# Red Paper on Executions and Atrocities Committed in Russia

Reprint of excerpts from Izvestia, Pravda, Volia Truda, Volksrecht and other newspapers.
RED PAPER
on
EXECUTIONS & ATROCITIES
Committed in Russia
by
CZECHO-SLOVAKS & RUSSIAN COUNTER-REVOLUTIONARIES
Assisted by the Allies
PRICE THREEPENCE
Published by THE PEOPLE'S RUSSIAN INFORMATION BUREAU, 152, FLEET STREET, LONDON, E.C. 4
page
​The Documents printed in the present Red Paper have been culled, with one exception, from the Izvestia, and other newspapers in Soviet Russia, and, so far from exhausting the evidence on the subject, represent but a small fraction of the evidence contained in those papers. It must further be noted that the organs of Soviet Russia never engaged, professionally, in collecting atrocity stories and, still less so, tn inventing them.
page
No. 1.
Izvestia, June 15, 1918.
On June 7th Samara fell. As soon as the first Czecho-Slovak detachment stepped on the bridge, the town was immediately seized by the White Guards, who had emerged from various nooks and corners. The first to be arrested was the Left Social Revolutionary Rybin, who was shot on the spot. Thereupon the Communist Club, the headquarters of the defence, was besieged. Fire was opened against it from machine guns and rifles. One comrade was shot dead and several others were wounded. There were about 80 persons in the Club, and about one-half of them succeeded in escaping into the street. But here they were met by a hail of bullets. There was scarcely a house from which they were not shot at, while from the church tower machine guns were firing. The remaining comrades, with Maslennikoff at their head, were captured, and many of them are reported to have been already shot. Then a veritable orgy of blood began. Right Social Revolutionaries, and other White Guardsmen, were directing Czecho-Slovak detachments, pointing out the Communists, who were then invariably handed over to hooligans to be lynched. Several Soviet workers were thus lynched, others were sought for at their houses. The Right S. R. Nesteroff held an open-air meeting at the Alexander II. Monument, and openly advocated the lynching of all Bolsheviki.
No. 2.
Izvestia, June 16, 1918.
Zhizn reports that after the occupation of Samara by the Czecho-Slovaks, their detachments started a regular hunt after Red Army men. They went about the streets asking: "Are you a Red Army soldier?" All Red Army soldiers thus discovered were shot on the spot. Among those shot there was a Red Army woman soldier, named Wagener, Lettish by birth, because she refused to surrender her weapons. The Bolshevik Club was destroyed by artillery fire from the railway. The Bolsheviki, who had entrenched themselves in the Club, surrendered, with Maslennikoff at their head, under the white flag, but he has apparently been shot since. The Ufa Commissary for food and cattle requisitions, was shot at the station for refusing to give up his arms. Then began the lynching of prominent men, like Ventsek, President of the ​Revolutionary Tribunal; Shtyrkin, President of the Housing Committee; Shadrin, President of the Bureau of Control; Romanoff, his Secretary, and others.
No. 3.
Petrograd, Pravda, September 17, 1918.
A comrade who has returned from Samara and Ufa relates:—Last spring children of proletarians were sent to children's colonies in the Ufa, Samara and other corn-producing provinces. They were scarcely settled when. Czechs seized the railway and revealed themselves in their true colours, as executioners of the people. At first they boasted of their decency, saying: "We are not Red Army soldiers, you need not fear us." But soon they cast off all shame. The children of the Petrograd workers, in particular, had much to suffer at their hands; as though they were responsible for their fathers! The Czechs, however, thought differently. The teaching and administrative staffs of the children's colonies were all killed, after being brutally mutilated, their noses or ears cut off, or their eyes gouged out. The money intended for the maintenance of the children was taken away, and only 95 kopecks were granted to each child a day, so that they starved and were compelled to beg in the streets. About six per cent. of the total number of Petrograd children perished through these causes. At present there is a Danish Commission there in order to arrange for the removal of our children.
No. 4.
Isvestia Krestianskikh Sovietov, October, 1918.
Eye-witnesses arriving from Samara to Nizhni Novgorod give the following details of the brutalities of the White Guard at Samara, a week after the occupation of the town by the Czecho-Slovaks. Dead bodies of the Red Army soldiers, thrown into the water by the wild bandits, began to be washed up on the shores of the River Samarka. The number of such bodies was colossal, and afterwards a guard was placed on the shore to prevent anyone approaching it, or taking away the bodies to be buried. Twenty-five bodies were washed up by the waves on the first day. Women were charged with picking them up, and were paid 50 roubles per body. They wanted to bury them, but the priest of the Samara Cathedral refused to perform the rites, saying: "A dog only deserves a dog's death." The women buried the bodies themselves, and on the same day all of them were arrested. A few days later thirty-seven other women were arrested on the charge of being the wives of Bolsheviki. Sixteen were shot and the rest sentenced to be hanged.
Those who had buried the bodies of the Red Army soldiers were also sentenced to be hanged, but they succeeded in escaping. No fewer than 12,000 men were arrested by the ​Czecho-Slovaks, and their treatment is cruel in the extreme. The least act of insurbordination on their part is punished by death.
The women are subjected to all sorts of insults, all their belongings, including their under-clothing, have been taken away from them, and many of them were outraged. Amongst others the chairman of the Union of Cooks and Waiters, Ivanoff, was arrested. He had his ears and nose cut off. He was wounded three times, while being under arrest, and afterwards he was shot. All those who had any connection with the Soviet authorities have been shot.
No. 5.
Izvestia, December 23, 1918.
Samara, October 22.—At the junction station, Ivashtchentsovo, there is a factory for explosives, and there lie more than 800 bodies of workers, their wives and children, who have been sabred to death for protesting against the lock-out.
At Krotovka, and further on along the lines, there are lying about 306 bodies of sabred men and women, whom the White Guards had taken out of the Samara prison. At the Lipiati station they also shot the assistant station master, Budanoff, the father of nine children, the platelayer Ivanoff, and the pointsman, Soboleff.
No. 6.
Izvestia, November 2, 1918.
Samara, October 31.—A torture chamber has been discovered at the offices of the former Commandant. A dark room served as a place of execution, and its walls are covered with inscriptions made by the hands of the unfortunates. On the level with the height of an average man, there are hundreds of holes made by bullets, and in many places the bricks have been damaged or destroyed.
No. 7.
Izvestia, November 17, 1918.
Samara, November 14.—Workers from the Ivochtchensky Works, who have escaped from Czecho-Slovak captivity, relate that they were eye-witnesses of the wholesale execution by shooting of 500 workers employed in those works. Many comrades, who had been kept in Samara prison and afterwards carried off by the Czecho-Slovaks in their retirement, were brutally sabred to pieces.
No. 8.
Izvestia, October 1, 1918.
From Kazan a correspondent writes: It is impossible to describe what our town has experienced during the reign of ​the Czecho-Slovak bands. Having entered the city, the international bandits, first of all, began to massacre Soviet workers and all who were associated with the work of the Soviet. People were simply shot in the streets, without any trial or inquiry, on the evidence of some passer-by, or on the strength of the Bolshevik exterior of the unfortunate victim. He would then be charged with being a soldier of the Red Army, and would be bayoneted on the spot. The former Commissaries were more particularly sought after, their names and descriptions being in the possession of the Czecho-Slovak officers. All through the first three days, executions were taking place on the strength of such descriptions. Almost at every corner the corpses of Kin, Mezhlauk, or Vatsetis were lying. As a matter of fact, all three of them are living to this day, and the scoundrels had been executing innocent men. It was only on the fourth day that a notice was posted up throughout the city forbidding indiscriminate executions, but the executions were not stopped, and continued in accordance with the new method. The hapless victims would be brought to a commission of inquiry, which would there and then issue an order to shoot, and then all the arrested men would, in the morning, at 8 or 9 o'clock, be brought into the fortress and there sabred to death, or shot down.
No. 9.
Izvestia, October 2, 1918.
An eye-witness describing the conditions at Kazan, after the recapture of the city by the White Guards and Czecho- Slovaks, says: One shudders at the recollection of the first days of the rule of the so-called Constituent Assembly when the atrocities exceeded all limits. A mob, consisting of shopkeepers and tradesmen, was going about mutilating the dead and killing off the wounded. It even nearly murdered a doctor who, in the exercise of his profession, had lent assistance to the wounded. Ex-officers, students, school-boys, young sons of wealthy land-owners and house-owners, and of other wealthy classes—in fact, all those whose interests have been affected by the revolution, were engaged in a veritable orgy of atrocities. The ward and house committees became agents of the okhrana (secret police), and the fate of the class-conscious workers was terrible! The committees denounced them to the White Guards, who then went about the factories and working class quarters, shooting down, not only those who had been connected with the former Soviet Government, but all "suspect" workers in general. They were executed on the spot, without trial or preliminary inquiry, while others were taken in batches to the fortress and there subjected to merciless beatings. A bloody nightmare overhung the Kazan working class, which lasted until the new rulers became positively satiated with blood. Nevertheless executions still continued, though not in public. They were carried out in the darkness of night, the corpses being afterwards carried off secretly.
No. 10.
Izvestia, June 4, 1918.
A comrade, arrived from Rostoff, who was eye-witness of its fall, gives a number of details regarding the capture of the town by the Germans and White Guards. … Arrests and executions began immediately. The orgy of vengeance against Soviet workers, which broke out, scarcely yields in any respect to the bloody massacres in Finland. Domiciliary searches on a wholesale scale were carried out in working class quarters, and a single denunciation was sufficient to have a man shot on the spot. The victims number many thousands. A still larger number of persons have been arrested and are awaiting their fate.
No. 11.
Izvestia, October 20, 1918.
Rostoff on the Don, October 17—In the local prison of Rostoff there are at present more than 1,000 persons, the majority of whom are workers. The old okhrana (secret police. under the Czar), and the Gendarmerie Department have been restored.
No. 12.
Izvestia, June 29, 1018.
Narodnoe Delo publishes details of the atrocities committed by Krasnoff's counter-revolutionary bands, with the assistance of the Germans, at Novotcherkassk: The citv is divided into eight Kommandaturs, and wholesale domiciliary searches are carried out. About 2,000 persons were packed in the local prison. Every night the arrested are being shot in batches. A court under the name "Defence of the Don" has been formed, which condemns to instant shooting, not only those caught when armed, but also those merely in "sympathy" with the Bolsheviki. "Justice" is administered in revolting conditions: there is no defence or publicity, the preliminary inquiry is conducted in haste, without cross-examination of the witnesses, and the sentence is usually death by shooting. With the establishment of this court, espionage was given full sway. Its horrors baffle all description. Old accounts are settled, former quarrels are recalled and punished, and not only political opponents, but next-door-neighbours become the victims for "having spoken well of the Bolsheviki," for "having used indecent language about the Tsar," etc. At the Fassler Works the entire shop stewards' committee has been arrested. Among those shot, by order of the "court," are Krasniansky, an employé of the district ataman: Aivazoff, a member of the staff of the Priazovsky Kray; Samokhin, an employé of the regional administration: Sheremetevsky, a Left Social Revolutionary, a school-master, who was shot dur​ing a domiciliary search; Izotoff; Tsyganoff; Leontieff, a watchmaker; Tretiakoff, president of the Garment and Shirt Workers' Union; Orekhoff, a former agronomical student of the local Technological Institute, and an ex-Lieutenant, who had been assistant food controller under the Bolsheviki; Pinus, a student who, on the withdrawal of the Bolshevik forces, had taken up the post of City Commandant, and had organised a force of ward watchmen for the maintenance of public security; Sukhoff, a Cossack Officer; and Kamneff, a Cossack N.C.O.; Skoptsoff, a Menshevik, director of one of the local classical colleges, was shot without any preliminary cross-examination, on an informer's evidence that he had tried to dissuade one of the bands from entering the city.
No. 13.
Izvestia, August 7, 1918.
The Commission for Fighting the Counter-Revolution has got hold of an interesting document, in the shape of a letter written by one of the counter-revolutionary executioners on the Don. Here are some extracts from it: "On April 23, the Bolsheviki were finally ousted from Novotcherkassk. I was appointed a member of the tribunal 'For the Defence of the Don.' Here began for me a different sort of activity, not less pleasing, namely, to receive for trial the Bolshevik commissaries and all the other scoundrels, and mark their names with pretty little crosses. The harvest was pretty good, and every evening, apart from the Tribunal, numerous prisoners were disposed of—sometimes 100, sometimes 300, and in one night 500 have been dispatched. The mode of procedure was as follows: Fifty men dug their own common grave, then they were shot, and the other 50 men would cover them up, and dig a new grave side by side, and so on. There are, however, so many of them that we have decided, to their great discomfiture, to turn the Red Guards into slaves. So, yesterday the Olympians of the other week, men on whom our own lives depended, are now working half-naked, bare-footed, without rest, under the encouragement of the Cossack whip, or even simply kicks. Unfortunately, bands of the Red scoundrels still remain about in the vicinity, but they are surrounded by a ring, and are being destroyed daily. …
"On that day we were driving the Red Guard so fast that they had no time to pick up their wounded, and these latter we were trying to cure on the spot by bayonets. I, myself, received a slight wound in my hand, but these few drops of blood of mine cost them five people whom I had the happiness to kill with my own hand, including one prostitute of mercy."
No. 14.
Vechernia Izvestia, September 26, 1918.
Voronezh, September 25.—In conversation with our correspondent, Vratchoff, deputy chairman of the Voronezh ​Provincial Executive Committee of the Soviets, who has just returned from the southern front, states that the Cossacks, when capturing soldiers of the Red Army, engrave on their bodies the words "Land and Liberty." On the caps of the dead Cossacks of the "special division" one can read the inscription "Death to the Red Army soldiers."
No. 15.
Izvestia, October, 1918.
On capturing Alexandrov Gai, the Cossacks first of all made a search for Comrade Tchugunkoff, chairman of the Volost Soviet, but he and another comrade, Tchurikoff, having disguised themselves, had gone to Novouzensk to seek assistance. Nevertheless, they did not succeed in escaping the hands of the Cossacks. Twelve of them were captured by the village usurers and handed over to the Cossacks. The Cossacks made use of their whips, according to their old habits, and comrade Tchugunkoff was flogged until he was half dead, and then he was cut into four pieces. Comrade Tchurikoff had his ears, nose and chin cut off; a piece of flesh was cut out of his back, and then he was killed. On that day numerous Soviet workers were shot. On the following day a meeting of the local village "vultures" (kulaks) took place, at which it was decided to shoot all the Bolsheviki. All who had been denounced by the "vultures" were taken to the square and shot. The priests held thanksgiving services and pronounced anathemas on the dead bodies of the executed comrades. Three days later a detachment of the Red Army, which had entrenched itself in a flour mill, having expended all its cartridges, was obliged to surrender. The men were stripped naked and were thrown into a cold cellar, where they spent three days and three nights without food or drink. After that they were taken out of the village and brought to an enormous trench, which was formerly used for dumping dead cattle. They were placed, a dozen men at a time, on the edge of the trench and shot, and many comrades fell into the trench only wounded, owing to the carelessness and lack of skill of the executioners. When all the 90 men had been thrown into the trench, the executioners began to cover them with earth. A heart-rending cry arose from the breasts of the wounded martyrs, but the troops knew no mercy, and the trench was soon filled with earth. Altogether, at Alexandrov, 675 persons were shot.
No. 16.
Izvestia, November 10, 1918.
Voronezh, November 8.—Wounded Red Army soldiers arriving from the southern front, state that the Cossacks, in determining whether any Red Army soldier belongs to the Communist Party, are guided by the presence of a cross on the neck of the prisoner. If there is no cross, it means that he is a Communist, and the Cossacks shoot the prisoners who have no crosses, while the rest are sent to work in the mines.
No. 17.
Izvestia, December 10, 1918.
Voronezh, November 9.—Cossack punitive detachments have hanged, in the villages of Kagalnik, Batisk, Koysug, and at Azoff, all the old men whose sons had joined the Red Army. The bodies were dangling for three days, as the Cossacks did not allow them to be buried.
No. 18.
Izvestia, December 4, 1918.
Voronezh, December 2.—A comrade who has arrived from Yuzovka, states that in expectation of a strike of workers in the Donetz coal district, the local Commandant Abramoff has published the following telegram from General Denikin: "I order every tenth man from among the arrested workers to be hanged, and to be left dangling on the gallows for three days. The gallows are to be placed in the main thoroughfares." The comrade in question states that several hundred corpses were already dangling in the streets.
No. 19.
Izvestia, December 6, 1918.
Kursk, December 4.—An Order No. 1 has been received from Yuzovka which was issued to the population af that town. The order cites telegrams received from the Commandant of the mining district, to the following effect:
(1) "I forbid the arrest of workers; they must either be shot or hanged."
(2) "I order all the arrested workers to hang in the main street, and to be left on the gallows for three days."
The Order further announces that according to these instructions, two workers, Litvinenko and Kritzky, have been hanged.
No. 20.
Izvestia, December 10, 1918.
Kursk, December 7.—It is announced from Almazmya railway station that 52 workers in the Briansk mines have been flogged to death, by the officers of the Volunteer Army (Denikin's). The flogging was carried out by means of gun sticks. Other workers are sent to the mines under the pain of being shot.
No. 21.
Izvestia, October 23, 1918.
Simbirsk, October 22.—The retiring White Guards are destroying not only the villages, but also towns, after pail pillaging them. On the eve of the occupation of Melekes, by the Soviet forces, the brutalities of the White Guards reached their highest point. They arrested and shot ​not only Bolsheviki, but also Mensheviki. In this way the Menshevik Butenko, president of the local Trades Council, was shot. All the inmates of the local prison were shot. In front of the railway station, under the very eyes of the people, 30 persons were shot, who had refused to fight against the Soviet troops. After the occupation of Syzran, peasant revolts broke out in a number of villages, including Khmelevka and Yeriklinka, but were crushed by the White Guards with terrible ruthlessness, accompanied by pillage and rape of women.
No. 22.
Izvestia, October 27, 1918.
Saratoff, October 25.—According to information from Astrakhan, the Communist Sergeyeff was, during a raid by the Krasnoff bands on the village Oslodniki, handed over to the Cossacks by the local village "vultures," and was hanged by them, after being subjected to torture, and kept in the noose for two days and two nights.
No. 23.
Izvestia, June 16, 1918.
Simbirsk.—The following information about the work of the counter-revolutionaries at Tcheliabinsk, after the capture of the town by the Czecho-Slovaks, has reached here. The Soviet has been forcibly dispersed, and its leaders and chief members have either been shot, hanged, or lynched. A Provisional Government has been formed, consisting of officers and cadet lawyers. All the trade unions have been suppressed, and the town authority has been handed over to old Cossacks. Pillage and outrages are of every day occurrence. The fields already tilled and sowed by the peasants have been handed back to the landlords. The railwaymens' organisations have been dispersed, and the president and deputy-president have been shot.
No. 24.
Izvestia, December 21, 1918.
Buzuluk, December 19.—A 14-year-old boy, Vladimir Vassilieff, who has come from Orenburg together with war prisoners, told, at the editorial offices of the Kommunistitcheskaia Zhizn, the story of the brutal murder of his parents and four-year-old brother. On December 10, armed Cossacks broke into Vassilieff's house, and with a cry of "We have got you at last, Bolshevik," shot the boy's father, who was at that time working at the bench. They then murdered the boy's mother, who had fainted away from sheer terror, and cut the throat of his little brother, who was crying. Vladimir himself was hiding all the time behind the oven.
No. 25.
Krasnaya Armia, September 25, 1918.
After the downfall of the Soviet authority in the Urals, there began a regime of terror against the workers. Not only members and employés of the Soviets were arrested, but even their relations. Many workers, in their fright, hid in the woods, from where an attempt is now being made to get them. Those who have been captured are flogged to death, or shot. Before being shot the prisoners are usually tortured. Our informant mentions the case of the Red Army soldier, Vassili Tchernoff, personally well-known to her, who was beaten and tortured until he fainted away, after which he was shot in the morning. At the Asha-Balashoff Works, a member of the local Soviet was tortured and shot. He was our old party worker, Ivan Barmatil. In many cases the wives of Soviet members and workers have been arrested, together with their infants. They are kept in prison as hostages, pending the discovery of the whereabouts of their husbands.
No. 26.
Pravda, July 17, 1918.
Ural papers are filled with descriptions of the atrocities committed by the Czecho-Slovaks and the White Guards, assisted by the Social Revolutionaries and the Mensheviki in the Urals and Siberia. The horrors of St. Bartholomew's night literally pale before those perpetrated by these hordes of inhuman brutes. At Omsk they were not content with shooting down the people. They flung masses of workmen into the river, and the bodies of our tortured comrades are often, even now, washed up on the shores of the Irtysh. At Tcheliabinsk they cut off the hands of workmen and peasant prisoners, and tortured the unfortunates before giving them up to the executioners. Many Soviet workers were buried alive by the Moslem counter-revolutionaries of the Southern Urals. At Zlatoust Red Army and Soviet workers were subjected to indescribable torture under direction of Ovcharoff, a prominent local Menshevik. At Neviansk the Right Social Revolutionaries caused a bomb to be thrown into a little room crammed with people under arrest. …
No. 27.
Izvestia, July 10, 1918.
Berzin, commander of the Soviet troops in the Urals and Siberia, telegraphs as follows: I wish to announce to the whole civilised world, to all peasants and labouring Cossacks, and to all the Soviet troops, the atrocities which are being committed at the front by the Czecho-Slovaks, White Guards and Russian Counter-Revolutionaries, under the auspices of the Provisional Siberian Government. On July 5, 17 men belonging to the railway guard troops were shot at ​Tululymskaia station, by a Czecho-Slovak band and Russian officers, and two wounded men were bayoneted. The chief of the guards, Artiukoff, was taken prisoner, and after being cross-examined was tortured, his eyes gouged, and afterwards he was sabred to death. On the same day a band of Cossacks, Czecho-Slovaks and Russian officers, attacked a sanitary unit at one of the stations of the Northern Siberian Railway, outraged and massacred four nurses, bayoneted to death ten Red Army soldiers, and inflicted severe wounds on 100 others.
No. 28.
Volia Truda, October 3, 1918.
Ekaterinodar, September 29.—The White Terror at Ekaterinodar has, in the course of the last fornight, assumed terrible dimensions. The so-called authorities no longer find shooting a sufficiently deterring method. The White Guards no longer shoot down prisoners, but hang them on the gallows, which is placed in a prominent place on the bank of the Kuban. In addition, the practice has arisen, and is being carried out with great zeal, of simply hacking the Red Army soldiers to pieces with the sabre. The officers publicly declare that they will not waste cartridges any more to kill the Soviet "scoundrels." The indignation of the workers is rising every day, and the newly-founded underground Communist organisations are carrying out great work.
No. 29.
Izvestia, September 19, 1918.
Novorossisk, September 14.—The Volunteer Army continues its wholesale executions by shooting. Of the wounded Red Army soldiers in the hospitals alone about 400 have been shot. The editors of the local "Justice" and of the "Revolutionary Soldier at the Front," have also been shot. In the lock-up of the Commandant alone more than 200 Soviet members and workers are kept under arrest.
No. 30.
Volia Truda, October 5, 1918.
Kurskya Bednota gives a description by eye-witnesses of the capture of Novorossisk by the White Guards. Three days before the fall of the town, the Commandant, an ex-officer, acting in collusion with Denikin, issued an order to re-examine the registers of persons who were residing in the town with Soviet certificates. Many fell into the trap, since afterwards these registers were used for the capture of Soviet workers. There were in the town about 2,000 sailors, who had also been captured and stripped naked, and when found to have their bodies tattooed, would be shot. There were also in the town about 8,000 soldiers of the Red Army. The White Guards, in order not to alarm the population by the noise of ​shooting, killed the wounded with sabres and bayonets, or the butt-end of their rifles, then dumped them into trucks and carried them out of town to be buried.
As regards the Chinese, who had been fighting in the International Regiment, Denikin issued an order to the following effect: "All Chinese who for some reason or other remain at Novorossisk, are to be dealt with by Field Court Martial." They were all caught, made to dig their own graves, and were shot. The extermination of the workers was still more ruthless. About 30,000 of them perished. Denikin then issued an order declaring that all wounded soldiers of the Red Guards, who expressed their regret at their doings, would receive a safe conduct to go home. About 200 men put in their appearance, but they did not reach home. At the station, Tonnelnaya, they were taken out of the carriages and shot.
In the Tsaritsyn paper called Soldat Revolutsii, some details are given of the life at Novorossisk after its occupation by the Volunteer Army. An attack was made upon the workers of both sexes, women being frequently arrested on the evidence of their short hair, which was regarded as a sure sign of their sympathy with Bolshevism. All the prisons are packed to overflowing, and the prisoners are being beaten and starved.
No. 31.
Izvestia, October, 1918.
The suppression of the peasant revolt in the Slavgorod district of the Altai province (Siberia) was effected by the following methods: In the first place the Red Army soldiers who had been captured in fighting were shot. They were shot on the spot, in the vicinity, under the eyes of the Slavgorod inhabitants. The shooting was carried out in a simple manner; one bullet for each man, and the rest completed by the Cossack sabres. There were many cases of men shot and their necks cut by sabres, who were still breathing. The Cossacks would then arrive on the scene and finish them. Ataman Annenkoff had given an order to the Cossacks not to take the captives for cross-examination, but to shoot on the spot every one who seemed to them suspicious. The terror extended throughout the steppe and the suburbs. Everybody was killed who could not produce a passport. Numerous persons, including several who had taken no share in the revolt, were killed. The villages Tchorni Dol and Podsosnovka were almost entirely burnt down, and the surviving old men and women suffered outrages of all kinds at the hands of the Cossacks. All the belongings of the inhabitants of these villages, including cattle and bread, were requisitioned by the detachment. Three million roubles are to be paid by the peasants of the district by way of contribution. After the first shootings, without rhyme or reason, executions began throughout Slavgorod and district, according to a proscription list. The officers have themselves admitted that 700 persons ​have been executed according to these lists, but even that did not end the matter. The proscription lists extended after each cross-examination, and there are still the ringleaders to be shot, as well as every fifth man, in accordance with the original order made by the Siberian "Government."
No. 32.
Izvestia, June 4, 1918.
The following appeal is issued by the Central Committee of Finnish Workers: A terrible fate has befallen the working class in Finland, after the victory of the united forces of the Finnish and German Bourgeoisie. Everywhere in the country a White Terror is raging, without let or hindrance, spreading horror, sorrow, blood, death, and destruction. About 70,000 citizens, for the most part members of the Social Democratic parties, including 30,000 civilians, have been thrown into prison, and in point of brutality are suffering all the horrors of unprecedented treatment and of hunger. Many among them, owing to lack of and entirely disgusting food, are ill and unable to move, some have died and others are threatened with slow and painful death by starvation. Every moment the arrested are expecting their executioners, for every day executions take place by order of the White Government in Finland, which has already executed numerous members of the Socialist parties and are now shooting prisoners wholesale. Whole units of the Red Army, as well as civilians who had surrendered have been shot. Many sisters of mercy of the Red Army have been shot and mutilated. All the commanders of the Red Army, from the rank of subaltern upwards, have been executed. Editors and contributors of the Socialist Press, commissaries and employés of the Finnish Soviet are being shot, and their property is to be confiscated. Even Socialist members of the Diet are hunted down like wild beasts. And all this is still going on, although the civil war has long ceased.
No. 33.
Volksrecht, April 19, 1919.
French Communists, living in Russia, have sent out the following appeal to the workers of the world: "We draw the attention of the workers of all the world to the inhuman deeds which have been perpetrated upon our comrades by the French Commandant at Odessa. According to reports recently received by us, all the French-speaking Communists at Odessa, as well as the men employed on the paper Le Tocsin, were shot in a batch on March 3, without any preliminary investigation. The Ukrainian proletariat has taken the sacred oath, that they will punish the executioners by driving them out of Russian territory. The proletariat of the entire world will avenge the murders by the establishment of a Communist World Republic."
(Upload an image to replace this placeholder.)
This work is a translation and has a separate copyright status to the applicable copyright protections of the original content.