Chapter III: Blood Statistics (3)

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]