“Red Terror” in Russia 1918 – 1923 2nd Edition, Enlarged S. P. Melgunov Berlin, 1924 i Contents Contents ii List of Figures iv Translator’s Preface vii Translation Issues................................ vii Holocaust or Not? ............................... x Was Nuremberg a Fair Trial? ......................... xiv 1 “Ecrasez l’infame!” (Preface to the first and second editions)3 2 Post scriptum (about the sources) 15 3 Red Terror 19 4 Systemic Hostage-taking 21 5 “Terror Foisted” (Restoration of Death Sentence and Bolshevik Rhetoric) 35 6 Bloody Statistics 45 6.1 1918 .................................... 46 6.2 1919 .................................... 49 6.3 1920 .................................... 54 6.4 In the North................................ 59 6.5 After Denikin............................... 62 6.6 Crimea After Wrangel .......................... 65 6.7 1921 .................................... 69 6.8 1922 – 1923................................ 78 6.9 1923 .................................... 81 6.10 1924 .................................... 83 7 During the Civil War 87 8 “Class Terror” 97 9 Che Ka Tyranny 109 ii CONTENTS iii 9.1 Cynicism Of Execution.......................... 110 9.2 Mutilation and Torture.......................... 115 9.3 Tyranny of the Executioners....................... 136 9.4 The Condemned.............................. 145 9.5 Violence Against Women......................... 148 9.6 “Oppressing Bourgeois”.......................... 151 10 “Graveyards Of The Living” and “Homes of the Dead” (Prison and Exile) 157 11 “Pride And Decoration” 171 12 By way of conclusion 185 13 A Few Remarks On Conradi Trial 187 14 Why? (Regarding Martov’s Book On Capital Punishment) 191 A “Vessel Of Death” (Documenting Operation Of the Extreme Com- missions) 197 List of Figures 1.1 Kharkov. Corpses of the hostages, tortured to death by the Bolsheviks. 11 4.1 A corpse of hostage Ilya Sidorenko, owner of a leather store in Sumy sity. Hands and ribs fractured, genitals removed. Tortured to death in Kharkov by the reds................................... 25 4.2 Kharkov, yard of Che Ka. A corpse of hostage retired telegraph operator I. Ponomarenko. Right hand severed. Several deep slashes across the chest. Two more corpses in the background..................... 26 4.3 Kharkov, the corpses of the executed loaded onto a carriage. 29 4.4 Corpses of the hostages, executed in Kharkov prison............ 30 4.5 The corpses of 4 peasant hostages (Bondarenko, Plokhih, Levenets and Sidorchuk). The faces mutilated by slashing. Genitals mutilated with undetermined tool. The doctors suggested that kind of mutilation must have inflicted maximum possible pain. ................... 32 4.6 Captain Fedorov with the signs of torture on the arms. Bullet wound on the left arm received during torture. Escaped the execution in the last moment. Below: the sketches of the torture tools by Fedorov. 34 6.1 Back yard of Kharkov regional Che Ka (5 Sadovaya St.) with the copses of the executed................................. 47 6.2 Exhumation of the mass grave of the red terror victims........... 48 6.3 Kharkov. Exhumation of the mass grave of the red terror victims. 49 6.4 A corpse of a 17–18 year old man, flesh slashed from the side and face mutilated.................................... 65 6.5 Corpses of the hostages, found in the basement of Tyulpanov’s house, occupied by Kherson Che Ka......................... 72 6.6 Corpses of the victims of red terror at a railroad station in Kherson region. The heads and limbs mutilated........................ 73 7.1 Station Snegirevka near Kharkov. Corpse of a woman, tortured to death. No clothes were found. Decapitated and arms severed (not found during exhumation). ................................. 91 7.2 Kharkov. Head of Abbot Rodion of Spassovski monastery, scalped alive by the Bolsheviks. .............................. 92 iv List of Figures v 8.1 Left: a corpse of hostage S. Mihaylov, a grocery store clerk, apparently slashed with a sword. Middle: a corpse of teacher Petrenko, flogged to death with the cleaning rods, lower spine fractured. Right: a corpse of Captain Agapov with mutilated genitals................... 103 9.1 Kharkov. The corpses of hostage women, tortured to death. Second on the left S. Ivanova, a convenience store owner. Third from the left A. I. Karolskaya, colonel’s wife. Fourth from the left L. Hlopkova, land owner. Breasts of all cut off antemortem, genitals burned (charcoals found inside vagina). .................................... 123 9.2 Kaharkov. A corpse of the hostage non-commissioned officer Bobrov. Tongue cut off, hands severed, skin removed along the left leg. 127 9.3 The villagers I. Aphanasiuk and S. Prokopovich, scalped alive. I. Aphana- siuk’s corpse bears hot metal burns...................... 128 9.4 Kharkov. Corpse of a hostage, retired General Putyat. Skin pulled from the right arm, genitals mutilated....................... 137 9.5 Corpses of three hostage workers from a factory on strike. Middle: A. Ivanenko, eyeballs burned, lips and nose cut off. Hands of the others severed.138 9.6 Skin, pulled from the hands of the victims of Kharkov Che Ka using a metal comb and special mandibles. ..................... 138 9.7 Skin, pulled from the limbs of the Rabinovich house victims in Lomonosov St., Kherson, where Kherson Che Ka operated the torture chambers. 139 Translator’s Preface The works of S. Melgunov are not a popular reading matter, not now, not in Europe and North America. They are not nearly so well known as the works of A. Solzhenitsyn such as “Gulag Archipelago”, “Red Wheel” or “Cancer Ward”. Published in 1924 last time, “Red Terror” was translated to English and published by Hyperion Press only in 1975. It appears to be out of print, never re-printed since. I came across “Red Terror” when researching material for an article on contem- porary religious, political and ethnic terrorism in the 21st century and did use many quotes from S. Melgunov’s writing. But also I realized that it was my civil duty to the peoples of Europe and North America to translate his book into English for the very first time. The motivation for translating originated from realization, that many methods of the Bolsheviks are being more and more applied in today’s Western hemisphere: cyn- ical lies in mass media, confiscation of property, disarming of population, alienation of the young generation, re-defining the language. Even though I was intimately fa- miliar with the methods of communist regime in Russia, the book was en eye-opener in many areas. I even recognized some of the facts and could correlate them to the stories my grand-mother told me, even though she was only 8 years old when “Red Terror” 2nd edition was published in Berlin. Her stories were from the more recent late 1920s, but they were frightfully similar: searches by night, arrests, disappearance of people, executions, tips by the informants, poverty and suppression of rights. Then there were Soviet era movies, such as “Ours among them, theirs among us”1: rittmeiser Lehmke telling Che-Ka operative Shilov that “you will return this gold, but your own will shoot you for that!” Only after reading “Red Terror” I realized what message the movie was trying to covertly convey: the story of captain Schastny – the saviour of Baltic navy from capture by German fleet (see p. 37). One of the sources that S. P. Melgunov extensively quoted from – “Vessel Of Death” – is worth adding to this book as an appendix. At some point I will probably translate the entire “Che-Ka” almanac if time and resources permit. Translation Issues Let us address some translation issues that arose when I researched mainstream sources of Russian-English translation of the matter used in “Red Terror”. I did 1English title “At Home Among Strangers...” in my opinion does not convey the idea of the movie at all. vii viii TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE not agree with some translations. The civil war of 1917-1922 was fought between the communist regime, with its military force called the “Red Army” and the forces, loyal to the Intermediate Gov- ernment called “White Army” or “White Guard”. Generally, everyone supporting the Bolsheviks was referred to as “reds” and the opposite side as “whites” (except for the anarchists or – without drawing any parallels! – common banditry). Many differ- ent categories have been lumped into the “whites”, not necessarily the soldiers and officers of the “White Army” usually associated with Generals Denikin, Kornilov, Ad- miral Kolchak and Baron Wrangel, etc. Throughout the book I will be referring to either side as “reds” and “whites” respectively. Traditionally, Che-Ka is translated as “Emergency Commission”. There are sev- eral issues with that. Although Russian word “Chrezvychajnaja” carried a hint of emergency to a degree, it did not correctly convey the meaning. The root of that word is “vych”, used in such Russian words as “habitual”, “ordinary”, “custom”. The prefix “chrez” means “over” or “extra”. Thus, it would be more correct to translate it as an “Extreme Commission” (not “Extraordinary”, though!). Rightly, “Extreme” is more often and more naturally used in Russian in combination with, for example, “Important”, but you could not do the same with “Emergency”. The acronym “chekist” was widely used to refer to the Che Ka operatives. I will be referring to them as “excommer” (plural “excommers”) as per above. Bourgeois as it refers to an individual human being in English cannot convey its new meaning in itself. It is important to understand, that the word’s new meaning in Bolshevik practice since 1917 was pejorative, used to incite hatred to the “privileged” class. Its correct form was not used in Russia since, by the way – it was truncated and received a different postfix, to make it sound more Russian and more humiliating. A word “rasstrel” as it describes prisoners being executed is very specific in Rus- sian. It is used to describe killing with firearms execution style, rather than aiming a firearm at someone and firing a shot, as in English. Therefore it will be more appro- priate to refer to them as “executions by firing squad”.