Chapter VI · CHE-KA TYRANNY (continued 2)

With Johnson was associated a young woman executioner named Vera Grebenninkova (or “Dora”). This female’s talent for barbarism rivalled that of the negro himself, and amongst other stories of her ferocity we may include the item that she would tear out victims’ hair by the handful before doing the same with them limb by limb—cutting off ears, dislocating jaws, and the like. Her activities may be summed up in the fact that during her two and a half months with the Odessan Che-Ka she shot over 700 persons—a third of the whole tale![213]

In Kiev it was the practice to make the condemned prostrate themselves amongst the curdled blood on the floor before being shot through the back of the head, or brained. And in certain cases they were even made to prostrate themselves upon victims shot a moment or two earlier, or were taken out into the garden for the purpose of a “human hunt” of the kind related by the Kievan Sisters of Mercy. “Mikhailov, the spruce, immaculate chief of the Che-Ka, had a particular love for stripping prisoners naked, and then chivying them about the Che-Ka garden with a brandished revolver.”[214]

There is a similar reminiscence recorded by the French authoress, Odette Kun, a self-styled Communist whom untoward circumstances caused to be confined in Che-Ka cells at Sebastopol, Simferopol, Kharkov, and Moscow. In one passage this writer describes a Petrograd hunt of women prisoners which she had had related to her by an actual eye-witness of the “sport.”[215] It seems that in 1920 her informant had, with twenty other women, been incarcerated for “counter-revolutionary activity.”

One night a band of soldiers arrived at the building, and drove some of my companions out into the yard; and the next moment, when a chorus of almost inhuman cries reached our ears, and we looked through a window into the courtyard, we saw that the women had been stripped of every shred of clothing, and were being bundled into a wagon. Later, we learnt that they were taken out into the country, and told to run for their lives, with a promise that the first who reached a given goal should have her life spared. Needless to say, all of them were killed.

S. N. Volkonsky’s memoirs, again, state that in Briansk it was the practice to shoot prisoners in the back as soon as ever an examination was concluded[216]; also, that in Siberia prisoners were brained with an iron “rattle.” And a woman has related:

Just under our window I saw an ex-agent of the Okhrana (the old secret political police force) being killed in the Che-Ka’s courtyard. He was killed with a pole or a rifle-butt. It took over an hour to finish him off, and all the time he was beseeching the men for mercy.

At Ekaterinoslav, too, a fellow called Valiavko who shot “counter-revolutionaries” by the hundred would release from ten to fifteen prisoners in a small garden around which he had had a special fence constructed, and then enter with two or three friends, and fall to shooting at the “game.”[217] In the same city “Comrade” Trepelov, head of the Che-Ka, would select victims for execution merely by the process of marking names on the lists whose appearance displeased him, and so, with a “Raz.”[218] in thick red pencil, sign the victims’ death-warrant. Another device of his was to pencil the lists in such a manner as to render exact determination of which names were meant impossible. Also, when the local prison was being evacuated he saved time by having the whole of his listfuls of persons (fifty in all) shot indiscriminately.

In the Revolutsionnoyé Dielo (“The Revolutionary Cause”)[219] of Petrograd we find the following details of how sixty persons were shot after the Tagantsev trial:

The shootings took place at a station on the Irinovskaya Railway, where the prisoners were led out at dawn, and told to dig their own graves. Then, when the graves were half dug, they were told to remove their clothing.... From all sides came groans and cries for mercy, but the victims nevertheless were pushed into the holes, and fired upon—one lot being pushed upon the top of the previous lot, and shot even as the latter had been shot, until all the graves had become filled up with dead and groaning.

The executioners of Moscow did their daily work in dungeons fitted with asphalt floors and gutters and trap-falls to carry off the blood. We find a good description of the ruffians in an article entitled “The Ship of Death,” and included in the collection The Che-Ka. The three executioners most prominent in Moscow were men named Emelianov, Pankratov, and Zhoukov—all of them registered members of the Communist Party, and therefore persons accustomed to live on the fat of the land. Like all other executioners, too, they were paid by piece rate, and received their victims’ clothes and jewellery for their perquisites. Hence many of them amassed perfect fortunes from gold-mounted teeth torn out, and pectoral crosses filched.

An eye-witness has stated in the journal Echo of Kovno that at one time shootings in the cellars of Nos. 13 and 14 Bretenka Street, Moscow, were carried out by so poising a rifle on a stand at the nearer end of the basement as to point towards the precise place where the head of a victim would naturally come, and that if the victim was too short to reach the place, steps were placed beneath his feet.[220]

Again, S. S. Maslov speaks of a woman executioner whom he frequently saw during the year 1919. Every two or three days this woman would make her appearance in the central prison hospital with a cigarette between her teeth, a whip in her hand, and an unsheathed revolver at her waist. And as she traversed the wards whence the next batch of victims was about to be removed for execution, she would revile and flog like dogs any patients who were so benumbed with terror as to be slow in collecting their belongings, or who sobbed too audibly as they bade their comrades farewell. Quite a young woman she was—not more than twenty or so. Nor was she the only female executioner in Moscow.

And from the same Maslov, who, as ex-member of the Constituent Assembly for Vologda Province, was well acquainted with events in that region, we have a description of a non-professional female executioner named Rebekah Plastinina-Maisel who was a surgeon’s assistant in a small town in Tver Province, shot, single-handed, over 100 victims. Of this harpy and her second husband, the notorious Kedrov, a woman named E. D. Kouskova who then was living as an exile at Vologda has stated that the pair would question prisoners from their travelling saloon at railway stations, and then and there shoot the wretches as soon as Rebekah had finished belabouring them, and shouting at them, and attacking them with her fists as ever and anon she cried hysterically “To be shot! Put them up against the wall!” And, adds Maslov, “I myself know of at least ten cases in which women executioners amused themselves for a while with ‘potting’ holes in their victims’ heads.” And from a correspondent of the journal Golos Rossii (“The Voice of Russia”)[221] we have a description of similar activities in Archangel during the spring and summer of 1920, with, for “heroine” again, the same Rebekah Plastinina-Maisel.[222]

In Archangel (says the correspondent), after the mock funeral procession of empty red coffins, Rebekah fell to wreaking vengeance upon her old party foes. Indeed, she became a maniac upon whose head there must have fallen the curses of hundreds of mothers and wives, for her malice surpassed even the malice of her male colleagues on the All-Russian Che-Ka. To begin with, she repaid petty insults once shown her by her first husband’s family by having that family crucified en masse.... So cruel, mad, and hysterical she was that also she invented a story that once some White officers had tied her to a horse’s tail, and started off the animal at a gallop. And she came to believe this self-imagined legend so firmly that, as soon as she reached Solovetsky, she took over from her husband the post of director of atrocities in that establishment, whilst later she had the victims whom Eydouk’s commission had arrested and dispatched to Moscow returned thence, forwarded by steamer to Kholmogory (that graveyard of the flower of Russia’s youth!), stripped, loaded on to barges, shot, and thrown into the sea. To the end of the summer the town groaned under the burden of her terrorism.

And in another communication to the same journal the correspondent adds: “In Archangel alone this Rebekah Plastinina-Maisel killed eighty-seven officers and thirty-three citizens with her own hand. And on another occasion she with her own hand scuttled a barge laden with 500 refugees and Miller soldiers.”[223]

Take also the following thumbnail sketch by an eye-witness who was present at the shooting of fifty-two persons in a single evening:

The chief executioner, a Lettish woman with a face so brutalised as to have earned for her, amongst the prisoners, the sobriquet of “The Pug,” was a female sadist. Always she wore breeches; and always she carried two revolvers at her belt. But subsequently this same “Comrade Louba” (she hailed, I believe, from Baku) was herself shot for stealing Government property.[224]

Another such woman was the female chief of the Che-Ka of Ounech, who, a brute beast rather than a human being, and a fit match for the Lettish hag, never stirred a step without revolvers and a goodly stock of cartridges in her leathern waist-belt. Once a refugee just come from Russia said of her to me: “The inhabitants of Ounech speak of her literally with bated breath.” May history preserve her name for the benefit of future generations!

And the town of Rybinsk too had its beast-woman, a creature named Zina. And Ekaterinoslav, Sebastopol and other places similarly evolved female monstrosities.[225]

For the rest, human nerves are fallible, and even Bolshevist executioners can weary of “a task for the people’s benefit.” Hence, in many cases it was by ruffians sunken in intoxication, in the requisite condition of “irresponsibility” for slaughtering their fellows, that massacres were carried out. Frequently I myself, whilst in the Butyrka Gaol, could see that its most hardened administrative officials, from the Commandant downwards, had indulged in cocaine or some other drug before the functionary whom we called the “Commissary of Death” was due to call at the gaol for his victims, and they would have to be collected from the cells by the officials. “In almost every cupboard,” says Nilostousky concerning the Che-Kas in Kiev, “and, for that matter, in almost every drawer, we found empty cocaine bottles in piles.” Thus drugged, of course, executioners would lose the last semblance of humanity, and a trustworthy witness has given us a particularly good instance of this, as related to that witness by a high official of the All-Russian Che-Ka[226]:

Once (the informant said), the chief executioner of Moscow, a man named Maga, a fellow who had shot thousands with his own hand (and the informant gave the almost fantastic estimate of 11,000!), completed the shooting of fifteen or twenty victims by throwing himself also upon the director of the special branch, Popov, who had attended the batch of executions merely for the pleasure of the spectacle. Maga’s eyes were bloodshot, and his frame bespattered with blood and brains. Indeed, he looked mad and horrible. Fortunately, though Popov lost his head, and ran for his life, and a scuffle followed, some other Che-Ka officials came to the rescue, and overpowered Maga.

Yet even drugging did not always enable executioners’ minds to stand the strain. In the report of the Kievan Sisters of Mercy to which I have more than once referred we read that sometimes Avdokhin, head of the principal Kievan Che-Ka, so felt the nerve-tension that actually he would go and pour out his troubles to the Sisters! “I am ill, Sisters,” he would say. “My head is burning, and I cannot sleep. All night the dead men keep torturing me.” And says another of the Sisters:

Never can I think of the faces of Terekhov, and Nikiforov, and Ougarov, and Abnaver, and Gousig and other members of those Che-Kas without feeling more than ever convinced that they are abnormal, sadists, cocaine fiends, men who have lost the last semblance of humanity.

At all events, it stands beyond doubt that for a while the lunatic asylums of Russia registered large numbers of cases of a disease which became known as “executioner’s dementia,” owing to its tendency to render its subjects a prey to real or imaginary remorse for bloodshed done, and to the most harrowing hallucinations. Similarly, eye-witnesses have told of Bolshevist sailors suddenly being seized with paroxysms in public places, and a Muscovite correspondent of the Dni once wrote: “The State Political Department has been trying to dispose of these madmen by shooting them—a resource which alone has enabled more than one such sufferer to find release from his terrible, haunting nightmares.”

Also, there were executioners evincing the clearest possible symptoms of mental degeneracy. Well do I remember a boy executioner who, aged only fourteen, shared my imprisonment in the Butyrka. So intellectually deficient was this lad, and so insensible of the enormity of what he had done, that he would boast of his exploits to his fellow prisoners, and relate them in the fullest detail. And when, during the January of 1922, a female “people’s prosecutor” of one of the Che-Kas of Kiev (Remover, a Hungarian), was arrested on a charge of having, without authority, shot a batch of eighty prisoners, most of whom were young men, she was found to be sexually deranged, and to have shot not only persons actually suspected, but also witnesses who unfortunately had excited her diseased craving during the time that they had been testifying before the Che-Ka. Lastly, a medical man has described for us a woman commissary named Nesterenko who would compel Red Guards to violate helpless women and girls—yes, and young children—in her very presence.[227]

Again, one needs but scan the records of the Denikin Commission to see that in dozens of cases higher officials, functionaries who in no way stood charged with the actual performance of executions, killed victims with their own hands. An example is Vichmann of Odessa, who had six executioners at his disposal (one of them, by the way, officiated under the pseudonym of “Amour”!) yet would go into the cells, and slaughter prisoners for his personal pleasure. And Atarbekov of Piatigorsk is known to have stabbed victims with a dagger, and Novar of Odessa to have killed a man named Grigoriev and his twelve-year-old son before witnesses, and another Che-Ka official to have had a weakness for “making his victim kneel down in front of him, and compressing the unfortunate man’s head between his knees, and shooting him through the back of the neck.”[228] Such instances, in fact, are endless.

Also, so common, in Russia, did death become that, as previously mentioned, a special phraseology of cynicism crept into the official press when detailing lists of shootings: examples being seen when victims were said to have been “paid over,” or to have been “given a change,” or to have been “sent to meet their father,” or to have been “dispatched to Doukhonin’s headquarters,” and when Voul of Moscow adopted the practice of writing that he had “played the guitar upon” them, or “sealed” them, and when Piatigorsk journalists took to speaking of “giving” victims “the natsokal” (an onomatopœic word based upon the sound of a revolver trigger snapping), and of “sending” them “to the Mashouk to sniff violets.” Lastly, once the Commandant of the Che-Ka of Petrograd himself was heard shouting to his wife over the telephone: “To-day I am to take some woodcocks over to Kronstadt.”[229]

An equal amount of brutality and cynicism marked the actual carrying out of the executions. In Odessa, when the death sentence had been pronounced upon an accused, the executioners stripped him naked, hung a numbered tab about his neck for identification purposes whenever the moment for slaughter should arrive, and forced him to sign a paper acknowledging that he had himself heard his doom proclaimed. It was in Odessa, too, that the cells of the condemned would be visited by officials who mockingly charged the condemned to supply biographical details for their own obituary notices! And a similar instance of mocking condemned prisoners is described by Madame Vyroubova—a party of sailors under an ex-lawyer named Levitsky, in this case, driving round and round a prison with songs, accordion music, and shouts of “Hi, you bourgeois! We are chanting your requiem!”[230]

But Petrograd, rather, went in for scrupulous observance of “legality” in the carrying out of executions. It even set aside a room specially for the purpose of informing prisoners of their fate: with the result that the room came to be known as “The Chamber of Departures.” True, the Pravda once took it upon itself to ridicule an English press assertion that military bands were wont to play during the progress of executions; yet this is no more than what actually happened on an occasion during the Terror of September, 1918, when Moscow shot some ex-Tsarist Ministers and others. In passing, it should be said that at that period all Muscovite executions were carried out by Red Guards on the Khodynka Plain, but later some Chinese replaced those Guards, and later, again, a special corps of paid executioners, assisted by, when necessary, amateurs. Again, witnesses examined by the Denikin Commission testified that both in Nikolaev and in Saratov ordinary criminals were set to execute their political fellows, and conceded their own lives as a reward, whilst in far Turkhestan judges themselves would act as executioners, and the custom seems still to obtain. Of course, it is a debatable question whether the person who has passed a death sentence ought not also to carry out that sentence; but, however that may be, there lies at our disposal a statement that as late as in 1923 a Judge V—always killed his own condemned, and as soon as he had sentenced them caused them to be divested of their clothing in an adjoining room, and shot. And of the Che-Ka of Odessa it is said that in 1923 it devised, for execution purposes, a dark, narrow passage-way which had a gaping cavity in the flooring at its further end, and an embrasure in each of the flanking walls, so that as the condemned man walked unawares along the passage way he fell into the pit, and could be fired upon from the embrasures without the executioners having even seen his face.

For only one more description of the kind need I make room—a description published in the fourth issue of the suppressed Left Social Revolutionary Bulletin,[231] and telling of shootings perpetrated by the Muscovite Che-Ka at the period when the “rights” of provincial Che-Kas and revolutionary tribunals were under discussion. But, as a description, it is the more valuable in that it was obtained from an actual onlooker at what was done.

Nearly every night a certain number of prisoners are removed from the cells for “dispatch to Irkutsk,” as our modern oprichniki now express it. Formerly the condemned were taken out to the Khodynsky Plain for execution, but since then their destination has become, in the first instance, Number 11, Varsonofievsky Pereonlok, and then Number 7, where, in batches of thirty, or twelve, or eight, or four, as the case may be, they are led to a room on the fourth floor to be stripped to their shirts, and then marched downstairs again and, half-naked as they are, stationed against stacks of fuel at the end of a snow-covered yard, and shot through the back of the head. And if any shot does not prove fatal, and a victim falls with life still left in him, he receives a whole volley, or else some of the executioners run and jump upon his chest, and stamp upon it, and rain blows upon his head. It was thus that on the night of March 10–11 a Madame Olekhovskaya was shot for an offence for which a sentence even of a day’s imprisonment would have been absurd. And it proved so difficult to dispatch her that, even when her head and bosom had been struck with seven bullets, her body still was quivering: whereupon Koudravtsev, an ex-Tsarist officer employee of the Che-Ka (and therefore a man fired with all the zeal of the Communist convert), ran and seized the woman by the throat, tore from her her blouse, and twisted and kneaded the vertebræ of her neck until life had fled. Her age was nineteen only.... Recently, seeing that the snow in that courtyard had become red and brown with the blood with which everything else in the yard is bespattered, the Che-Ka decided that the snow had better be melted away; and as there was plenty of fuel ready, large bonfires were lighted not only in the yard but also in the street outside it. Unfortunately, as the snow dissolved, it did so in a blood-red, curdled stream, and ran out of the yard and formed pools in the street, and had to have improvised, for the removal of its damning traces, a trapfall. Yes, mingled with that dark, accusing, terrible stuff there was blood come from the hearts of people recently as alive as the executioners themselves!

Arrogantly the Bolshevists proclaim that “we have no guillotine.” Ah, I know better. I know that, to an accompaniment of motor engines kept running to drown the sound of the shots, executions still are taking place in secret dungeons and basements.

And it was not only by night that shootings took place. There was a small square in front of an Archangel factory, where they took place by daylight, “where crowds of children from the neighbourhood could collect to witness them.”[232] And similarly in Odessa were people executed by daylight. And the same in Mogilev, and before the very eyes of their relatives.

Every evening between five and seven o’clock a motor-lorry would halt before the premises of the revolutionary tribunal of the Sixteenth Army; and when there had sprung into it a dozen executioners provided with a perfect armament of weapons and a couple of spades, the persons about to die also would be loaded into the vehicle, and it would be driven away. And when, an hour later, the lorry returned, the executioners would drag thence sackfuls of boots and clothing which the deceased had recently been wearing. And all this was done exclusively in the day time (the clocks were advanced three hours for the purpose), and in the presence of the victim’s relatives and friends—men, women, and children.[233]

But the conditions under which the late Tsar and his family were murdered at Ekaterinburg constitute the episode which is bound to transcend any other such episode in striking disgust to the heart of any person not either dead to human sentiment or drunken with political fanaticism: the episode of the night when a Tsar, a Tsarina, and their children were taken into a cellar, and killed before each other’s eyes. Subsequently a Red Guard named Medviedev, a witness of the executions, stated to the Commission of Enquiry that was held during the February of 1919 that the victims made their preparations slowly, as though they guessed what was in store for them. All history contains no parallel to the murders wrought at Ekaterinburg during the night of July 16–17, 1918.[234]

The Condemned

We know that in a past age persons ascended the scaffold singing the Marseillaise. Similarly, when, in Odessa, the Left Social Revolutionaries sentenced to execution had been lashed together in pairs and loaded on to a lorry, they sang their Marseillaise, even when the weight of thirty-five corpses had been heaped upon them. But, above all, it was within the prison gates of Russia that death came to seem an everyday incident. In The Che-Ka we find described the emotions of a prisoner when first he found himself in a condemned cell.

A strong posse of Red Guards brought us to this horrible dungeon at seven o’clock in the evening: yet hardly had we realised our surroundings before the bolts of the iron door rattled, and the door itself creaked upon its hinges, and the commandant entered with a bevy of warders. “How many?” he inquired. “Sixty-seven.” “Sixty-seven, when a grave has been dug for ninety?” And the commandant seemed puzzled, but, still more, supine and ennuyé. And we? We just sat benumbed. Already death seemed to be breathing upon us. We sat like men paralysed. “Of course, though!” cried the commandant presently, “I had forgotten that there are thirty prisoners to come from the special branch.”... And so there began horrible, infinitely long hours of waiting for death. By some miracle a priest imprisoned with us had contrived to retain his pectoral cross; and now he produced this, fell upon his knees, and began to pray. Yes, and a Communist prisoner followed his example. Yet all the while that sobs could be heard within there were making themselves heard, without, the sounds of a hackneyed waltz on a cracked piano, and of gay folk-songs. Ah, how those songs tore at our hearts! The sounds were coming from what had been the prison chapel, where some young Communists were holding a musical practice! Thus closely had the irony of fate caused life and death to stand intertwined![235]

Waiting at death’s door to the sounds of a cracked piano!—It is to Nilostonsky’s book that we owe this description of a condemned cell, whilst also we know that in many such cells and cellars permanent darkness reigned, and that from fifteen to twenty persons would be confined in a place 4 arshini (9½ feet) long by 2 arshini wide, and that amongst those people there would be both women and old men, and that, as none of them were allowed ever to leave the cell, natural functions had to be performed on the spot. And in Petrograd condemned prisoners were kept like this for as long as thirty-six hours after sentence of death had been pronounced, with neither food nor water conceded them, nor permission to leave the cell for a single moment.

And think of the mental torture endured by anyone who, like myself, has had to watch victims preparing to be shot. In particular I remember an evening in the July of 1920 when I was lying in the Butyrka prison. That evening, as a “privileged” captive, I was sitting alone in the prison yard when the following experience befell me, an experience which still leaves me doubtful as to whether I was most horrified or most awed, but not at all doubtful as to the fact that the unnatural contrast which the experience presented stabbed my senses like the point of a needle. It happened that from the portion of the prison building reserved exclusively for Communist inmates there was issuing a boisterous revel of piano music and gipsy songs and a telling of tales, for there was in progress one of the entertainments, with special artists engaged, which the administration periodically arranged for the amusement of the “privileged offenders.” But suddenly, as the sounds of song and piano were echoing over the prison yard, and I was listening to them in silence, I happened to glance towards the window of the “Chamber of Souls,” and saw behind the bars a face—a face convulsed with agony, a face pressed hungrily forward to inhale the free air. And I recognised it as the face of a victim who was to be shot that night, and remembered that several other such victims, over twenty of them, were awaiting their turn to die.... Later that night all were fetched away by the “Commissary of Death.”... What happened after the vision I scarcely remember, but I know that never afterwards did I feel inclined to enter the prison yard save when other prisoners were present. Often since then have I thought of the lines from Korolenko’s An Incident of the Past—lines supposed to have been written by a prisoner when a death sentence was about to be carried out within the prison’s walls. “... The place is silent with a silence that is the silence of death, and therefore a silence which, for all our usedness to the valuelessness of life in Russia, none would willingly break....”

Next let me quote a description of a certain incident in Mogilev. My source for it is a correspondent of the Posledniya Novosty.[236]

On the eve of the session of the Gomel circuit court we saw it announced on the street corners that the court was going publicly to try some deserters from the Red Army; and later, when the trial opened in the local theatre, I attended it. There I saw the three men who were supposed to be sitting in judgment upon the accused (of whom there were about a hundred) do no more than shout at them for a while, and then sentence them to death.... As I passed out of the building through the foyer I saw people calmly buying tickets for the theatrical performance of the coming evening!

And the condemned in general? Well, most of them went to the slaughter silently, and without protest or resistance, after submitting to be pinioned with barbed wire.

If (wrote Sister Medviedeva in the Kievan report)[237] you could see our condemned being taken to execution, you would see that they are practically dead already. But the few who either resist or make abject, useless petition to the executioners are beaten and kicked before being dragged down to the basement where slaughter awaits them.

And take another reminiscence of Kiev, as related by Madame Kourakina:

We stood horror-stricken, and our very hearts seemed to stop, when night fell, and some men arrived to fetch away the condemned. The room lay hushed in a silence as of the grave. Yet the unfortunates knew how to die: they went to their doom without a sound, with truly amazing calmness. Only the pallor of their faces and the abstraction of their gaze showed that already they had ceased to belong to this present existence. Yet a few poor creatures did rebel against the thought of death: and it was these who produced upon me the most harrowing impression of all as horribly, to the last moment, they struggled against the guards’ violence, and clutched at bunks and corners and doors, and wept and shrieked in the frenzy of their terror. Yet the guards only laughed at them, saying: “So you don’t want to be put to the wall, eh? Yet to the wall you must go.”

Apparently, those of the condemned who committed suicide before execution did so less through fear of death itself than through fear of death through official slaughter. For example, I remember a Tartar in the Butyrka who went to immense pains to cut his throat with a fragment of glass rather than be executed. And suicides included many cases of self-incineration, as mentioned both in The Che-Ka and in the materials amassed by the Denikin Commission. But always the executioners tried to restore the suicides to life. And why so? Because always they wished to put an end to the unfortunates with their own hands—it was against the Communists’ rule to let a single victim, when sentenced, escape “revolutionary justice.” There are many staggering instances of such insistence upon fulfilment of “justice” included in the data compiled by the Denikin Commission, and I will cite one of them. Once when some bodies of persons who had been executed were being driven to the Odessa mortuary, the driver noticed a woman victim’s eyelids flutter, and pointed the fact out to the mortuary attendant. And, sure enough, the woman had no sooner been carried into the mortuary than she regained her senses sufficiently to cry out (though still half-dazed, and for the reason, as a witness has asserted, that she had caught sight of her dead husband near her): “I am cold!” and “Where is my cross?” And though the attendant besought her to be quiet, she persisted until some executioners heard her, and came and gave her the coup-de-grâce. And by another deponent it has been related that when a man was already in his coffin he regained consciousness, and promptly was finished off. And there is on record a case where, on the lid of a coffin slowly opening and emitting a cry of “My comrades, I am still alive!” a telephone message was sent to the Che-Ka, and elicited the reply, “Settle him with a brick,” whilst a further appeal to the head of the Che-Ka himself (Vichmann) called forth the jest: “We are to requisition the best surgeon in Odessa, I suppose?” and finally a Che-Ka employee had to be dispatched to the scene, to shoot the victim a second time with a revolver.

As regards relatives seeking information concerning the fate of imprisoned kinsfolk, I myself know how often the Che-Ka of Moscow got rid of such inquirers by giving them permits to see captives whom the Che-Ka knew already to be lying in the Lefortovsky Mortuary. And even women and children attending with parcels for prisoners would be met with the answer: “No person of that name is confined in this prison,” or with the enigmatical statement that “that person has been removed to another place in the city.”

Finally, in S. M. Oustinov’s reminiscences we came upon the following horrible, yet apposite, picture: “In the main street a barefooted, bedraggled woman was whirling madly to and fro before the advancing troops. The previous night, before leaving the town, the Bolshevists had shot her husband.”

Bolshevist Treatment of Women

As one reads accounts of Bolshevist outrages upon women one scarcely wonders that these outrages should have provoked a desire for revenge. Take the following description of sufferings endured by women in the concentration camp at Kholmogory:

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.

“Squeezing the Bourgeoisie”

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.