The authorities’ recruiting of their cooks and laundresses and other serving-women is done exclusively from the ranks of the female prisoners. And for the most part they select gently nurtured women. Also, the staff (especially a man called Okren) compel such girl prisoners as take their fancy to come and visit them by night, on the plea that there is domestic work requiring to be done, but, in reality, to use these girls as their mistresses. And the terrified victims cannot refuse, but must bear such insults in silence. Once a woman prisoner did voice her disgust (this was during the days when Bakhoulis was in command) but was shot on the spot; and when, on another occasion, an ex-girl student was sent for by the assistant commandant at one o’clock in the morning, and at first refused to answer the summons, her comrades actually besought her to go, lest all of them should be made to suffer for her refusal. In the same way, whenever women prisoners were taken to the bathhouse, they would find Red Guards in wait for them, both there and in the retiring-rooms.[238]
Like things obtained under the special branch of the Kuban region. And outstanding cases elsewhere are those of an ex-school teacher, a Madame Dombrovskaya, who was raped before being shot, and of a young woman who, sentenced to death by the Che-Ka of Kislovodsk for “speculative trading,” was subsequently violated by the head of the “counter-espionage department” before being killed with his sword, and having foul sport made of her naked, dismembered body.
Akin is a witness’s statement that, before the wife and daughter of General Ch—— were executed near Chernigov, the daughter, aged twenty, was raped: the facts being related to the witness by the chauffeurs who drove the party to the scene of execution. And another statement says:
Some women were writhing hysterically on the floor amongst a group of executioners as, with drunken laughter and lewd, filthy jests, they kept tearing open the women’s clothing on the pretext of “searches.” All of a sudden the senior warder (one of the regular prison staff, not a regular Che-Ka employee) cried in a voice tremulous as with apprehension: “Don’t touch the women! Such fellows as you are not to be trusted with women when they are going to be shot.”
Such, if you please, a description of an ordinary execution night (the date was November 17, 1919), at Saratov! Revolutsionnaya Rossia[239] also gives details of rapings. And only recently a woman exile wrote to the Berlin-published journal Anarkhichesky Vestnik[240] an account of her experiences in the Vologda transport prison:
Before the wardress left us she warned us to be on our guard, since infallibly, when night fell, either the superintendent or the director would enter “with the usual intentions.” The procedure, she said, was so stereotyped that very few women passed through the prison without something of the sort being done to them, whilst, owing to most of the officials being syphilitic, the women so treated in most cases caught the disease.... We found that we had not received the warning for nothing.
I myself can remember a woman prisoner being violated in the top storey of the men’s solitary confinement building in Moscow (the then prison of the Muscovite Special Branch, an institution notorious for the severity of its régime) and the Red Guard concerned in the affair excusing himself on the ground that the woman had given herself to him for half a pound of bread. And this is not impossible. For half a pound of foul, black, prison bread! Yes. What further comment is necessary?
Before the Lausanne Tribunal the witness Sinovary told of a multitude of Petrograd rapings. And the following extract enables us to read of what was done in that way by the Che-Ka of the Kuban region:
Over that Cossack village Saraev held such unlimited sway as to possess power of life and death over every inhabitant, and be able to carry out what confiscations and requisitions and shootings he liked. Yet, though exhausted with sensual pleasures already, he still desired to gratify his animal instincts, and never let a pretty woman come under his notice without outraging her. His method of procedure was equally simple, primitive, lawless, and cruel. As soon as he coveted a female victim he would begin by arresting her nearest male relative—brother, husband, father, or what not, or all of them together—and sentencing them to death. And, upon that, petitions would be presented, and intercession made, by influential inhabitants and Saraev would avail himself of the fact to confront the woman with the ultimatum that, unless she became his mistress, her relatives would become lost to her. Whereupon, forced to choose between the two evils, the woman, naturally, selected, in most cases, the alternative of degradation; whilst, for his part, Saraev would, so long as she continued in that degradation, hold up the accused man’s trial. And the terror-stricken population dared not make the slightest protest, but had to remain deprived of the elementary right of every population, the right of defending its own interests.
In another Cossack village a Madame Pashkovskaya, the wife of a Cossack officer, found favour in the eyes of the head of the local executive committee, and upon that there began a persecution of her husband, and the head of the committee even went so far as to requisition a portion of the husband’s house for his own residence. Lastly, since the object of his attentions failed to be affected even by the factor of propinquity, the head of the committee removed the husband, the obstacle, by having him imprisoned as “an ex-officer and counter-revolutionary,” and, finally, shot.
Again, once a Che-Ka inquisitor said to a prisoner of his, a Madame G——: “You are very pretty, and your husband is unworthy of you.” Then, as though it had been an afterthought, he added: “I have a great mind to release you, and to shoot your husband as a counter-revolutionary. But no—I will release both him and you if you will become my mistress as soon as ever I have set you free.” And though, almost beside herself with agitation, Madame G—— consulted a fellow prisoner on the point, and was advised to save her husband at all costs, and allowed the inquisitor to begin visiting her, her husband was shot as though no agreement at all had been made!
Again, a Madame M——, an ex-officer’s wife, was imprisoned by a special branch, and told by the inquisitor concerned that, provided she became his mistress, she should be released; whereupon she agreed, and was released, and the inquisitor took up his abode in her house. Yet later she confessed to a friend:
I detest the man, but what can I do against him with my husband away, and no one else in the house but my three small children? All that I can say for myself is that at least I feel secure in so far as that I no longer have reason to fear inquisitional searches, or to live in daily dread of having my house entered, and myself dragged before the Che-Ka again.
And a witness whom I have already quoted in connection with events in the Crimea told the Lausanne Tribunal that each of the sailors active in that region possessed four or five mistresses, and that in most cases the poor women were wives of massacred or escaped officers, since rejection of the sailors’ overtures meant execution, and only a few stronger-minded ladies were able to muster up sufficient courage to solve the problem by suicide.
Intoxicated with blood, the sailors ran amok, seized the execution lists, and, in haphazard fashion, put crosses against any name which offended them by its appearance. And into their midnight orgies they impressed even Sisters of Mercy, the wives of imprisoned or escaped officers, and women hostages. And before the night was over all against whose names they had put crosses had been shot.
Again, a witness testified before the Denikin Commission that licentious orgies had been carried out systematically by the Che-Ka and tribunal of Nikolaev, and included even women who had come to beg for relatives’ release, with that inclusion as the price of their relatives’ freedom. And from Sister Medviedeva the same Commission heard a Kievan incident of still greater shamelessness:
Not an employee of the Che-Ka lacked a certain number of women. In fact, such fellows could cast the eye of lust upon every woman, and the state of things was absolutely disgusting. Sorin, in particular, loved lustful orgies, and on Easter Eve the large hall which used to belong to Demechenko witnessed the following. Two ladies entered the hall to present a petition on a prisoner’s behalf; and just as they did so, some curtains were drawn aside, and disclosed three nude women playing upon a piano; and it was in these women’s presence that the ladies had to proffer Sorin their petition. They themselves told me of the occurrence later.
Naturally, in face of such an order of life in Russia, the “fortnights for inculcating respect for women” that were advocated by the Prabochnaya Gazeta and the Proletarskaya Pravda[241] proved a foregone conclusion, and there set in a system of “communisation of women,” and of “days of free love,” which became an established, undeniable manifestation of the true meaning of Bolshevist tyranny, even though both Bolshevist and non-Bolshevist journals have attempted to ridicule the idea that the system ever existed as a fact. The existence of it stands corroborated by a host of documents.
The Terror meant murder and bloodshed and capital punishment. And it meant still more, for at its disposal it had means of affecting contemporary thought and imagination that went yet deeper. And those means were as endless, and as diverse, of form as always is the case when tyranny and outrage are expressing themselves. But, above all, the Terror meant capital punishment—capital punishment everywhere, and at every step, in every nook and cranny.
Thus wrote, in The Moral Aspect of the Revolution, the Herr Steinberg who helped to bring about the October upheaval, and at first was for building a social system which he has since declared to “have for its bloody crown, for its tragic apotheosis, the death penalty,” and to be “daily and persistently killing the people’s soul.” Well, he had better have written the words in Petrograd in 1917 than in Berlin in 1923, for since 1917 the Bolshevist tyranny has daily been setting human life at nought, and stifling free speech, and cramping the popular soul with the heavy fetters of a censorship, and slaying Russia’s best writers and publicists.
But I must draw the reader’s attention to the incomparably clumsy and senseless form of popular terrorisation which, known as “squeezing the bourgeoisie,” was a resource practised upon the educated classes everywhere, but more especially in the south. The procedure was that special days would be set apart for carrying out wholesale domiciliary searches which stripped the inhabitants of the bulk of their clothing, linen, and other articles, and left them, by way of “rations,” merely a shirt apiece, a couple of handkerchiefs, and so forth. Let us take a description of a particular “squeezing day” which, in 1921, was carried out in Ekaterinodar on the anniversary of the Paris Commune[242]:
At nightfall, that day, all houses inhabited by persons unlucky enough to have been “gentry” or merchants or leading citizens or lawyers or officers before the Revolution, and to be doctors or professors or engineers (in short, bourgeois) at the present time, were invaded by Red Guards and Bolshevists armed to the teeth, who made careful search everywhere, and removed all money and other valuables, dragged the houses’ occupiers outside in their indoor clothes, and, without regard for age or sex, or even for state of health (so that persons suffering from typhus were taken), loaded the lot on to wagons, and dispatched them to destinations elsewhere—half of them to a local concentration camp, and the other half to Petrovsk for forced labour in the Caspian fisheries. And this atrocious deportation of families by the hundred went on for a day and a half, accompanied with confiscation of the property of the deported, and distribution of the same amongst the local workers—though, as a matter of fact, we do not know how far it really reached those workers; we only know that at least it reached the market-place, and, in many cases, was bought back by its owners from the speculators who had since purchased it. Thus it became quite a common thing to see one’s clothes figuring on commissaries and their wives and relatives, and during the first year of the Bolshevist usurpation the system gathered to itself a secondary system of arbitrary “contributions” which in time attained almost fantastical dimensions. Yet to decline to pay those “contributions” meant arrest and imprisonment as a hostage, and then, not infrequently, death.[243]
Perhaps a speech delivered by the notorious Bolshevist leader Mouraviev at a forced meeting of bourgeois held after the Bolshevists’ seizure of Odessa in 1918 will best illustrate what the term “contributions” or “mites given for the revolutionary cause” really meant. Said Mouraviev:
I have reached the hall late, and the enemy is knocking at the gates of the city already. And, perhaps you bourgeois like the sound of that? However, do not rejoice too soon, for if I should have to surrender Odessa to the enemy, I intend to leave you neither your houses nor your lives. So look here. What you have to do is that within three days you must pay up to me ten million roubles. And if you don’t, then woe betide you, for I shall drown every man of you with a stone about his neck, and deport his family.
On the same lines as the foregoing was a “day of peaceful protest” which the Bolshevists of Odessa announced for May 13, 1919, just a year after the above speech by Mouraviev. And for the purposes of the day these Bolshevists formed as many as sixty gangs charged to relieve Odessa’s propertied classes of all “redundant” food and footwear and outer and under clothing and money: after which they broadcast threats that anyone who failed to observe the decreed day, as ordained by the local “council of workers’ deputies,” would be imprisoned, and anyone who actively opposed the decree shot. Also, the committee drew up an “Instruction” which set forth in minute detail the articles to be confiscated, but at least left to each inhabitant three shirts, three pairs of under-pants, and three pairs of socks. Which last provision had the effect of inspiring Pieshekhonov, our informant, to say that the devil is not always as black as he is painted. Pieshekhonov then continues:
Unfortunately, on the arrival of the day the citizens gave way to panic, and ran hither and thither in terror and perplexity as to where they should hide their valuables. I, for my part, could only smile at the idea of thinking that anyone could rob several hundreds of thousands of persons in a single day, and so thoroughly as to include even money concealed in nooks and corners. “No!” I said to myself. “One of two things will happen. Either the Bolshevist bands will be held up as soon as ever they enter the first houses, or a Bolshevist organised robbery will become a popular uncontrolled brigandage, and the Bolshevists at length find themselves forced to restrain the latter.” And this duly happened—the Bolshevist bands being held up on their first entry into houses and—well, and the unexpected happening in the circumstance that it was precisely in the localities inhabited by the working-folk that those bands met with the most abuse. In fact, it was not long before sounds of firing began to be heard there, and in the end the Bolshevists altogether had to abandon their “day of peaceful protest” or they would have found themselves confronted with an armed rebellion not so much of the bourgeoisie as of the proletariat. True, later (in 1920), the Bolshevists of Odessa did succeed, I believe, in a “confiscation of all surpluses”; but by that time I had left the place, and cannot say how the confiscation was effected, save by, probably, allowing a large number of persons to evade the affair altogether. And a Kharkov confiscation of surpluses during the same year came to an equally unsatisfactory conclusion, for, though on the first night, the Bolshevists took care to search strictly on the system of house by house, on the following night they were foolish enough to visit only houses previously selected—the more prosperous residences—and so to draw protests from influential inhabitants, with complaints of unauthorised robbery, which eventually compelled the searches to be stopped. As for my own experience in Kharkov, it was that the searchers never reached the house in which I was.
The chief reason for the Bolshevists’ failure in Odessa [wrote Margoulies] was that they committed the gigantic tactical error of not previously exempting from search all houses belonging to the industrial workers and the petty officials. For failure to do so brought it about that, as soon as ever news of the impending “peaceful protest” reached the town, there set in a panic not so much of the bourgeoisie as of the proletariat, and a stoppage of work at most of the factories in order that the hands might hasten home and safeguard their property from the illegality that was supposed to be threatening even the goods of Communists. Whence some of the scenes were indescribable as the requisitionary detachments (mostly youths and young women of questionable character) were assailed with curses and abuse, and in some cases even with physical violence and sousings with boiling water: until, the popular passions having become thoroughly aroused, no course was left save reluctantly to relinquish the scheme before isolated cases of protest should coalesce into a popular upheaval, and, as early as one o’clock in the afternoon (that is to say, four hours only after the “peaceful protest” had been begun), to circulate an urgent message that the domiciliary visitations must cease, and, next day, to issue an address on the subject to the workers. Said the address: “We feel not a little hurt that yesterday the workers should seem to have taken the part of the bourgeoisie. As a matter of fact, it was impossible for us to charge our instructions with an order that searches should not be carried out in the working-class districts, for in that case the bourgeoisie would have resorted thither in large numbers for concealment of all the stolen wealth which they have been hoarding.” But the appeal concluded: “The misunderstanding which has happened is the more regrettable in that it is bound to act as a setback to what constitutes a primary factor in the workers’ cause.”
A month earlier a similar demand had been made upon Odessa, but in this case for a definite “contribution” of 500,000,000 roubles. And both in Odessa and elsewhere evictions were carried out at twenty-four hours’ notice, whilst in Vladikavkaz women found walking out of doors were then and there sent to menial work in the hospitals, and in Sebastopol and other towns of the Crimea members of the bourgeoisie were seized and put to hard labour. “All members of the male sex found wearing starched collars, and all members of the female sex found wearing hats, shall be apportioned tasks of severity.” Such persons were arrested just as they were, conveyed forthwith to the outskirts of the town, and set to trench-digging. And in time casual street seizure of the kind was improved upon with nocturnal house-to-house collection, and dispatch of the captured bourgeois to militia camps. There, the next morning, the men were, regardless of age, sorted into batches of ten, and set to loading railway wagons and digging trenches—tasks which such of them as had never before done manual labour found come none too easy, and admit of but slow performance, and so bring down upon the performers both the taskmaster’s tongue and the taskmaster’s lash. And meanwhile the womenfolk amongst the captured bourgeoisie were set to clear and scour out Red Guard barrack-rooms, commissaries’ houses, and Communist establishments generally. And one Easter Sunday a party of young girls in Sebastopol were unexpectedly commandeered for menial tasks in public for the sole purpose of making a spectacle of them; after being ordered to assemble at given points, they were sent to scrub out and dust and scavenger Red Guard barrack-rooms that were, it need hardly be said, plunged in an extremity of filth. And not only had these gently nurtured girls (who were, for the most part, only of school age) to perform their tasks in ordinary (non-working) clothes, but also, being forbidden to bring with them any of the cleaning implements necessary for such work, had, at the point of commissaries’ revolvers, and threatened with the lash, to scrape out barrack lavatories with their bare fingers![244]
Kiev, too, had its “week for confiscation of surpluses.” And the manner in which that “week” was carried out makes it more than ever certain that Steinberg was right when, in his book, he asserted that no system at all governed Bolshevist requisitions and confiscations, so that, as always happens in such cases, spoliation aimed at the well-fed and the leisured missed a large number of them, and hit, for the most part, the underfed and the overworked.
In Vladikavkaz an Order promulgated on April 9, 1918, said that “all members of the bourgeoisie shall assemble at the Winter Theatre at 8 P.M. to-night (no matter whether they have paid their contributions or not) and be shot in case of failure to comply with this Order.” Also, it might be well to quote the following conversation between Peters and some Communist journalists, as reported in the Kievan Izvestia.
Let me remind you [said Peters to the journalists] how the workers of Petrograd responded to my appeal for voluntary searchers of bourgeoisie dwellings, and the searches came to be participated in by 20,000 workers (men and women alike), with sailors and Red Guards. Never could the thoroughness with which those volunteers executed their task be sufficiently praised! And what was the result? That the searches brought to light 2,000 bombs, 3,000 prismatic binoculars, 30,000 compasses, and many other articles of military equipment, and that for the first time we were enabled to get upon the track of the counter-revolutionary organisations which subsequently were discovered to have sprung up in every part of Russia. But here, in Kiev, unfortunately, popular discipline of the kind does not exist; marauders and speculators are allowed to inflate prices, and to conceal the food needed of the city.
Only yesterday some searchers in our employ unearthed fresh stocks of provisions, so that there confronts me the necessity of subjecting the holders of those stocks to the supreme punitive measure for having failed to comply with my Order concerning Registration of Supplies.
And in the same issue of the Kievan Izvestia there stood published the names of the 127 stockholders in question—as shot.