A more systematic approach in dealing with hostages was adopted in the summer of 1919 in connection with Denikin’s advance toward Moscow and the need to evacuate prisoners and hostages to prevent their falling into White hands. At this time, according to Drugov, Soviet Russian jails held 12,000 hostages. Dzerzhinskii instructed his staff to work out priorities to establish the order in which hostages would be shot as the need arose. With the help of a certain Dr. Kedrov, Latsis and his fellow Chekists divided the hostages into seven categories, the principal criterion being the victim’s personal wealth. The richest hostages, to whom were added ex-officials of the tsarist police, were placed in Category 7; they were to be executed first.
Unlike the mass murder of Jews by the Nazis, every aspect of which is known in sickening detail, even the general course of the Communist holocaust of 1918–20 remains concealed. The executions were often made public, but they were invariably carried out in secret. Of the few available accounts, some of the best are by German journalists in Russia, especially those published in the Berlin Lokalanzeiger in defiance of pressure from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to suppress such information. The following description comes from the Lokalanzeiger by way of The Times of London:
Details of these wholesale nocturnal executions are kept secret. It is said that on [Petrovskii] Square, brilliantly lighted with arc lamps, a squad of Soviet soldiers are kept always in readiness to receive victims from the great prison. No time is wasted and no pity expended. Anyone who does not place himself willingly on the place of execution and range himself according to order in the ranks of those about to be executed is simply dragged there.
These practices recall authenticated accounts from Nazi extermination camps. As for the executioners, the correspondent had this to say:
It is related of some sailors who participated in the executions almost every night that they contracted the execution habit, executions having become necessary to them, just as morphia is to morphia maniacs. They volunteer for the service and cannot sleep unless they have shot some one dead.
Families were not notified of pending or completed executions.*
The worst bestialities were committed by some of the provincial Chekas—which operated at a distance from the eyes of central organs and had no fear of being reported on by foreign diplomats or journalists. There exists a detailed description of the operations of the Kiev Cheka in 1919 by one of its staff, M. I. Belerosov, a former law student and tsarist officer, which he gave to General Denikin’s investigators.97
According to Belerosov, at first (fall and winter of 1918–19) the Kiev Cheka went on a “continuous spree” of looting, extortion, and rape. Three-quarters of the staff were Jews, many of them riffraff incapable of any other work, cut off from the Jewish community although careful to spare fellow Jews.* This “cottage industry” phase in the Kiev Cheka’s Red Terror, as Belerosov calls it, later gave way to “factorylike” procedures dictated from Moscow. At its height, in the summer of 1919, before the city fell to the Whites, the Kiev Cheka had 300 civilian employees and up to 500 armed men.
Death sentences were meted out arbitrarily: people were shot for no apparent reason and equally capriciously released. While in Cheka prisons they never knew their fate until that dreaded moment at night when they were called out for “questioning”:
If a prisoner kept in the Lukianov jail was suddenly summoned to the “Cheka,” then there could be no doubt as to the reason for the haste. Officially, the inmate learned of his fate only when—usually at 1 a.m., the time of executions—the cell resounded with a shouted roster of those wanted “for questioning.” He was taken to the prison department, the chancery, where he signed in the appropriate place a registration card, usually without reading what was on it. Usually, after the doomed person had signed, it was added: so-and-so has been informed of his sentence. In fact, this was something of a lie because after the prisoners had left their cells they were not treated “tenderly” and told with relish what fate awaited them. Here the inmate was ordered to undress and then was led out for the sentence to be executed.… For executions there was set up a special garden by the house at 40 Institute Street … where the Provincial Cheka had moved … [T]he executioner—the commandant, or his deputy, sometimes one of his assistants, and occasionally a Cheka “amateur”—led the naked victim into this garden and ordered him to lie flat on the ground. Then with a shot in the nape of the neck he dispatched him. The executions were carried out with revolvers, usually Colts. Because the shot was fired at such close range, the skull of the victim usually burst into pieces. The next victim was brought in a like manner, laid by the side of the previous one, who was usually in a state of agony. When the number of victims became too large for the garden to hold, fresh victims were placed on top of the previous ones or else shot at the garden’s entrance … The victims usually went to the execution without resisting. What they went through cannot be imagined even approximately … Most of the victims usually requested a chance to say goodbye; and because there was no one else, they embraced and kissed their executioners.*
It is one of the striking features of the Red Terror that its victims almost never resisted or even attempted to flee: they bowed to it as to the inevitable. They seemed to have been under the illusion that by obeying and cooperating they would save their lives, apparently quite unable to realize—for the idea, indeed, defies reason—that they were being victimized not for what they did but for what they were, mere objects whose function it was to teach a lesson to the rest of the population. But there was at work here also a certain ethnic characteristic. Charles de Gaulle, serving in Poland during the Russo-Polish war of 1920, observed that the greater the danger, the more apathetic Slavs tend to become.98
As the Red Terror entered its second month, a revulsion made itself felt in middle-level Bolshevik ranks. It intensified during the winter of 1918–19, forcing the government to issue in February 1919 a set of regulations that restricted the Cheka’s powers. These restraints, however, remained largely on paper. In the summer of 1919, as the Red armies were falling back before Denikin’s offensive and the capture of Moscow seemed imminent, the frightened Bolshevik leadership restored to the Cheka the full freedom to terrorize the population.
Criticism of the Cheka inside the Communist apparatus was inspired less by humanitarian impulses than by annoyance at its independence and fear that unless it was brought under control it would soon threaten loyal Communists. The carte blanche that the Red Terror gave the Cheka endowed it with powers which, by implication, extended over the very leadership of the party. One can imagine the feelings of ordinary party members on hearing Chekists boast that if “they felt like it” they could arrest the Sovnarkom, even Lenin himself, because their only loyalty was to the Cheka.99