victims on to wagons and lorries as soon as massacred, and take them outside the town for burial, we found that a corner of the garden near the grave already described had in it another, older grave, and that this second grave contained eighty bodies which in every instance bore almost unimaginably horrible wounds and mutilations. In this grave we found corpses with, variously, entrails ripped out, no limbs remaining (as though the bodies had literally been chopped up), eyes gouged out, and heads and necks and faces and trunks all studded with stab wounds. Again, we found a body which had had a pointed stake driven through its chest, whilst in several cases the tongue was missing. And placed together in one corner of the grave we found a medley of detached arms and legs, as well as, near the garden fence, some corpses which bore no sign at all of death by violence. It was only a few days later that, on these unmarked bodies being subjected to post-mortem examination, our doctor discovered their mouths and throats and lungs to be choked with earth. Clearly the unfortunate wretches had been buried alive, and drawn the earth into their respiratory organs through their desperate efforts to breathe. And it was persons of all ages and of both sexes—old, and middle-aged, and women and children—that we found in the grave. One woman was lying tied with a rope to her daughter, a child of eight; and both bore shot wounds. Further, a grave in the yard of the building yielded the body of a Lieutenant Sorokin (accused of espionage on behalf of the Volunteer Army) and the cross on which he had been crucified a week before our arrival. Also, we found a chair like a dentist’s chair which still had attached to it straps for the binding of its tortured victims. And the whole of the concrete floor around the chair was smeared with blood, and the chair itself studded with clots of blood, and fragments of human skin, and bits of hairy scalp. And the same with the premises of the district Che-Ka, where, similarly, the floor was caked with blood and fragments of bone and brain. There, too, a conspicuous object was the wooden block upon which the victims had had to lay their heads for the purpose of being brained with a crowbar, with, in the floor beside it, a traphole filled to the brim with human brain-matter from the shattering of the skulls.

Again, here is a description of a form of torture which the Chinese Che-Ka of Kiev employed:

The person to be tortured was first of all tied to a wall or a stake. Then an iron tube a few inches in diameter was clamped to him by one of its ends, and a live rat inserted into the other end, and the end covered over with wire netting, and the tube held over a flame until the rat became so maddened by the heat as to attempt at all costs to escape by gnawing its way out through the human victim’s body. And so the torture would be continued for hours—sometimes all through the night into the following day, and in any event until the victim died. And the Commission found that the following form of torture also had been employed in Kiev. The person to be tortured had been buried to the neck in the ground, and left there until consciousness had failed, when he had been dug out again.

And then he had been re-buried to the neck until once more unconsciousness had supervened. And so on, and so on, indefinitely. And inasmuch as the Bolshevists had been treating some victims in this manner just before they evacuated Kiev, they had, in the hurry of their departure, left some of the victims in statu quo—to be dug out, of course, by the Volunteers.

In fact, each Che-Ka seems to have had its speciality in torture. Kharkov, for instance, under Saenko, went in primarily for scalpings and hand flayings; and in Voronezh the person to be tortured was first stripped naked, and then thrust into a nail-studded barrel, and rolled about in it, or else branded on the forehead with a five-pointed star, or, if a member of the clergy, “crowned” with barbed wire. As for the Che-Kas of Tsaritsin and Kamishin, it was their custom to saw their victims’ bones apart, whilst Poltava and Kremenchoug made it their special rule to impale clergy (once, in the latter place, where a ruffian named Grishka was in command, eighteen monks were transfixed in a single day). Also, inhabitants have testified that Grishka would burn at the stake any peasant who had been prominent in a rebellion, and sit on a chair to enjoy the spectacle. The Che-Ka of Ekaterinoslav, again, went in for crucifixion and death by stoning, and the Che-Ka of Odessa for putting officers to death by chaining them to planks, and slowly, very slowly, pushing them into furnaces, or else tearing their bodies on a capstan wheel, or else immersing them in a boiler of water heated to simmering point, and then flinging them into the sea, before finally consigning them to the flames again.

In fact, the list of tortures is endless. Another Kievan method was to thrust the living victim into a rough coffin already containing a decomposing body, and to fire shots over him as he lay there, and then inform him that he was going to be buried, and bury him (with the decomposing body) for about half an hour, and, lastly, disinter him again for further “questioning.” And, seeing that all this might be repeated more than once, can we wonder that sometimes the victim lost his reason?

Similarly, the well-known report of the Kievan Sisters of Mercy mentions the local practice of locking up living prisoners with dead. And the statement is confirmed by a Latvian lady who was imprisoned for “espionage” in 1920, and has related that, after being flogged with a whip, and having her finger-tips pounded with an iron implement, and her head screwed into an iron circlet, she was pushed into a cellar.

Very soon the dim light of the electric globe enabled me to realise that I was standing amongst corpses, and to recognise the corpse of an acquaintance of my own, of a lady who had been shot the previous day! And everything had blood upon it, so that all my garments became stained.... At last my surroundings horrified me to the point that I could feel cold sweat break out on my brow.... What happened next I do not know. I only know that when I regained consciousness I was back in my own cell.[199]

The following is an extract from a statement issued from the central bureau of the Social Revolutionary Party:

In Kerensk victims usually were tortured with subjection to sudden changes of temperature. First they were put into a steaming bathhouse, and then led forth, naked, into the snow. And at Alexievskoe and other villages in Voronezh Province the victims would similarly be taken naked into the winter-bound street, and soused with cold water until they became living statues of ice. And at Armavir the “death wreath” was the implement most used. That is to say, the victim would have his head encircled with a leather strap fitted at the ends with an iron nut and a screw, and the nut and the screw be joined together, and the head increasingly compressed. Lastly, the Che-Ka of a Caucasian stanitya used an iron-studded “glove” that was made to be worn on the executioner’s hand.

Possibly the reader may say that these instances of cruelty were isolated instances; but alas, and to humanity’s shame, they were not so. For example, the practice of transforming living persons into statues of ice was widespread in Orel Province whenever levyings of “extraordinary revolutionary tax” were toward; and once in the Malo-Archangel district the tax-gathering detachment placed a merchant named Yinshkevich upon a red-hot stove until his due was paid; and in Voronezh Province, in 1920, some peasants who were in arrears with their food-tax were subjected to the method of “persuasion” of being let down a well, immersed at the bottom of it, brought up, and once more plied with demands for payment of the tax in full.

In passing it may be said that this author did not go solely to “counter-revolutionary” sources for his information, but collected information also from fellow-prisoners of the Democratic and Socialist Parties.

In the present supposedly civilised age one would rejoice to be able to believe that some of these stories were exaggerations; but to do so is difficult when whole companies of persons stand vouchers for them. A trustworthy correspondent of the Dni of May 13, 1923, writes thus concerning Georgia and the Transcaucasian Che-Ka:

The Che-Ka confines its prisoners in damp, deep, hidden dungeons for weeks at a time, and meanwhile leaves them practically without food, and practically even without water. And beds and tables and chairs are not to be found in those dungeons, but instead, the captives have to lie on a floor compounded of knee-deep mud and blood, and nightly to do battle with the rats. And if even those surroundings fail to affect a prisoner, he is taken downstairs to a lower, a wholly pitch-dark cellar of a kind to make the blood congeal in his veins and render him insensible with the cold. And then he is taken upstairs again, and once more told to inform against his associates and organisation. And if he should still prove recalcitrant he is a second time relegated to the cellar—and so on until he either dies or reveals the “information” required, no matter how improbable that “information” may be. And in other cases victims will be awakened by Che-Ka agents in the small hours of the morning, and taken into the courtyard, and subjected to a blank volley or two in imitation of a real execution, and lastly, half alive and half-dead, relegated to the cellar. Of late, too, much use has been made of the “wreath of death.” Rakaobadye, the Social Democrat, was subjected to the torture until he agreed to enter the Che-Ka’s service, but later regained his freedom, and told his comrades of his experiences.[200]

Sometimes denunciations of tortures inflicted during “investigations” appeared even in the Soviet press itself. Especially was this the case in the early days of Bolshevism, before the usurping Party’s members had all ceased to be shocked by the fact that outrage and violence were perpetrated in their “Socialist-run” prisons. In a letter “Do medieval torture chambers still exist?” which was dispatched to the Muscovite Izvestia on January 26, 1919, by a Communist who had been arrested, and temporarily interned, through an error, the writer stated:

My arrest was accidental, and came about through the fact that I happened to be discovered in a house where (as I learnt later) counterfeit Kerensky notes had been manufactured. But, for all that, I had to spend ten days in prison before the authorities even questioned me, and meanwhile I suffered greatly in mind.

And, next, speaking of the “Investigatory Commission” attached to one of the quarters of the city of Moscow, the writer said:

Persons in that prison were flogged until their senses left them, and then, still unconscious, taken down to a cellar which had been the refrigerator chamber, and thenceforth beaten for eighteen hours out of the twenty-four. Things of the sort so impressed me that I nearly lost my reason.

Again, in the Pravda of March, 1919, we are informed that the Che-Ka of Vladimir kept a special den for “pricking prisoners’ heels with needles,” and that when an imprisoned Communist appealed to public opinion with the words, “One is as much afraid to live as to work, now that even the most reputable of workers may at any time, if domiciled in the provinces, find himself in the position in which I am now,” the matter only attracted official attention because a Communist happened to be concerned, whereas thousands of similar cases had already been passed over in silence. “I blush for your torture chamber,” also wrote L. Reisner to the Che-Ka of Petrograd in December 1918. But his words were looked upon as “sentimentality,” and few protesting voices joined in, and even they speedily gave way to the chorus. In February, 1919, the Pravda cited a case which it roundly declared to illustrate the actual advantages of mock shootings: the case being one of a well-to-do peasant who had refused to meet a requisitional order for 20 poods-weight of grain by way of “extraordinary food tax,” and had been imprisoned, and still refused to pay, and had then been stood up against the local churchyard wall, and again refused to pay, and, lastly, had had a shot fired about his ears, and—oh, miracle of miracles!—at length agreed to pay what was owing.

An equally amazing item is to be found in the Che-Ka’s Weekly,—an item which furnishes us with yet further historical proof of our point, and was headed “Why does the Che-Ka hesitate?”

Tell us [asked the signatories of the article—the head of the Che-Ka of Nolinsk, and others] why you did not subject that fellow Lockhart[201] to the most refined of all possible tortures, and thereby wrest from him the information which we require, and also the budget of valuable addresses which such an official always possesses? Why, we repeat, did you allow him to leave your premises without having been subjected to such tortures as would have made the blood of every counter-revolutionary in the land run cold?... Away with such shilly-shallying! When a dangerous rascal has been caught he should have all the information possible extracted from him, and then be dispatched to a better world.

This was an article in an official journal,[202] and that journal the very journal which purported to be “imparting wise direction to the activities of local Che-Kas, and propagating the ideas and methods of warfare which the All-Russian Che-Ka itself employs”! However, at the sixth Congress of Soviets the representatives of the All-Russian Che-Ka assented to this by saying: “We recognise that it is time for shilly-shallying and namby-pamby methods to be eliminated from our dealings with the bourgeoisie and the bourgeoisie’s servants.”

Hence, from the moment when the Che-Ka’s slogan of “Show no mercy to the bourgeois rabble!” first rang out in the provinces that slogan was bound to be interpreted by the provincial officials as at once a call for and a sanction of cruelty, and to nullify in advance the Che-Ka’s subsequent instructions that a watch be kept over the “legality” of the proceedings of provincial executive committees. And this was the more bound to be so because those instructions were theoretical rather than practical.[203] For the provinces, of course, took their cue from the centre, where, as British reports have stated, a precedent for torture was set in the torturing of Kannegiesser, the assassin of Uritsky. But is it, or is it not, the case that Madame Kaplau, the assailant of Lenin, also was tortured? At all events, rumours to that effect gained currency in Moscow; and though I cannot, for my own part, feel sure on the point, I do know this much: that one night whilst I was lying in the Butyrka, a night which I now believe to have been the night immediately following the Lenin attempt, we could hear that someone was being tortured in the building, and long lay listening to the sounds. Also, although, in those days, it was as unusual for news of torturings to reach the public ear as it is now, I did at least hear of the “safes trial” in August, 1920, and learn about the details of seating the victims upon ice (and the rest) which were laid before the Supreme Revolutionary Tribunal. And the picture becomes more vivid still when we read of the great political trial in Turkhestan in October, 1919, when the accused, to the number of twelve or so, repudiated the evidence which they were alleged previously to have given before the local Che-Ka, and pointed out that their signatures to the “confessions” had been extorted through torture, and thus caused the Tribunal to question the “special detachment” of the Che-Ka which had inflicted the torture, and thereby to elicit the fact that torture had been a regular item of that Che-Ka’s routine. “Upon this,” a correspondent of the Volya Rossii[204] who was present has said, “sobs and cries arose in the hall, and made the building re-echo:” with the result that the judges disregarded the fact that the counsel for the prosecution dubbed the protests “mere bourgeois lamentations,” and uttered a formal condemnation of what had been done.

And only recently the Izvestia[205] of Moscow reported a session of the provincial court of Omsk at which there were tried one Hermann, commandant of the district militia at Sherbanov, a fellow militiaman of his, and a Dr. Troitsky on a charge of having tortured prisoners during examination by pouring hot sealing-wax upon the victims’ palms, arms, necks, and scalps, and then tearing away the wax, and, with it, whole patches of skin. “We cannot,” the President of the Court moralised, “tolerate such methods of inquiry, for they are worthy, rather, of the Spanish Inquisition.” Yet they were “methods of inquiry” which had received practically the sanction of “law,” and we gain additional information of value on the subject from the Socialistichesky Vestnik. To that journal a correspondent wrote:

Last spring persistent rumours and disclosures of certain occurrences caused the provincial court of Stavropol to appoint a special commission of enquiry into torturings said to have been inflicted by the local criminal investigation department.... The commission found that, in addition to floggings, suspensions, and other physical violence, the following means of torment had been employed. (a) First of all there had been confinement in “the hot cellar,” a dark, sunken cell three paces long, and oneand-a-half paces wide, with the floor of the cell cut into steps. For purposes of torment as many as eighteen persons at once had been placed in this cell, so that, there not being standing-room for them all, some of them had had to remain constantly supported upon their companions’ shoulders, whilst the atmosphere had been such that a lamp would not burn in it, nor matches strike. Yet the prisoners had been left there for from forty-eight to seventy-two hours, and, meanwhile, given neither food nor water, nor yet permission to leave the cell for natural purposes. And even women, as well as men, had been incarcerated there—a case in point being a certain Madame Weitzmann. (b) Secondly, there had been confinement in “the cold cellar,” a vault communicating with the shaft of a disused icehouse. In this case prisoners had been wholly divested of their clothing, and lowered into the shaft of the icehouse on a sliding ladder; after which the ladder had been withdrawn, and cold water poured upon the prisoners. And this torture had been inflicted even during seasons of severe frost, and in some cases included pourings of as many as eight bucketfuls of water upon a single prisoner.... (c) Thirdly, there had been measurement [compression] of the skull.

Also, it appeared that this criminal investigation department had been shooting prisoners for alleged attempts to escape, and, in the April of 1922, used the pretext for putting to death, in particular, a certain Mastriukov. In fact, when the commission of inquiry issued its findings they were findings based upon testimony both of victims and of eye-witnesses, upon discoveries made by qualified medical men, upon results of post-mortem examinations, and upon confessions of Che-Ka employees, the actual inflicters of the tortures—the plea of these last being that they had acted only on the express orders of a certain Grigorovich who was head of the local C.I.D., head of the local executive committee, and head of the local provincial committee of the Communist Party. Also, they said, they had received instructions from Povetsky, Grigorovich’s assistant, and from Topishev, judicial adviser to the C.I.D., and carried out the tortures with these two officials’ personal help. Yet, though the commission ordered the persons inculpated to be arrested and proceeded against, their arrest was found to be impracticable owing to the fact that a certain Chernobrovy, head of the local O.G.P.U., concealed them for a while on premises attached to his official quarters, and then produced in their justification a secret circular issued by the Central Che-Ka itself which laid it down that if, during a process of “investigation” of prisoners, or a preliminary enquiry with regard to prisoners, the latter should resist circumstantial evidence, confrontation, and “threats,” and refuse to confess to their imputed crimes, “the old and proven remedy” should be applied to them. The origin of the circular had, apparently, been as follows. During the summer of 1921 Voul, a notorious “people’s prosecutor” attached to the Che-Ka of Moscow, had been accused of employing inquisitional torture and violence, and, upon that, had threatened to send in his resignation on the ground that, should torture be debarred him, he would not be responsible for preventing any further increase of “banditism” in Moscow: and this threat had so frightened Menzhinsky that the latter had forthwith accorded Voul licence to pursue his inquisitional methods as before, and issued the foregoing “old and proven remedy” circular. Hence the usual result happened, and none of the Stavropol officials who had employed torture were arrested—the only persons to be arrested being persons who had displayed an altogether uncalled-for amount of zeal and initiative in probing Stavropol’s criminal-investigatory mysteries! And we have detailed confirmation of this from a letter published in No. 1 of the journal Pouti Revolutsyi (“Roads to Revolution”), one of the Left Social Revolutionary Party’s journals.

Akin to the Stavropol business was a Turkhestan affair. In Turkhestan the chief inflicter of torture was, for a while, an ex-circus clown named Drozhin, a member of, and an executioner employed by, the local Che-Ka. In time, however, this man was dismissed from his post on a torture charge—only to be reappointed, on the strength of his record as a “questioner,” to the post of local political commissary.[206] And how we can imagine the exploits of the ex-circus clown in his new rôle! Not that we know very much about his exploits in that particular quarter of the world. What we do know about him is his career in a kindred sphere at the other end of Russia, at Archangel. I have before quoted a report in The Che-Ka dealing with the concentration camp at Kholmogory; and although I am not personally aware of the identity of the author of the report, of the man who, in the face of every possible danger and difficulty, travelled to the far North to collect for himself authentic information concerning horrors which had reached our ears even in Moscow, it was in Moscow that subsequently he sought for means of assistance for the unfortunate prisoners in the “Camp of Death,” and I was present when a paper was read on his behalf. The paper proved to be even more terrible than his report had been: so much so that we sat petrified, and realised at once that no possible means of help was conceivable. And if I cite a few details from the paper, they will help the reader to realise what life conditions were in that inferno of a camp.

So long as the abominably cruel Bakhoulis was commandant of the place, persons were shot in large numbers for purely trivial offences. Truly detestable are the tales told of him! Amongst other things, he made it his practice to divide his prisoners into groups of ten, and punish a whole group if any one of its members committed an offence. Once a member of a group escaped, and could not be found; whereupon the other nine were shot forthwith; and when the actual offender himself was caught he also received a sentence of death, and was led to the side of a ready-dug grave, and cursed at for a while by the commandant, and, lastly, hit over the head in such a manner as to fall, half-stunned, into the grave, and be buried alive. This incident I had from one of the camp guards themselves. Later, when Bakhoulis had been transferred to the command of the camp at Portaminsk, the most northerly camp of all (situated about a hundred versts north of Archangel), he continued his Kholmogory practices there, and caused the prisoners to be fed upon dried fish alone (so that they never saw bread) and, in general, gave full rein to his cruelty. In particular it is said that of 200 prisoners whom he removed thither from Kholmogory very few survived. I found the very name of Portaminsk to inspire captives with fear, so much had the name come to mean practically a death sentence. Yet the conditions of Portaminsk differed little from those obtaining at Kholmogory.[207]

Further details as to life in the Portaminsk disused Monastery reach us in a private letter secretly conveyed to Petrograd.[208]

Once, as we were starting work at six o’clock in the morning, and had not yet left the courtyard, one of the prisoners, a man recently recovered from typhus, and therefore still weak from the attack, fainted away: whereupon the commandant declared him not to be genuinely ill, and, to punish him for “malingering,” had him stripped stark naked, thrust into an icy-cold cell, and pelted with snow. Later the man died of the chill then caught.

Also the writer records how a sick man who failed to keep up with a prison convoy proceeding from one village to another was shot before his comrades’ very eyes. And another eye-witness has written: