Chapter III · BLOOD STATISTICS (continued 2)

Again, a railway workers’ rebellion in Ekaterinoslav had, as a sequel, a list of “fifty-one” victims, which means, probably, that the true number was considerably larger. Indeed, we read in Z. U. Arbatov’s reminiscences, entitled Ekaterinoslav, 1917–1920,[121] that after 200 workmen had been arrested, and fifty sentenced to execution at once, the rest were, later, and by night, conveyed in two motor-lorries (the date being June 2) to a spot on the river Dnieper where, with a machine-gun trained upon them from behind, the whole were so shot that their bodies fell into the water, to be carried away by the current, and only a few were left stranded on the margin. And later more railway employees were sentenced and executed by the All-Ukrainian Che-Ka at Kharkov. The foregoing details Arbatov had from Bolshevists’ own statements. A minor rising at Kronstadt was suppressed in the same manner.

At Byisk a “conspiracy” led to 500, or more, arrests and eighteen shootings; a “conspiracy” (of ex-officers and koulaki[122]) in the Semiriechen district to forty-eight shootings; and a “conspiracy” at Elizabetgrad to shootings of fifty-five out of eighty-five persons arrested.

Next, the period arrived when Cossack refugees began to be compulsorily restored to their homes from overseas. They reached home to find not an amnesty, but punishment, awaiting them. A Cossack named Chouvillo who contrived to escape from Yisk after he had been repatriated thither subsequently informed certain foreign-published Russian journals that, out of a party of 3500 of his comrades, as many as 894 had been shot.[123] This statement may have been exaggerated, but at least no doubt exists that there were frequent shootings of legally or illegally repatriated Cossack officers; many such cases stand recorded for the year under review (1921). A correspondent of the Parisian Russian National Committee has informed us, in an article entitled “The Return”[124] (an article based upon items which Odessan Bolshevist journals themselves had published), that as soon as the S.S. Reshed Pasha reached Novorossisk from Constantinople during the April of 1921, 30 per cent. of her passenger complement of 2500 were shot, and that the same had been done after a previous trip of hers with 1500.

In our own case the officers and soldiers on board were shot at once; whilst of the previous party of 1500, 500 were shot at once, and the remainder dispatched to various concentration camps of the north, where certain death awaited them.

And even a respite from execution in no way guaranteed security against execution in the future. This we learn from a letter as recent as the November or the December of 1923 which was published in No. 16 of the Kasachyi Doumy (“Cossack Opinion”), and says, amongst other things, that no one who landed at Novorossisk at the period of which I am speaking could have failed often to hear the code phrase, “To be set apart for service in Mogilev.”[125] So much, then, for the system of deporting the compulsorily repatriated to the interior. Only the innocence of a credulous foreigner could have made Dr. Nansen believe that he found social rights still existent in Soviet Russia, or state, on April 21, 1923, that, “with regard to repatriations of Cossacks from the Balkan States, the Soviet Government is keeping faith in this respect, and fulfilling all undertakings given,” seeing that those undertakings had been defined by two clauses saying:

(1) That the Soviet Government binds itself herewith to extend the amnesties of November 3 and November 10 to all Russian refugees repatriated through the good offices of the High Commissioner of the League of Nations; and (2) that the Soviet Government binds itself herewith to afford Mr. John Garvin and other accredited representatives of Dr. Nansen in Russia every facility for holding unhindered converse with repatriated refugees, to the end that such representatives may verify the fact that the Soviet Government is applying the amnesties named to all refugees without exception.

And if Dr. Nansen could add to the above statement the words, “Certainly, two repatriated refugees have been arrested for minor offences, but already delegates from myself are negotiating with the Government with regard to these two persons’ fate,” his faith in the written word of a Bolshevist and his ignorance of Russian realities must alike have been great! For how could a private person—even a delegate from the High Commissioner of the League of Nations—control an independent Soviet Government with regard to that Government’s refugees, seeing that for such a purpose a State would need to have been formed within a State, and provided with its own secret service? Besides, the policy of the Soviet Government is a policy capable always of postponing its wreakings of revenge, so that persons may “disappear,” may be sent into exile, or thrown into gaol, long after they have been granted official guarantees of immunity.

Is any further proof of the existence of such a policy required? Proof can be discovered at every turn. A good instance is a case tried before the Military Tribunal of Moscow. During the year 1919 an officer named Chougounov deserted from the Red Army, but returned to Russia four years later, and was put upon his trial. True, he expressed “whole-hearted repentance,” and, the locality whence he had returned being Poland, he had, before returning thence, obtained from the Russo-Ukrainian Mission in that country a licence to return, and a recommendation to the All-Russian Executive Committee that he should be reinvested with civil rights; yet on May 18 he was arrested, brought before the Military Tribunal of Moscow, and, “in view of his whole-hearted repentance, and of his voluntary return to Russia, and of his class origin” (he was a peasant’s son) sentenced only to a term of—ten years’ “imprisonment in strict isolation”!

The Years 1922 and 1923.

Certain persons, particularly foreign visitors who have scraped together a superficial acquaintance with Russian life (M. Herriot is an example of the type), declare that terrorism in Russia is a thing of the past.

Well, even if we suppose that figures issued by the foreign-published Russian press were invariably exaggerated (including the figures said to have been derived from the Bolshevists’ Commissariat for Foreign Affairs itself, and stating that 2372 persons were shot during the month of May 1922 alone), the figures, whether exaggerated or not, are still horrifying as indicating the extent to which political life in Russia had become extinct, the country come to resemble a skeleton-strewn field, and all energy to rebel, all will to vent an open protest, fled from an abject, nerveless, supine population. Indeed, I should be only too glad to believe that the figures were exaggerated. Again, according to figures issued by the State Political Department itself, the O.G.P.U., a continuation of the Che-Ka organisation, 262 persons were shot during January and February 1922, and 348 during April, and 164 (including seventeen priests) during the one night of May 7–8, and 187 (at Kharkov) and 209 in Kharkov Province, and 200 in Petrograd, during May in general; even if we suppose that these figures, too, were exaggerated it was at least hypocrisy on Stallin’s part when he informed the Muscovite branch of the Communist Party in August of the year named that “we shall have to resort to terrorism,” and, in defence of the mass arrests of intellectuals then being carried out, to say:

Before long our enemies will be forcing us back upon Red Terrorism, and compelling us to reply to their activities with such measures as were necessitated during the years 1918 and 1919. So let those enemies remember that we do not fail to keep our promises. Already their experiences during the two years named should have taught them that much.... It is for those who sympathise with our political adversaries to dissuade them from going too far, from over-stepping permissible bounds of opposition to our policy. For unless they cease from those activities, we shall be forced to resume usage of a weapon which we should never have used at all if we had not seen our warnings disregarded. To our adversaries’ stealthy blows we must oppose blows open, stern, directed against every adverse quarter, whether actively or passively operative.

For there was no need for such threats: still vivid before the public memory were executions of churchmen for opposing confiscation of ecclesiastical property—the most dastardly executions that could possibly have been conceived, seeing that they were due merely to the mildest of protests against ecclesiastical spoliation, even as was the case in July last, when the Revolutionary Tribunal of Petrograd tried sixteen members of local religious communities, and condemned eleven of them to death—the condemned including Benjamin, Metropolitan of Petrograd, himself. And to this, and to the earlier case in Moscow, when fifty-four ecclesiastics were tried, and twelve of them sent for execution, there must be added instances in the provinces of Chernigov, Poltava, Smolensk, Archangelsk, Staraya Roussa, Novocherkassk, and Vitebsk, where clergy were shot in batches of from one to four on charges of having protested against despoilment of sacred ornaments.

With these executions for clerical “counter-revolution” went shootings after purely political trials on charges of having belonged to non-existent “counter-revolutionary organisations.” And trials of the sort are still going on: as recently as February 22, 1922, the Posledniya Novosty published a striking letter concerning the “liquidations” of some risings in the Ukraine which said: “Such ‘liquidations’ constitute, in reality, a war of extermination whose object is to finish off any intellectuals who have survived previous efforts of the sort.” And take the following extract from a letter written by a refugee from Proskurovo during January of that year. It says:

Owing to the almost incredible terrorism which has been rampant here (in Proskurovo) during the past few months, people have been compelled to escape whilst there was yet time. Such intellectuals as remained behind the Bolshevists are already arresting.... Koritsky, Chouikov, and my brother have been shot. Our Elder committed suicide just before he was led out to execution. And his wife is a prisoner in the local gaol.... Many have been put to death for participating in a “conspiracy.” Twenty-three were shot on the 18th last.... As the victims were being led out to be slaughtered nine of their companions burst through the gaol doors, and escaped. I, too, succeeded in doing that when my turn came. This was during the fourth series of arrests.... How you may be thankful that you have got clear of Proskurovo! At least you have escaped the spectacle of wives and mothers and children waiting outside the Che-Ka building on execution days!... None of the persons executed had had anything to do with political agitation at all. Most of them had merely agreed with the “Ukraine Movement.” They fell victims to evidence concocted by the Che-Ka itself. In fact, the Che-Ka has concocted the whole of this “Proskurovo conspiracy” on the usual degraded lines which Che-Kas affect.

And for news of similar terrorist orgies in other quarters of the Ukraine we need but scan the files of the Golos Rossii, or of the Posledniya Novosty, for 1922, when we shall see there excerpts from the Bolshevist press which tell of repeated executions of members of Savinkov’s and Pethura’s followings—of 12 members in Kharkov, of 25 in Odessa, of 55 in Nikolaevsk, of several in Minsk, of 8 in Gomel, of 10 in the Northern Caucasus, of 10 in Pavlograd, of 10 in Semipalatinsk Province (according to some sources, of 5), of 12 in Simbirsk Province (out of 42 found to be in possession of Antonov’s proclamations), of 68 in Maikop (amongst them women and young boys—all shot “to intimidate their fellow-bandits, since with the return of spring the rebels are losing their sense of fear”), of 13 (from amongst a group known as the Berdiansk Constitutional-Revolutionary Association) in Melitopol, and of 13 (students, these) in Kharkov. Then we must add to these the shooting of the General Staff of the Don Army—a shooting which became the more known because it included the shooting also of two Communists; the trial of the Nobel employees; the trials of repatriated émigrés; the execution of Shishkin, the Social Revolutionary, by the Muscovite Revolutionary Tribunal for refusing to testify before that court, and dubbing it “a mere organ of Bolshevist revenge”; the murder of Colonel Peshkourov of Yaroslavl as a participator in the Savinkov rising of 1918; the execution of 13 officers at Krasnoyarsk; the trial of the Karelian rebels; an execution of 148 Kievan Cossacks for mutiny; the arrest of 260 sailors after a naval conspiracy at Odessa; and a batch of executions at Odessa for a local strike.[126]

From Riga, on August 5, a correspondent of the Golos wrote:

During the past week both the O.G.P.U. and the revolutionary tribunals have been actively engaged in carrying out mass arrests and passing death sentences. At Petrograd ten persons have been condemned to death by the local revolutionary tribunal. In Esthonia a trial has been held of the Esthonian Wholesale-Control Committee. At Saratov the local tribunal has condemned two social revolutionaries for stirring up a peasant rebellion in the Volsk district. And on July 29 the tribunal of Voronezh put to death a social revolutionary named Sharnov, and on the 28th passed death sentences upon eighteen officers previously captured in Northern Caucasia and the Trans-Caucasian and Don regions. The tribunal’s sentences were carried out in the concentration camp at Archangel, whither the officers had been sent at the end of 1920, or early in 1921. Amongst the victims were General Mouraviev (aged over seventy), Colonel Gandurin, and others.

Then there were cases which seem to have had, not a political, but some other basis: a shooting of three railwaymen at Kiev; a shooting of forty persons at Saratov for having looted provisions destined for the famine-stricken areas; a shooting of six railwaymen at Novocherkassk for theft; and some wholesale massacres at Tsaritsin, Vladimir, Petrograd, and elsewhere. Of course, not all of those condemned may actually have been put to death—indeed, we know that sometimes they were not; but also we know that journalistic news of death sentences reached the foreign press only as regards a tithe of those sentences, and that sometimes the Bolshevist press omitted any details of them at all. Thus the Posledniya Novosty once quoted from that press: “Shootings of persons convicted of accepting bribes have been taking place in large numbers,” and I myself can recall a special “week for combating bribery” (it was during my last few days in Russia, early in the October of 1922), and the fact that on the day of my departure I found the Brest railway station all plastered over with posters announcing the “week,” and that only subsequently I learnt that the “week’s” plans had been planned on a scale large enough to include hundreds, and even thousands, of arrests of railwaymen!

Z. U. Arbatov, who escaped from Russia by way of Minsk, has given us a vivid sketch of the city’s condition. He writes[127]:

Affixed with tin-tacks to the wall of a carpenter’s shop we saw a list of names headed “Persons of the sort whom the Che-Ka punishes.” But just as my eye caught the figure “46” my companion dragged me away, and said hurriedly, “Oh, that is nothing. We have long been used to it. They put up a new list every day, and if one is seen reading it one runs the risk of being taken before the Che-Ka. You see, the saying is that no one would want to read it who had not got ‘enemies of the Soviet Power’ amongst one’s friends, since otherwise it wouldn’t be interesting enough. They shoot dozens daily.”

As regards the year 1923, let me first cite a report issued by the Supreme Revolutionary Tribunal. The report says that between the January and the March of the year in question the tribunal shot forty persons, and, during the May of that year, a hundred. Could anything be more eloquent? And from the Executive Committee of the All-Russian Che-Ka we have it that during the same period the State Political Department, the O.G.P.U., executed 826 persons “independently”—that is to say, illegally, in that only 519 of the 826 had been political offenders. At the same time it should be stated that later these findings led to three chiefs of branches of the O.G.P.U., fourteen “people’s prosecutors,” and certain other officials being dismissed. Again, from official Soviet publications which I was able to procure after I had left Russia, and from various correspondents of European journals, we glean items of the mass and individual executions of the year in question which enable us to divide the victims into the usual categories. Hence, first of all come executions for “counter-revolution.” A good example is the murder of the prelate Boutkievitz, which so shocked the whole civilised world that the reader will have no difficulty in remembering it. And then there come executions for having printed unauthorised political pamphlets. And then there come cases termed in the official reports “Details,” which were old affairs raked up after lapses of years—the shooting of a Savinkov agent named Sverzhevsky for planning to assassinate Lenin; the shootings of three and six members of the Union for Defence of Liberty and the Fatherland; the execution of M. F. Zhilinsky, a Muscovite member of a Savinkov organisation[128]; the shooting of three officers of the “Olonetz Sharpshooters Division” for having caused that division to surrender to the British in 1919; the execution of thirty-three members of a counter-revolutionary organisation active at Nikolaevsko-Neznamovsk; the shooting of thirteen members of a Constitutional-Revolutionary organisation at Kiev; the trial of forty-four persons at Semipalatinsk, twelve of whom were sentenced to death; the shooting at Perm of two Kolchak officers (Drizdov and Timotheiev); the shooting at Omsk of Kolchak’s director of intelligence, Pospielov, an ex-Tsarist Crown Counsel—though previously he had been granted an “amnesty”; the shooting at Semipalatinsk of the Kolchak Government’s Chief Justice; the shooting in Moscow of Pravdin; the execution of Ishmourzin (ex-Commissary for the Bashkir Republic) for seceding to Kolchak; the trial, in Moscow, of Piestchikov, Okoulov, and Metkevich, ex-officers of Denikin’s army, on a charge of “espionage”; the shooting, in Moscow, of Serdinkov, late Vice-Commandant of Omsk; at Ekaterinoslav, of 28 “rebels”; at Podolsk, of 26 Petlura men (including a sergeant named Pogoutsky); in Volhynia, of 64 persons out of 340 condemned—the rest having their sentences remitted; in the Caucasus, of 9 members of a “rebel” group operative during 1923; in White Russia (where a correspondent reported “a great increase of terrorism”), of 10 “rebels”; in Chita, of a Colonel Ernelich and 6 confederates; in Rostov, of 5 persons; and everywhere of countless “bandits”—of 15 in Odessa, of 15 and 17 in Petrograd (including a number of women who had refused to betray their lovers), of 9 in Moscow, of 6 in Ekaterinoslav, of 5 in Berdichev, and of 8 in Archangel, whilst in Kharkov also 78 “bandit” trials were held, and in only a few instances the subsequent death sentences commuted to imprisonment “because of the accused’s proletarian origin,” or “in recognition of services rendered to the Revolution and the Proletariat.” And, finally, we have it from a correspondent of the Rousskaya Gazeta (“The Russian Gazette”) in Odessa that 16 local “bandits” were sentenced to death for “acts of terrorism against Communists.” Yet the term “banditism” should be viewed with great caution. An instance is seen in the fact that the Izvestia once wrote:

Last December the case of Soloviev’s White bandit supporters was brought before the provincial court of Enisey. Of the 106 persons arraigned, nine were condemned to death, with five who had forged railway tickets, some who had passed counterfeit money, and the like.

Also, we must remember the category of persons executed for “economic counter-revolution.” Instances are the manager of the Turkhestan Tobacco Company (for “negligence”), four forest wardens in Tomsk Province, three engineers employed by a concern called the Union Works, a man employed by the Principal Remount Depot (Topilsky, an ex-Social Revolutionary), some workers in the employ of the State Trading and Naval Stores Departments, an engineer named Verkhovsky and six others in Petrograd, a merchant trader of the Sukharev Market in Petrograd, four workmen for “sabotage,” and a batch of Communist traders for “unconscionable speculation in currency.” Also there was the affair of the Vladimirsky Club, together with executions for offences similar to the offence then alleged. And during the same year there occurred several cases of senseless, gratuitous official revenge for offences committed several years previously. Instances are the shooting of Lieutenant Stavraky for having helped to quell a mutiny in the Black Sea Fleet during 1905, the execution of seventy-six repatriated men of Wrangel’s Army, and the shooting of General Petrenko after returning home from Prince Island in reliance upon an “amnesty.” Again, my portfolio contains sundry items relating to offences connected with official duties—items relating to the shooting, in Moscow, of eleven employees of the Central Housing Department; to the trial, at Pskov, of one Porkhov and two other employees of the local revenue office; to a trial of employees of the Viatka educational department for acceptance of bribes; to trials of members of local Che-Kas and revolutionary tribunals for lapses of official duty (a perfect wave of “official duty” trials seems to have swept over Russia); to the trial of a member of the Archangel revolutionary tribunal; and to a trial of the head of the Doubosarsky (Tsaritsin) criminal investigation department—the two last for having tortured victims before shooting them.

And what of the many executions of the year which were never reported at all? That such executions took place I am certain. For example, no journal ever reported the shooting of nineteen Savinkov supporters during the May of 1923, though I possess well-founded information that it took place, and that, of the nineteen then executed, thirteen had had no connection whatsoever with the offence alleged against them. And it was only when Sinovary was giving evidence before the tribunal at Lausanne that the world first learnt that P. I. Smirnov had been arrested during the previous April in connection with the Savinkov affair, and shot in Petrograd during the following January.

And what of Georgia, now supposed to have become a Communist State? The same as everywhere else: the usual quellings of the usual risings. In this connection we learn best of local conditions from certain Bolshevist press accounts of the rebellion and the suppression of 1922. Those accounts include an order to the inhabitants which, though by no means new in its contents, is at least instructive.

All inhabitants (the Order said) must report to the authorities and representatives of the Red Army both the Christian and the family names of any bandit who is known to them, and of any person who is harbouring such a bandit, with the whereabouts of any person soever who is hostile to the Soviet Power.

These Georgian risings were succeeded by Georgian “conspiracies”: and journals of the day contain resultant lists of names of from fifteen to ninety-one persons shot, with the executed described, in every case, as former princes or aristocrats or generals who had turned “bandit,” whereas, as a matter of fact, the overwhelming majority of them had belonged to the plain Socialist or Democrat intelligentsii where they had not been merely rural schoolmasters, or co-operative employees, or industrial workers, or peasants, and the like,[1] or known to all just as members of the Georgian Social Democratic Party.[129]

On July 5, 1923, the Central Committee of the Party just named published an address to the Central Committee of the local Communist Party and the local Soviet of People’s Commissaries. The address said:

Since November and December last large numbers of Socialist working people and peasants have been perishing at your executioners’ hands, and thousands of others finding themselves forced to flee for refuge to the wilds, lest they find themselves expelled from Georgia, or thrown into prison. And even this, it would appear, has not sufficed you, for you are torturing incarcerated comrades in your dungeons, and causing them such moral and physical suffering as in not a few cases has deprived them of reason, and, in others, crippled them for life where it has not killed them outright. From 700 to 800 persons are lying in your Che-Ka dungeons, or in the Metekhsky Fortress, at this moment.[130]

The Year 1924

This year, too, must be begun with similar items—with, first of all, the case of the “spy” Dziubenko, an ex-lieutenant-colonel of Kolchak’s army who, brought before the military division of the Supreme Court in Moscow, was sentenced to death and sequestration of his property. Subsequently the Izvestia reported: “Dziubenko had his sentence carried out within the legal period.”[131] Then there is the case of the “spy” Khrousevich, an ex-instructor attached to the Kronstadt Artillery School, upon whom the same tribunal similarly passed sentence of death.[132] And from a correspondent of the Dni we learn of a shooting of some workmen merely for having gone on strike,[133] and of a session of the Verkhne-Tagilsky “district circuit section of the provincial court” at which five unemployed and another man were sentenced to death for having, during January, “promoted disturbances in factories, and cessations from industrial work.” All these sentences were duly carried out, and from a pamphlet published by the Georgian Labour Group in February we learn that in Baku, for the same offence, eight Russian and three Georgian workmen were executed by the Transcaucasian branch of the O.G.P.U.—the pamphlet citing as authority for its statement a letter sent to the Dni by a Muscovite correspondent.[134]

Hence during this year we find ourselves in the presence of the usual orgy of death sentences. In particular, the O.G.P.U. staged a great political trial in Kiev, the pretext for which was an allegation that the O.G.P.U. had discovered in Kiev a great counter-revolutionary organisation styled “The Kievan Centre of Action.”

The present shootings are endless [wrote a refugee to the Novoyé Vremya (“The New Times”)], with, as the only difference, the fact that things now are done more circumspectly than formerly was the case. For example, an inhabitant of Tambov will be sent to be executed in Saratov, and a Saratovian elsewhere, and so forth, so that all tracks may be covered up, and, on a given person disappearing, no one may be able to find him again.[135]

I can vouch that the statement embodies a fact.

Attempts have been made to determine totals. But what use is that, seeing that probably the black pall under which the sanguinary events of latter-day Russian life have lain concealed these five years past will never be lifted, and that to the end history will have to stand vainly outside the locked doors which admit to the Red Statistical Chamber? In the White Sea, it is said, fishermen’s nets still keep dragging up corpses of Solovetski monks, lashed wrist to wrist with barbed wire.[136]

However, once a correspondent of the Roul, a writer named Egeny Komnin, did essay to compile a table of totals,[137] and below I will give the conclusions of his attempt accurately to estimate them.

By the winter of 1920 [he wrote] the number of provinces included within the R.S.F.S.R. was fifty-two, and they had fifty-two Che-Kas, and fifty-two special branches, and fifty-two provincial revolutionary tribunals. And then there existed all the swarm of regional-transport Che-Kas, railway tribunals, tribunals of “internal defence” (the “Internal Service Force”), and circuit sessional courts—these last being commissions periodically sent from the centre to supervise local mass shootings. And there were the special branches and special tribunals attached to the several armies (which, again, numbered sixteen), and the special branches and tribunals attached to the several divisions of those armies. Hence, in all, we may assume that there existed fully a thousand torture chambers—or, if we take into account also the activities of the district Che-Kas at that period, more than a thousand; considerably more. And later, as the R.S.F.S.R. still further increased the number of its provinces (Siberia and the Crimea and the Far East becoming overrun), that increase must have been accompanied by an increase in the number of the torture chambers. Whence, taking the Bolshevists’ own totals for 1920 (though during that year no real decrease of terrorism set in—merely it was that acts perpetrated by terrorism began to be reported less frequently), we can fix upon a certain definite figure for the daily average of killing per torture centre, and see thence that the curve of shootings rose from one to fifty as regards the larger centres, and from one to one hundred as regards regions in recent occupation by the Red Army. And since terroristic outbursts always were periodical in their outbreaking and their decreasing, a modest estimate of the average will work out at five persons per diem per torture centre, or, if multiplied by 1000 (the total number of torture centres), at 5000 persons per diem, or 2,500,000 per annum for the country as a whole. And to think that for six years past, or more, this Medusa’s Head has been waving over the ashes of our fatherland!

Che-Kas are said also to have appointed special officials, “corpse numberers,” for the purpose of keeping tally of the dead. The fact, surely, speaks for itself?[138]