Out of Their Own Mouths/Chapter 4
IV
THE REIGN OF TERROR
As early as September, 1918, Mr. Wilson, then President, made an effective appeal to the civilized world against the crimes, the "barbarism," the "mass terrorism" and the "indiscriminate slaughter" of the Bolshevists. He called for all civilized nations to withdraw their official representatives from Soviet Russia, and every civilized nation without exception responded to his call.
The reign of terror continues and in many respects has grown worse. Again and again the Bolshevist chiefs and assemblies have re-endorsed terrorism. At the second congress of the Communist Internationale, in the summer of 1920, Lenin declared that "no dictatorship of the proletariat is to be thought of without terror and violence against the bitter foes of the proletariat and the laboring masses." Let us remember that this international meeting is the highest Communist authority and the principles accepted there are binding until the next annual meeting, and that Lenin and his immediate associates reserve to themselves the right to define just who are to be regarded as "the bitter foes of the proletariat and the laboring masses."
Anybody Lenin and Trotzky desire to destroy they first label "bourgeois," but they are just as ready to apply this term to laboring men or their elected leaders or to laboring agriculturists as they are to apply it to former employers. On October 5, 1920, Trotzky said:
The bourgeoisie must be torn off, cut off. The Red Terror is an instrument used against a class doomed to go under and which does not want to go under.
An even stronger expression was used at the beginning of the Bolshevist rule by Latsis, one of the chiefs of the Extraordinary Commission, which is charged with putting the Red Terror into effect. In the organ called the Red Terror (November 1, 1918) Latsis wrote:
We are no longer waging war against separate individuals. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class.
Do not seek in the dossier of the accused for proofs as to whether he opposed the Soviet Government by word or deed. The first question that should be put is to what class he belongs, of what extraction, what education and profession. These questions should decide the fate of the accused. Herein lies the meaning and the essence of the Red Terror.
This description gives a good picture of the methods of the Red Terror, but the list of classes which were to be exterminated was soon extended to embrace all anti-Bolshevists, no matter whether they themselves were wage earners and no matter how many thousands or ten thousands of wage earners they represented. In a speech made on April 3, 1921, before the railway workers in Moscow Lenin stated that "the bourgeois class does not exist any more in Russia," and boasted that it had been "completely destroyed" by the Bolshevists. We may point out that this is merely a terrible boast, for it is well known that after slaughtering the "bourgeoisie" for a year or more Lenin publicly acknowledged that he not only needed the experts in this class but was ready to retain them at very high salaries. But in view of their previous treatment and the treatment of their relatives and friends we can be assured that these bourgeois, far from being good Bolshevists, maintain their former views and are waiting for a chance at revenge.
Trotzky has tried to justify mass terror (from signed article in Izvestia of January 10, 1919, under title "Military Specialists and the Red Army"):
By its terror against saboteurs the proletariat does not at all say: "I shall wipe out all of you and get along without specialists." Such a program would be a program of hopelessness and ruin. While dispersing, arresting and shooting saboteurs and conspirators, the proletariat says: "I shall break your will, because my will is stronger than yours, and I shall force you to serve me." … Terror as the demonstration of the will and strength of the working class, is historically justified, precisely because the proletariat was able thereby to break the political will of the intelligentsia, pacify the professional men of various categories and work, and gradually subordinate them to its own aims within the fields of their specialties.
The conspirators referred to in this paragraph are all those who stand for the right of the Russian people to elect their own representative government in the place of the tyranny that is now imposed upon them; the "saboteurs" are the professional men and experts whose wills could not be successfully forced.
In a letter to British labor dated May 30, 1920, Lenin, after denouncing the democracy of the British Labor Party, their pacifism, etc., says of its leaders: "The sooner they share the fate of Kerensky, the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionists in Russia" the better. "What this fate was we shall see below. Lenin then continues:
Some of the members of your delegation have asked me with surprise concerning Red Terror, about the lack of the freedom of the Press, about the lack of freedom of assembly, about our persecution of Mensheviks and Menshevik workers, etc. … Our Red Terror is a defense of the working class against the exploiters; it is the suppression of the resistance of the exploiters with whom the Social Revolutionists, the Mensheviks, and an insignificant number of Menshevik workers align themselves. … The same "leaders" of workers who are conducting a non-communist policy are 99 per cent. representatives of the bourgeoisie, of its deceit, of its prejudices.
Here is a definite official statement by the Bolshevist chief that a regularly elected labor leader may be regarded as 99 per cent, bourgeois—and he is often so regarded for purposes of imprisonment or execution.
The Bolshevist Czar recently issued a ukase saying that prisoners belonging to all active anti-Bolshevist groups would be held as all bound together as hostages for the lives of the Bolshevist chiefs—referring back to the butchery of hundreds of such hostages after the assassination of the bloody Uritzky and the attack on Lenin in 1918. Here are the words of the decree as carried in the official Izvestia on November 30, 1920:
Confident of its impregnability, the Soviet Government is nevertheless very far from offering an opportunity to these counter-revolutionists and agents of the Allies for resuming again the methods of struggle used by them in 1918 and resulting in a stern lesson in Red Terror in retaliation.
The Workers' and Peasants' Government has in its hands quite a sufficient number of prominent and responsible counter-revolutionary leaders from the camp of all the above-mentioned groups, especially from among the Wrangel officers. Regarding all of them as bound together in a mutual pledge to relentless struggle against the authority of the workers and peasants, the Soviet Government declares the Socialists—Revolutionists of Savinkov's and Chernov's groups, the White Guards of the National and Tactical Centre, and Wrangel's officers—hostages. In the event of an attempt on the lives of the leaders of Soviet Russia the responsible partisans (literally in the Russian text—those who think likewise) of the organizers of an attempt will be exterminated without mercy.
In order fully to realize what this means let us quote from the appeal to the Socialists of the world by Martoff, leader of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party an appeal that has been endorsed by the well-known syndicalist Merrheim, head of the French Metal Workers and one of the leaders of the Conféderation Génèrale du Travail. Referring to the above ukase, Martoff, who is well and favorably known by the entire labor movement of Europe, writes:
Let all who would take this warning lightly remember the fatal experiment which has already been made in Soviet Russia. In September, 1918, after the murder of Uritzky, Chief of the Petrograd police, and the attempt to shoot Lenin, the Soviet Government declared all the anti-Bolsheviks to be hostages in the event of further assassinations, and at the same time, as a reprisal for the acts of terrorism already committed, ordered a number of these "hostages" in several towns to be shot.
It is impossible to estimate the number of men and women killed at that time. The general public commotion forced the Government to conceal the true extent of the hideous massacre after the publication of the first lists of victims. But from these lists it is known that in Petrograd 512 people were shot, 152 in Penza, 41 in Nijni-Novgorod, 30 in Smolensk, 29 in Moscow, 6 in Mojaisk, 4 in Morshansk, 7 in Nijni-Lvoff, and 7 in Schemlara. The last echo of this madness was the proclamation of the Petrozavodsk (in Northern Russia) Extraordinary Commission that it shot 14 bourgeois hostages as a revenge for the murder of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht!
Just after the above-mentioned attempts on the lives of Lenin and other Bolsheviks, the Social-Revolutionary party stated officially that it had nothing to do with these assassinations; but this statement did not prevent the Bolsheviks shooting down like dogs members of the Social-Revolutionary party. The terrorist madness of the Bolsheviks, once let loose, ignored the difference between the different sections of their political opponents. In Petrograd they shot the metal worker Krakovsky, a member of the Social-Democratic Labor Party; three members of the same party in Ribinsk, leaders of local trade unions (Ramin, Sokoloff and Levin); and in Nijni-Novgorod the secretary of the local party committee, Comrade Ridnik.
The great majority of the victims belonged to the bourgeois class, and were not mixed up with politics; they were arrested, not because of some crime committed, but as "suspicious persons" whom it was necessary to isolate. Men and women, boys and aged people—all were shot because two men, political fanatics, had plotted the murder of two leaders of the Communist party.
The official execution and wholesale butchery of hostages referred to by Martoff is boastfully avowed in the official Soviet pamphlet by which the Bolshevists have sought to sum up and popularize the Red Terror and the Extraordinary Commission. This pamphlet, written by Latsis, is printed by the Soviet Printing Office in Moscow, 1920. As to the 1918 butchery, Latsis in Chapter 5 of the pamphlet declares:
But the murderess, the hysterical Kaplan, missed her aim. The Extraordinary Commission exacted costly retribution for these murders. In Petrograd alone as many as 500 persons were shot as an answer to the shots fired at Comrades Lenin and Uritzky.
Those who dreamed of killing the revolution by murdering the leaders severely wounded themselves, and the damages inflicted by the proletariat were a whole year in healing.
The Bolshevist remedy for insufficient productivity on the part of labor, known as sabotage, is thus summarized in Chapter 3 of this illuminating document:
Those who were practicing sabotage were (either) shot to death or imprisoned by us, but nevertheless up to this time they have eluded us in large numbers and destroyed our apparatus and transports. Such work is nothing else than the same counter-revolution. It was so regarded by the Extraordinary Commission, and those guilty of sabotage were punished without mercy. The Extraordinary Commission threw its best forces into the fight against this manifestation, and is now working in various institutions. There is but one way to get rid of this pestilence—burn it out with a hot iron. And that is what the Extraordinary Commission is doing.
We now come to another class of crime punished by execution without trial or any other process of law, viz., the crime of affiliation with the socialist and labor parties which think they have a right to a voice in the government in proportion to their numerical support. This is not the Bolshevist view. And the punishment for the effort to institute either a democratic or a non-Bolshevist socialist government of any character is likely to be death. We quote the following from Chapter 4 of the above mentioned official pamphlet:
But there is still another kind of counter-revolutionists—those who are such because they do not think. These are people who not seldom desire the triumph of the working class, but do not understand how this is to be accomplished. This is the whole Socialist Party, entering into agreement with the enemies of the working class, the bourgeoisie. There are several such parties among us; Social-Revolutionists of the Right, Social-Revolutionists of the Left, and the Mensheviks.
They do not believe in the strength of the working class and therefore desire to trade with their class enemy, the bourgeoisie. They forget that civil war is a war not for life but to the death; a war in which prisoners are not taken and no compromises made, but opponents are killed. As there can be no amity between wolves and lambs, so there can be no conciliation between the bourgeoisie and the workmen. You may beat the wolf as you will but he will still remain savage; so the bourgeoisie does not change his nature.
We must recall in this connection that the civil war is looked upon by the Bolshevists as likely to last a generation or more and that all non-Bolshevist working men are labelled "bourgeois."
Without counting irregular executions, assassinations, massacres and military killings of many different kinds, the Extraordinary Commission, in the pamphlet quoted, confesses that it executed 2,024 persons for the sole fact of belonging to an anti-Bolshevist organization—such organizations, as we have said, being always labelled for Bolshevist purposes as counter-revolutionary or bourgeoisie. This does not include 3,082 persons executed for insurrection and 455 for inciting insurrection. The immense scope of the Extraordinary Commission and the use of the death penalty for offenses for which it has not been used in civilized countries for centuries, is shown in Chapter 2 of the pamphlet quoted:
The sphere of the labors of the Extraordinary Commission was determined by the activities of the counter-revolutionary elements; but, as there was no domain of life into which the counter-revolutionists had not intruded themselves, and where their destructive work was not manifested, the Extraordinary Commission often had to enter quite positively into all phases of life: stores, transportation, Red army, navy, militia, schools, consulates, industry, assessments, etc.
But the Extraordinary Commission had to interest itself not only in direct counter-revolutionary work. There are acts committed by no means intended certainly to injure the Soviet authority, but simply for personal advantage without considering the consequences. Such are speculation, crimes in office (in part), banditry, and desertion.
But as such acts do no less harm to the Soviet authority than the open counter-revolutionary manifestations, they were followed up in the same manneras the rest.
For the sake of convenience in assimilating and mastering all the (details of the) immense work performed by the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission, we present it to the reader in the same category which in the main was pursued in the course of the work itself, and in the same order in which it developed, namely:
1. Sabotage.
2. Counter-revolution.
3. Speculation.
4. Crimes in office.
5. Banditry.
6. Uprisings of the rich peasants (land-grabbers).
7. Desertion.
The use of the expression "rich peasant" needs comment. The peasant who is resisting the Bolshevists is called by them for the purposes of execution "rich." It is needless to say that there are no rich or well-to-do peasants in Russia after all the economic degeneration of the past ten years, and especially in view of four years of Bolshevist persecution and attack on all peasants who were well enough off to muster up any effective resistance.
The attitude to the peasantry is indicated in other Bolshevist documents as, for instance, the following passage from an order directed against the Cossacks—a name applied to the agriculturists of a certain section:
To institute a mass terror against the well-to-do Cossacks and peasants, exterminating them wholesale, and to institute a ruthless mass terror against those Cossacks in general who have any direct or indirect part in the struggle against the Soviet power.
The Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party.
Chief of the Chancellery of the Political Section of the Southern Front.(Signed) Cherniak,
Secretary of the Political Section of the 8th Army.
Steklov, in the Moscow Izvestia, declares that civil war will continue until the Social Revolutionaries and the "koulaks" (the better-off agriculturists) who are hampering the work of construction, particularly that of revictualling, are completely exterminated.
Here is another example. The peasants have in many places organized armies for self-defense which cannot by any stretch of the imagination be called Whites. These so-called "Green Armies" are defending the villages from the foraging and punishment expeditions of the Red armies. This is how a recent decree of the Extraordinary Commission in Southern Russia proposes to deal with them:
The majority of the Greens who are now in the mountains have their relatives in the villages. These have all been registered, and in case of an attack by these bands all adult relatives of those who are fighting against us will be shot, while their minor relatives will be deported to Central Russia.
In the event of a mass rising of any village, stanitza or city, we shall apply mass terror against these localities; for every Soviet representative that will be killed hundreds of inhabitants of these villages and stanitzas will have to suffer.
The Bolshevist remedy for any and all opponents is to find some opprobrious epithet to apply to them, indicating treason to Bolshevism, and then to crush them with the Red Terror. This method is evidently to be used even against the valiant Red Army. The peasants who constituted ninety per cent, of the Army are being demobilized. The remainder, said to be some hundred thousand men, are either mercenary foreigners, Chinese, Hungarian, Letts, etc., under the name of the "international" army, or communist fanatics. The first step towards the persecution of the rank and file of the Red Army was to deprive them of all rights. Leon Trotzky in his Order of the Revolutionary Military Council, No. 296, dated November 10, 1920, declared:
The country is in danger. The false notion that the army has any civic rights threatens the existence of the free Russian people and the Revolution.
It may be recalled that the Bolshevists came into power by standing for the rights of soldiers even to the point of the right to elect their own officers. But now, having deprived the peasant soldiers of all rights, Lenin is apparently upon the point of turning the Red Terror against them. To a meeting of the railway workers in Moscow, reported in the Bolshevist Wireless of April 3 (1921) he said:
The soldiers do not wish to go back to cultivate their land and become peaceful workers. The demobilized soldiers are our greatest enemies. They have been accustomed to rob and pillage and murder. They have been accustomed to satisfy only their own needs and desires.
It is evident that a despot who feels he has the power to wage war against the personnel of his own army is liable to proceed against any other element of his subjects.
The use of the Extraordinary Commission and of terroristic methods against labor is shown in the following passages from the report drawn up on February 1 by the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party:
In Mohilev the entire membership of both the Russion Social-Democratic Labor Party and the Bund were arrested during the night of the 1st of November. The Extraordinary Commission gave the following motives for the arrest: "guilty of pernicious criticism of the Soviet power and its activities, thereby affecting very badly various measures taken by said power, and, since it occurred in the war zone it affects detrimentally the gallant Red Army." Among those sentenced (to forced labor in various concentration camps until the end of the civil war) were. …
Towards the close of the year the "verdict" (administrative order without trial) was handed down. Astrov, Korobkov, Grossmann, Babin, Tkatchenko, Kuchin-Oransky and others were sentenced "for belonging to the right wing of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party" to confinement in a concentration camp throughout the duration of the civil war.
In Yekaterinburg our attempt to take part in the election campaign for the Soviet was punished by the arrest of the local Committee of our Party (comrades Kliatchko, Ossovsky and others), together with the member of the Central Committee, D. Dalin and 6 workers of the Verkhne-Issetski Factory. At the home of N. N. Sukhanov a domiciliary search was made. A month later the prisoners were freed by a direct order from Moscow, as the purpose of the arrests had been accomplished, the elections to the Soviet having been most "successful" for the Bolsheviki.
In Tula the outrageous behavior of the factory Commissary caused an outburst among the workmen of the Arms Factory, which spread to all other establishments in that city. The protest took at first the form of a strike, but following the arrest of strikers it assumed the form of so-called "self-imprisonment," i.e., the workmen and their wives compelled the Bolsheviki to arrest them, thus expressing their solidarity with the prisoners. In this way several thousand workers were arrested in those days. The reprisals were severe, wholesale deportations to the front were resorted to and, as a climax, 12 of the strikers were turned over to a field court martial and sentenced to hard labor for life. And in reply to the attempt made by the Social-Democratic group of the local Soviet to have the trouble settled peaceably, the group was arrested during its session.
The Social Democratic Party (Menshevists) have also brought before the labor world a full report of the persecution of the Russian printers and of other Soviet atrocities against labor.
This party finally made a strong appeal to British Labor—prompted by the fact that the British Labor delegation to Russia had issued a report that was in part mildly critical or ambiguous, but, on the whole, was distinctly friendly to the Bolshevist régime. Individual members of the delegation practically half of it, including Tom Shaw, Ben Turner, Mrs. Philip Snowden, Dr. Haden Guest, as well as Bertrand Russell, who accompanied the delegation had issued the strongest adverse statements. But the report, as a whole, was friendly, doubtless owing to domestic politics and to diplomatic motives which do not appear. This was all the more shocking to the Russian Socialists and Trade Unionists since all other foreign labor delegations—Germans, Italians, Swedish and Spanish, had had the courage of their convictions. (See Chapter XII.) The Social Democratic appeal is therefore doubly important, serving not only as a picture of Russian labor persecution but as an indictment of the inexcusable failure of the British delegation even to touch on these vital matters in its one-sided report—from which was excluded also the valuable individual testimony of Mrs. Snowden and other delegates, while the pro-Bolshevist material of the extremists, Robert Williams, Purcell, and Margaret Bondfield, was reproduced.
The Social Democratic appeal secured the following endorsement from Merrheim, Secretary of the largest French labor union, the Metal Workers, a leader of the French Confederation of Labor, and an ultra-pacifist and syndicalist himself:
Such are the facts. … There should arise the vehement and indignant protest of all trade union members and socialists (throughout the world) who still have a sense of dignity and independence.
To the British Workmen and to the Members of the
Labor Delegates to Russia
Dear Comrades:
We, the undersigned, Russian socialists, have received from Russia the information stating that the visit of the British labour delegation to Russia last summer has resulted in severe reprisals and persecutions for all the socialists who were bold enough to criticize openly the soviet regime and the actions of the Russian communist party.
Well-known leaders of the labour movement in Russia, who for many years fought against Tsarism, who spent long and weary years in prison and in exile, and who hold prominent positions in the Russian trade union movement, have once more been severely sentenced, imprisoned and exiled by the soviet government.
We wish to repeat here a few facts mentioned in the above circulars:
1. Comrade F. Dan, a member of the central committee of the Russian socialist-democratic labour party, and one of the oldest members of the party, has been exiled from Moscow to Perm.
2. Two members of the central committee of the socialist-democratic party (Mensheviki), Comrades Dalin and Troyanovsky, are in prison in Moscow.
3. All the members of the executive committee of the Moscow printers' union, headed by Comrade Deviatkin, have been arrested; the printers' union is dispersed; workmen who came out on strike to express their protest against such actions of the soviet government have been searched and prosecuted.
4. Victor Chernov, a member of the central committee of the socialist-revolutionary party, spoke at the printers' meeting in Moscow in the presence of several members of the British labour delegates; he was, however obliged to hide after this speech, as it has made the Extraordinary Commission (Cheka) very angry, and they wanted to arrest him. They could not find him, and arrested instead his wife and daughters, aged 10 and 17 years.
5. Comrade Abramovich, member of the central committee of the socialist-democratic party, welcomed the British labour delegation at a meeting of the Moscow Soviet. In his speech he pointed out the actual condition of the Russian labour classes under the bolshevik yoke, and was in consequence, through intrigues and pressure from the Russian communist party, expelled from the soviet.
We are in possession of many other similar facts, but it would take too long to state them all here. We think that the above facts are quite sufficient proof that there is no freedom in soviet Russia, and that even the socialist parties can not propagate their ideas legally and unrestrictedly.
We feel we must put the following questions to the British workmen and to you, members of the British labour delegation. Do you know these facts? If you do, what do you intend to do in order to alleviate the sufferings of these Russian socialists who were bold enough to tell you the entire truth about Russia? Don't you consider that you are also responsible for their misfortunes and sufferings?
We, the adherents of the socialists who are being so severely persecuted by the Russian communist party ruling in Russia under the disguise of the soviet government, think you can not and must not be indifferent to the actual results of your policy.
We are deeply convinced that in protesting against the blockade and intervention the British proletariat was prompted by noble motivesthe British workmen meant to support the cause of the Russian democracy, the cause of the great Russian revolution. If they did mean so, they must understand that the struggle against the world's reactionaries must go hand in hand with the struggle for the principles of the Russian democracy.
You denounce the blockade, the intervention and the counter-revolution. But you must also denounce the slavery that has been introduced into Russia by the Russian communist party. Only then will the Russian working classes consider you their real friends. …
You have interfered in Russian domestic affairs by your struggle against the blockade, against support of the counter-revolution, and for the recognition of the soviet government. Your intervention was and is one-sided. You supported the soviet government, but you did not support the Russian proletariat and peasantry who fought against the despotism of the soviet government during all these terrible years. …
Some thirty days after this original appeal was issued the Social Democratic Party followed it up with a second appeal showing that the persecutions, instead of becoming milder, had become worse, especially under the Soviet Government set up by Moscow in the Ukraine under the leadership of Lenin's right bower, Rakovsky. This Ukraine persecution seems to have been aimed mainly and almost exclusively at the labor unions. The Social-Democratic Labor Party portrays it in the following convincing paragraphs:
With the object of the suppression of the social-democratic labor party, the bolsheviks have invented a new weapon, which was used for the first time by H. T. Rakovsky. The so-called Ukrainian government ordered the exile to the Georgian borders, without any trial, of seventeen of the most energetic leaders of the Russian social-democratic labor party in the Ukraine. Amongst them, are the members of the central Ukrainian committees of the social-democratic party—comrades I. Bar (former editor of the internationalist journal, "Golos," in Paris during the war) , Zorohovitch, Shtern, A. Roubtzoff (a well-known leader of the trade union movement amongst the metal workers), Schoulpin (leader of the Miners' trade union), and a member of the Kharkoff party committee, Boris Malkin. Ten other comrades were sentenced at the same time, also without any trial, to forced labor in the concentration camps, until "the end of the civil war" (i.e., indefinitely). Among them are the well-known social-democratic leader and trade unionist, Astroff, the trade unionist, Korobkoff from Odessa, members of the Kieff party committee, Tchijevsky and Kouchin-Oransky (the latter, a well-known socialist author, had voluntarily joined the ranks of the "Red" army as an officer at the beginning of the Polish war), and the distinguished leaders of the Kharkoff shop assistants' union of Babin and Grossman.
Most of the above mentioned comrades were arrested in Kharkoff on August 19, during the provincial conference of the Russian social-democratic labor party.
Several social-democrats, leaders of the trade union movement in Kremenchug, were also exiled to Georgia. The boards elected by the Kremenchug trade unions have been dissolved and replaced by persons appointed by local organizations of the communist party.
By such measures H. T. Rakovsky, who plays the hideous part of a menshevist renegade, hopes to destroy the influence of the well-organized social-democrats upon the Ukrainian working classes.
The fate of the other popular party (the Social-Revolutionists) has been even more horrible—for they composed the majority of the constitutional assembly which the Bolshevists dispersed by bayonets and are the sole party which can make any legitimate claim to represent the masses of the Russian peasants. The Social Revolutionary Party has also addressed to world labor a vigorous protest outlining the refinement of physical and moral tortures introduced under Lenin through that revival of the Spanish inquisition, the Extraordinary Commission for Fighting the Counter Revolution, presided over by the world famed inquisitor and butcher, Djerzinsky.
The social revolutionists state that the wife of one of the prisoners, A. T. Kuznetzov, was flogged by the Bolshevist authorities for refusing to divulge her husband's whereabouts; that not only were the wife and daughters of Chernoff, Likhatch and the other leading social revolutionary prisoners arrested but that in some cases, their distant relatives were held as hostages; that the inquisition proposes to the wives of prisoners to enter into its services as spies, promising to free their husbands in return.
Here are the conditions of Russia's "political prisoners" and "conscientious objectors" as defined by the executive committee of Russia's largest political organization. The protest is addressed in the first instance to the Soviet authorities:
The refined cruelty of the ail-Russian and provincial Extraordinary Commissions has reached such a stage as to drive insane some of the arrested socialists-revolutionists who can not endure the regime of confinement in the city of Yaroslav, in the so-called "soviet house of detention," over the entrance of which there is flaunting a sign reading: "Russian Socialist Federal Soviet Republic" and above which sign there is the old Tzarist inscription: "Yaroslav Central Hard Labor Prison." There are many tried and true champions of the workers' cause among these persons to whom the March Revolution at last opened the doors of their prisons, only to find the bars, after a brief period of liberty, again closed on them, this time, however, by your hands.
The prison regime to which our comrades have been subjected in the Yaroslav soviet house of detention has outdone the regime of the Tzarist central prison, and even during the walks of the prisoners for their airings they have been forbidden on pain of the severest penalties to exchange ordinary greetings with each other. Confined to damp, cold solitary cells, left for a long time already without necessary repairs, with broken-down heating, water and drainage systems, the prisoners have been deprived of sunshine, light and air, and compelled to live amidst filth and pestilential stench; and if some of them dared approach a window for a moment, the prison guards would open fire at the window, acting in accordance with instructions given them.
But if the outrages and brutalities, the denial of light and air, and the shooting at the windows only repeat and, perhaps, augment the methods used by the Tzarist jailkeepers, torture by hunger is a new invention of the "socialistic" prison regime.
The form of feeding the prisoners at Yaroslav falls even far below the rations officially acknowledged by you as hunger rations. The prisoners receive one pound of raw, half-baked bread, and soup with some beet leaves or herring bones for dinner, and three or four spoonfuls of gruel for supper. But then, this gruel is no longer given, and they are trying to make the dinner soup last for both dinner and supper. This is all the nourishment there is. Such is the regime of gradual death by starvation established by you for your prisoners.
You will perhaps point to the critical food situation all over soviet Russia, and you might say that the food committees are not in a position to allot from their supplies any more for the feeding of socialists languishing in communist prisons.
But it is not for the food shortage of soviet Russia that the Yaroslav hunger torture can be explained away. Were that the case, the organs of your political police would not interfere with the food assistance that we are willing to render the prisoners from the outside. At the cost of tremendous efforts and immense sacrifices the relatives of the prisoners have organized food assistance to be sent to the prison. But permission for these gifts has been hedged in by the special section of your extraordinary commission with all kinds of conditions which made it impossible during two months to send more than two relief shipments. An attempt was made to supply the prisoners with money, so as to enable them to order some products permitted in the open market, but the prison authorities accepted only a certain amount which they deemed proper to confiscate right there and then in payment of the damage caused to the prison department ostensibly by the demonstration of the prisoners at the Butyrski prison. (Although it was proved that none of these prisoners had participated in that outbreak at the Moscow prison.)
Under these circumstances all efforts to fight the hunger torture have proved futile.
Now, what is your object in this?
Do not excuse yourself by claiming ignorance. You know, you can not help knowing, what is going on, to the glory of your name, in Yaroslav. It has been discussed with the president of the council of people's commissaries, Lenin himself, with the chairman of the central executive committee, Kalinin, and with many others of you.
By the hands of your henchmen, in your communistic torture-chamber of the Yaroslav central prison, you want to finish secretly and unobserved that which the Tzarist jailers did not manage to complete: in the tortures of death by starvation you want to kill these old champions of socialism and the revolution!
The workers are discontented with power, for they are hungry and lack clothing. In many of the large factories there are no communists. There results a political weakening of Bolshevism, notwithstanding its strategic successes. It is not possible to create a single economic plan when 80 per cent of the population are peasants who will not allow themselves to be regulated.
The Social-Democrats elected a majority in the Soviets in many parts of the country and recently secured two-thirds in certain elections in Petrograd. It was this that led Lenin to an even stronger expression than Rykov, when (early in this month of February), he declared, in the Petrograd Pravda, that "the fight between the labor unionists and the Soviets for supremacy will break up the bolshevist state system unless a settlement is soon reached." The offense of the labor unionists is very clear. They are fundamentally opposed to the so-called government set up by Lenin and his handful of associate dictators. Lenin declares, "they are out for material benefit for themselves at the expense of the general welfare of the communist state." Lenin is the sole interpreter of the welfare of this "proletarian" state; the organized proletariat has no voice.