Once Zinoviev said: “The Che-Ka is the pride and the joy of the Communist Party”: but though commendation is a matter of personal opinion, I myself believe that Latzis came nearer to the truth when he said: “The Che-Ka is at least the best that Soviet institutions can evolve,”—and thereby pronounced the death warrant of Sovietism.

One of the prime causes of the degeneration of Che-Ka activity into tyranny and violence was the quality of the Che-Ka personnel. Political fanaticism alone will not explain the horrors which I have described. It is only sadists and madmen, it is only social elements which life has rejected, and greed of gain and lust of power have attracted, that can engage in bloodshed on such a colossal scale. Yet the mentality even of a healthy-minded individual would have broken down amid the atmosphere of orgy which has prevailed in Russia for five years past: and therefore a type study of the sort of functionary who figured on, and was employed by, Che-Kas is bound to offer both the alienist and the historian a most interesting field of investigation. Yes, only a sadist could find pleasure in such bloody work, or in singing the praises of such work as once the author of some doggerel verses called “The Che-Ka’s Smile” sang them in Tiflis when he declared that:

For we all know how cruelty may mate with sensuality, and an Eidouk show himself equally capable of writing hysterical rubbish and of slaying his fellows for a “revolutionary cause.” And we know that from the first the Che-Kas were forced to draw their staffs mainly from the criminal population, and that Dzherzhinsky’s memorandum of February 17, 1922, saying that “the punitive apparatus of a revolutionary authority should be constituted of an institute of revolutionary judges and prosecutors chosen by the people, and vested with an integrity of crystal spotlessness (seeing that they are the functionaries in whose hands the supreme authority is to repose),” was setting forth, in this connection, things as they ought to have been rather than things as they were. Yet the memorandum continues:

Well, even if we take it as a fact that there was a single word of truth in this, the atmosphere of tyranny which soon spread over the country would still have ended by demoralising not only any “institute of judges” of the kind mentioned, but also every decent element amongst the population. Nay, Latzis, the Che-Ka’s own statistician, himself had to admit that constant changes of Che-Ka employees were found necessary.

One such young Communist, an ex-plumber in the employ of the Che-Ka of Yaroslav as a “people’s prosecutor,” began his work well, but, later, took to liquor. And he had a friend who played the accordion, and the pair would drink in company. And it was mostly when he was drunk that he did his questioning of prisoners, whilst his accordion-playing friend sat by him to keep up his spirits. Yet so illiterate was this ex-plumber “people’s prosecutor” that he could not even inscribe his sentences of death, but had to scrawl across the paper, “To be put out as a White.”

The All-Russian Che-Ka held its sessions in Moscow, and constituted a state within a state, and could requisition blocks (indeed, scores of blocks) of buildings for its exclusive use, and maintain its own tailor’s establishment, laundry, restaurant, toilet saloon, boot-maker’s shop, locksmith’s forge, larders, and cellars—the latter, of course, well stocked with the best of “confiscated” food and wine. And it was not only actual members of the Che-Ka that could make use of these amenities without incurring an obligation to render account. The Che-Ka’s employees could do the same. Hence, when everyone else was going hungry the Che-Ka member or employee would be receiving his ration of sugar and butter and flour and the rest, whilst every theatre in the place had to send the Che-Ka free tickets for every performance. And practically the same obtained in the provinces, where everywhere we see the local Che-Ka occupying the most desirable premises. When a body of that sort was instituted at Sebastopol it, as a matter of course, took possession of Kist’s Hotel, whilst, as regards Odessa, the local Che-Ka built a whole settlement for its own benefit, and speedily caused to spring up there every species of establishment likely to conduce to the comfort of a “citizen,” from a barber’s shop to a cinema palace. The Che-Ka of Zhitomir, again, had its own dramatic society.[259] And though a correspondent wrote to the Obstchoyé Dielo that “the drunken sailor and the small boy with belt and huge revolver, our two hitherto types of Che-Ka employee, are becoming things of the past, and replaced with people’s prosecutors of urbane address and legal, or budding legal, origin,” the change seemed the more revolting, so terribly did the sleek, flashy aspect of the fellows who now held power of life and death over their fellow men clash with the universal popular impoverishment.

“The name of our Che-Ka must not only become famous. It must also become, and remain, innocent of spot.” How was this going to be achieved when Moscow alone contained twenty thousand Che-Ka agents drawing special rations, and organised into a host of cliques? As early as the year 1919 the All-Russian Che-Ka had come to have 2000 persons on its personal staff, with three-fourths of them natives of Latvia. Indeed, Letts, from the beginning, obtained, and retained, a special position in this regard, and would be engaged by Che-Kas in batches of whole families, and render those Che-Kas faithful service. Thus our modern Letts might be likened to the ancient mercenaries. So much was this the case that the Muscovite Che-Ka came to be known as “the Lettish Colony.” A propos of the attraction which the institutions of Moscow had for Latvia’s population, the Bulletin of the Left Social Revolutionary Party remarked: “Letts flock to the Extraordinary Commission of Moscow as folk emigrate to America, and for the same reason—to make their fortunes.” And the fact that very few Letts knew a single word of Russian was in no way held to disqualify those immigrants from being entrusted with inquisitions and domiciliary searches, or even with the filling in of returns. Whence arose amusing anecdotes not wholly amusing to the victims.

The truth is that, on the Bolshevists sending out a call for “idealists,” there looked up to them mostly the scum of the population, until Krylenko himself had to admit that “into the Che-Kas there have crept criminal elements.” For that matter, could it reasonably be expected that an ex-circus clown and an ex-brothel keeper should remain the only officiants of their kind?[260] And though it may not have been the invariable rule that Che-Ka employees were criminals (for example, Douzirev, the Grand Duke Vladimir’s ex-coachman, who took service under the Che-Ka of Odessa, may conceivably have been an otherwise respectable man) the fact remains that, as time went on, persons of the thief-murderer-swindler type insinuated themselves in large numbers into the best posts, and there exist scores of instances to that effect. Some of these instances are to be found in The Che-Ka. For example, once it was found that the headquarters of a gang of burglars which had been operating in the town of Ekaterinodar was the residence of the local “people’s prosecutor,” and that a certain Albert who had been in the employ of the local Che-Ka’s detective department, and sent to the University of Kuban at the expense of the League of Communist Youth, had been the gang’s principal leader. And there are instances of the same kind in the materials collected by the Denikin Commission, so that they constitute a perfect picture gallery of past and present malefactors. Nay, it fell to the lot of the Muscovite Che-Ka itself to discover that certain of its principals were not unconnected with cases of “banditism” which occurred; whilst in 1919 an employee of the Odessan Che-Ka revealed the fact that “criminals amongst us have been forging orders for carrying out domiciliary searches, and extracting money from victims, and robbing them,” whilst the victims in question had actually been employees of the Che-Ka’s own “operative department”! In fact (partially, perhaps, owing to the southerliness of its climate) Odessa furnished more instances of “banditism” on the part of Soviet-commissioned officials than any other locality in Russia; and once a local lawyer, when questioned on the point by Denikin’s Commission, replied:

Again, an ex-burglar of Odessa, one Kotovsky,[263] was appointed to the command of a Red Division.[264] Yet at least this fellow displayed a certain amount of decency in his new post, whereas, as a rule, his kind soon harked back to their original bestiality, and, sometimes, to their original job. Thus a certain Ossip Letny acted for a while as administrative chief at Tsaritsin, but left that post in order again to head a band which carried out countless robberies and murders. And in January 1921 one Khadzhi-Elias, president of a revolutionary tribunal, had to be shot for having taken part in an organisation for perpetrating extortion and theft under cover of the phrase “Warfare against Counter-Revolution,” even though up to the time of his detection he had been allowed to conduct trials solely according to his “revolutionary sense,” and to pass sentences of death on his own responsibility, and to carry them out with his own hand. The number of killings which he is said thus to have perpetrated is truly appalling.[265]

On one occasion the Che-Ka’s Weekly asserted that “the late bourgeois dispensation had for its principal adjuncts corruption and forgery.” Would the journal repeat the statement, now that the Soviet Government has had actually to organise “weeks for combating bribery”?

Then, to touch briefly upon the trial of a man called Kossarev. This man had been a member of the Committee of Inspection and Control, a body formed to review the “legality” or otherwise of decrees issued by the provincial Che-Kas. Yet now, when arraigned before the Supreme Revolutionary Tribunal on a charge of having substituted a car-load of firewood for a car-load of frozen meat, he was found to have served a previous sentence of ten years in the Siberian mines for having robbed and murdered an old woman! And in 1922, when the Revolutionary Tribunal of Moscow tried a certain Taraboukin, an ex-bandit, and the president of one of the provincial tribunals, for extortion, it found that he and a friend had once murdered a jeweller, and stolen twenty million roubles-worth of stock!

Thus the Bolshevists could be ruthless towards their own agents: but they were so only when those agents had been too brazen in their robbing or accepting of bribes. Wherefore cases of the sort formed the exception rather than the rule. As a rule, an official could commit an offence with impunity, for always it was found that, though appeals might be presented for “extinction of the rascals who are wrecking our Soviet system” (an appeal of the sort being presented by, in particular, Zachs, whilst serving as Dzherzhinsky’s temporary substitute on the Muscovite Che-Ka),[266] it had to be realised that those “rascals” had become indispensable to the system. Indeed, I could cite many cases where officials were charged with offences, sentenced to death, released, and given superior posts.

The Head of the Petrograd Che-Ka once proudly told a meeting of Che-Kas of the Northern Region that was held during the October of 1918 that “My Che-ka looks with disapproval upon the methods of the old Secret Police, and particularly disapproves of the employment of agents-provocateurs”: whereas the truth is that, beginning with the case of the Mr. Lockhart whom Peters invited to attend a fictitious meeting of a fictitious “Committee of White Guards” (later even the Pravda admitted that it had been a fictitious committee), the working of the Che-Ka’s “punitive apparatus” was carried on exclusively by means of an officially (and clumsily) organised and sanctioned and operated system of provocation. Thus, the fifth paragraph of a secret Order issued by the Special Branch over Dzherzhinsky’s signature on December 5, 1920, recommended that, “for the detection of foreign agencies in our territories, there be organised pretended White Guard associations.” And this circular would seem to have been present to Latzis’ mind when he inspired a special Kievan piece of political provocation which was worked by pseudo “Chilean” and “Brazilian” “Consuls” (who, in reality, of course, were employees of the provincial Che-Ka), and adopted for its plan of operations offers to help refugees to escape abroad, and those refugees’ subsequent betrayal as “counter-revolutionaries.” The upshot was that in due course the Krasny Mech, or “Red Sword” (the organ of the Political Department of the All-Ukrainian Che-Ka) published (on August 18, 1918) a statement that a huge counter-revolutionary conspiracy had been brought to light under “Count Albert Petrovich Pirro, Brazilian Minister to the Ukrainian Soviet Government,” and that this “Count Pirro” and four confederates had been shot, and that investigations with regard to certain others connected with the affair were now in progress. Well, certainly a lady of the name of Poplavskaya was shot at that period, for having “prepared to travel to France and warn M. Clemenceau of an impending visit of Communists for secret propaganda”; but we know that no “Count Pirro,” as such, can have been put to death, for the reason that the “Count” was none other than an agent provocateur employed by the Che-Ka—though to this day the precise identity of the Che-Ka employee who impersonated the pseudo-diplomatist has been kept a secret.

Again, in 1920 some foreign-published Russian journals issued accounts of Odessan doings of a “Baroness Stern,” who resembled “Count Pirro” in so far as that her proceedings at least smacked of Bolshevist provocation. For no sooner had she landed at Odessa from Constantinople than local Bolshevist leaders hastened to fête her as a zealous Communist, and to cause her every utterance to be quoted in the press, even in the Izvestia itself. Then she disclosed to the German Consular Agent her “real mission.” She had come from Germany, she said, on behalf of the International Red Cross, and was charged to help any German subjects in Russia towards repatriation if they wished, and to supply any Russian subjects who might desire to join the party with false passports. Only, the lady said, those Russian subjects must first hand over to her their valuables, lest those valuables should be confiscated, en route, by the Bolshevists. And, for the rest, the day for departure having been appointed, the Che-Ka stepped in, and arrested all those who had accepted the fictitious offers of help.

And another counterpart of our “Count Pirro” was a “Representative of the Danish and Swedish Red Crosses” who took such an interest in White Guard activities as a hobby that he tried to get into communication with certain persons known to myself, and did succeed in doing so as regards such of them as were simple enough to let themselves be landed in the gentleman’s toils.

Also a trial of refugees at Anapa was engineered by agents-provocateurs in the employment of the Che-Ka of Vladikavkaz. First that Che-Ka induced refugees to attempt to escape from Anapa to Batoum; and then it caused them to be arrested and shot by the district Che-Ka of Ter. The procedure was the usual one. The first party of refugees (twelve of them) was taken in hand by a “Colonel Baron Zussermann,” and accorded, in the half-way town of Vladikavkaz, a hospitable official welcome, with good quarters and entertainment, and, after supper, a visit to the town’s theatres and cinema palaces. The only unfortunate circumstance was that the refugees were unaware that the address of “Colonel Baron Zussermann” was also the address of the head of the local Che-Ka. And when a still larger party (of about a hundred) was organised the tragi-comedy ended in the usual shootings.[267]

In the Posledniya Novosty of February 7, 1922, we find a description of the method by which, in 1921, certain places near the Bessarabian frontier caught bourgeois and White Guards when trying to escape abroad. The affair would begin by certain “relatives” of the fugitive sending him a “trustworthy person” with a commission to see to the fugitive’s safe-conduct out of Russia; but always it would come about that, whether by accident or otherwise, both the “trustworthy person” and the “letter of recommendation” fell, en route, into the hands of the Roumanian Che-Ka; whereupon that Che-Ka would send another “trustworthy person” with another “letter of recommendation,” and that person would call upon the refugee concerned, and, after arranging for his journey, and obtaining sufficient evidence against him, carry out the usual arrest.

It has been stated,[268] too, that the commissary attached to the medical mission that was tried in Moscow during the summer of 1920, and shot under heart-rending circumstances, was not a commissary at all, but an agent-provocateur. And certainly the so-called Evstafievskaya Street conspiracy of Odessa in 1921 was organised by the keeper of the local Che-Ka prison,[269] and the Tagantsev trial in Petrograd by a sailor named Pankov. And beyond a doubt provocation was employed in the affair of the Petrograd co-operative employees, and again in the huge pro-Polish conspiracy that was unearthed in Smolensk in 1921, when over 1500 persons were arrested. Also, eye-witnesses have stated in connection with the rising in the Ishona region in 1921 that agents-provocateurs figured in officers’ uniforms at the sessions of the Omsk Che-Ka, and that a similar ruse was used to foment the Saratov rising of Social Revolutionaries and Menshevists in March of the same year.[270] In this regard, a peculiarly instructive case is the case of the Anarchists Lev Cherny, Fanny Baron, and others, who, in 1921, were shot for alleged forgings of Soviet notes. In their pamphlet concerning the trial the Anarchists of Berlin wrote:

To realise how likely this hypothesis is we need only recall the telegram with regard to Anarchists sent to Rakovsky.

And a correspondent wrote to the Obstchoyé Dielo:

For a while, also, the All-Russian Che-Ka maintained a staff of prostitutes for provocation purposes. And in the same connection it utilised even children of from twelve to fourteen years of age, and rewarded them with money and presents and sweets. Again, it would permit prisoners (hundreds of cases of this occurred) to purchase their lives by entering the Che-Ka’s secret service. The tragedies that resulted from this practice! Once a young lady who accepted service of the kind, to save her father from being shot, fell a prey to such consequent remorse as to burn herself alive. And one of a famous series of essays, entitled “Russia of To-Day,” which appeared in the London Times tells of the self-hanging of a woman who had laid false information.[271] Particularly extensive was the provocation directed against the lower strata of the population; wherefore the “Workers’ Opposition” within the Communist Party spoke no more than the truth when it said that to Russia’s labouring classes Communist nuclei were known as “Communist bloodhound-kennels.” “Brood hens,” agents-provocateurs, swarmed also in the prisons, where they procured countless trials for accepting bribes, and for forgery and theft, and countless death sentences—for which last they were paid at a percentage rate, whilst, should the case happen to include peculation, the “people’s prosecutor” concerned received 10 per cent. of the sum alleged, as a reward for his share in having “discovered” the crime. I myself had personal knowledge of such a “discovery.” In the instance referred to, two “people’s prosecutors” attended an entertainment given by a Mr. R. and his wife, and induced them to become confidential. Then they arrested them. And when the wife sent word of the occurrence to a lawyer friend of her husband’s, and the lawyer approached the praesidium of the Che-Ka, he, to his surprise, found himself added as a third prisoner, on the charge that he had dared to address the Che-Ka without previously obtaining permission. In the end he was exiled to Novospassk.

And, according to The Che-Ka, it was quite a common thing for Che-Ka employees purposely to carry out domiciliary searches, and mass arrests and ambushes, as a means of supplying themselves with additional stocks of the amenities of life: so that on December 9, 1919, the Soviet of Moscow itself had to admit in its press that “it has been found that houses used by our agents for organising ambushes never fail to be left stripped to the basement.” For, as I have already shown, these Che-Ka staffs were, for the most part, mere gangs of thieves. Yet whenever gangs of the sort were seen to be in danger of exposure they found powerful defenders in the real instigators of the crimes, in the leading officials of the local Che-Ka. On September 22, 1918, Peters wrote in No. 2 of the Weekly: “Recently certain enemies of the Soviet Government have been spreading tales that Communists are guilty of bribes-taking, corruption, and false witness. But do not let this depress us. True, a few cases of abuse in this way may have occurred; yet all that that means is that the New Man has not yet had time to acquire the legal sense.” Then Peters added: “Besides, we may rest assured that all such calumnies are but slanderous lies of bourgeois production.” And this a lesser light capped with the self-satisfied words: “Charges of the sort are only a proof of our strength, for we are both clever and practical, and have no need to grease the palms of persons weaker than ourselves.” Yet why should Mr. Alston have written to Lord Curzon: “Frequently arrested persons have to bail themselves out several times over, under a threat of death,” or the Che-Kas of Kuban and Odessa have organised a regular industry of throwing persons into gaol, and reaping a monetary harvest from their release?[272] Nor did Moscow form any exception to the rule of corruption, and the Che-Ka of Tiraspol systematically smuggled refugees across the frontier, and the same was done by other Che-Kas conveniently near the boundary line. In this connection the Posledniya Novosty of February 7, 1922, declared the Roumanian Che-Ka to be taking the lead in such doings, and went on:

But sometimes that “window” would be closed for a while. Early in 1920 the small frontier towns of Podolia were very popular resorts for Odessa and Kiev; but when spring arrived the whole population of the Dnieperian region was shocked to hear that eighty decomposed bodies had been found in a cave near Kamenka, one of the small Podolian towns concerned, which proved to be bodies of refugees who, supposedly, had long ago reached Bessarabia in safety. However, in localities where Che-Kas were chronically poor, and, therefore, chronically desirous of obtaining rich clients, the journey to foreign climes presented no difficulties at all; though in winter-time the Che-Ka of Tiraspol would control the traffic by nocturnal holdings-up of persons who attempted to cross the river on the ice without first having paid the Che-Ka its prescribed fee of from 4000 to 5000 Romanov roubles. And any refugee so caught was then led naked through the streets, and beaten with sticks and whips, to “harden him against freezing on the ice when next he crossed.” And in Tiraspol also provocation flourished.

On February 16, 1923, the Posledniya Novosty reported that a leading member of a commission which had been appointed to enquire into the working of the O.G.P.U. had committed suicide on the Nikitsky Boulevard, and left for discovery on his body a letter addressed to the Praesidium of the Central Committee. The letter said:

And there had been yet earlier cases of prickings of Bolshevist conscience, especially before the mentality of the Bolshevist intelligentsia had wholly assimilated the brutality of Che-Ka work, and whilst yet persons “with weak nerves and effeminate bodies” (to quote Peters) were finding the sense of moral responsibility for the bloodshed perpetrated under the auspices of the Communist Party, and under those of the proletariat as a whole, too heavy a burden. At all events, up to the beginning of 1919 letters to that effect kept reaching the official press, and we find Petrovsky himself admitting that if Che-Kas persisted in their policy of converting themselves into independent State units, the end could only be a “demoralisation of the State’s constructive labours.”

And when the Grand Dukes Nicholas, George, Dmitry, and Paul were shot argumentation as to the advisability, or otherwise, of curbing the Che-Kas broke out with greater virulence than ever in the Bolshevist press. Yet though, eventually, theoretical reforms were introduced, the Terror continued its way unchecked, and we need but recall the words of Moroz,[274] that “there is not a sphere of life which the Che-Ka does not watch,” to realise that the moral and mental conditions of Bolshevist Russia have never changed.

Take, for example, the type of agent-provocateur or “Government worker” whom Dzerzhinsky’s circular encouraged, and largely enabled, to make good his footing in the State. “Life here is terrible,” wrote a Pskov correspondent to the Roussky Courier in May 1921:

And in 1922 an official document entitled “Duties of Secret Agents for January” enjoined that during that month:

On the sixth anniversary of the Che-Ka’s sanguinary inception Zinoviev wrote:

And certainly this last is true.

When, in Tsarist times, the old “Third Department” was renamed “The Department of State Police,” the act of renaming it was declared to be an insult to the intelligence of the Russian community. Yet what else can be said of a “reform” which has done no more than convert the letters “V.C.K.” into the letters “O.G.P.U.,” and achieved results brilliant to none save those who possess the mentality of a Zinoviev? Long ago the Russian masses translated the initials “V.C.K.” into the phrase “Vsiem Cheloviekam Konetz!” (“An End to All Men!”): and though yet it remains to be seen how popular humour will interpret the initials “O.G.P.U.,”[276] for the present the rest of the world regards them as standing for an institution alien to democracy, and in no way sanctioning the dictum of Anatole France that “revolutions are bound to demand an irrational toll of victims.”

Once the Muscovite Pravda[277] quoted a promise on Trotsky’s part that “if we are forced to depart hence, we shall make the whole world hear it when we slam the door behind us, and leave to our successors only ruins and the silence of a cemetery.”

That silence is reigning in Russia now. And in “The Ship of Death” we find written:

Yet though the living may be dumb, it is not so with the dead. They are crying aloud to us from the ravine of Saratov, from the dungeons of Kharkov and Khuban, and from the “camp of death” at Kholmogory.

For never can the dead be put to silence!

THE END