M. Serge de Chessin has painted a graphic portrait of the

ascetic tormentor, who ordered butcheries with all the callousness of the sacrificial priest of some infernal rite, the political vivisectionist, always experimenting on human guinea-pigs, caring only for results and feeling no curiosity about the agonies of his victims. , Other biographers pre- sent the lay Trappist, the great abstract mind, the trans- cendent brain bulging independently of matter, like that of Wells’ men in the moon, the rectilineal scientist, the lord of all power and might who refused an extra-ration card for himself, the superhuman anchorite who found his only solace in undying detestation of all his fellow-creatures. _
Vladimir Ilyitch Ulyanoff was born on the roth of April, 1870, at the dreary little town of Simbirsk, beside the Volga, his father being a clerk and later a councillor or ‘‘ maréchal de la noblesse,”’ from which it has been ignorantly deduced that he had some connection with the nobility. His mother had a farm in the Government of Kazan and drew a pension from the Czar’s Government when she became a widow. Vladimir was accordingly of humdrum, respectable parent- age and some throwback must be found to account for the criminal instincts of himself and his brothers and sisters, as well as for his hatred of his own class. He was sent to school
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under Kerenski’ 5 “father and left at the age of seventeen with a report that he was industrious, accurate and “‘ gener- ally unamiable to his fellows.’ He actually received a gold medal for good conduct. His elder brother, Alexander, was hanged in 1887 for attempting to murder the Czar Alexander III with bombs about the time that Vladimir left school, and this may have stimulated the boy’s revolu- tionary ideas. He went on to Kazan University in 1889, and was expelled within a month for taking part in a stu- dents’ riot, but he was allowed to go to St. Petersburg University two years later, taking a legal degree and prac- tising at the bar for a few days.
It was after his expulsion from Kazan that he started studying Karl Marx, swallowing every word he read without digestion, and reading little else. The idea of using the proletariat as a tool for autocracy appealed to the paranoia or delusions of grandeur, which had been developed in him at an early age, and he claimed a monopoly of the interpretation of his crazy Communist mentor. For years he lived very poorly, no doubt on his parents, for the pre- paration of Marxist pamphlets cannot have been lucrative, especially as we hear he never tired of presenting the public with the same secondhand idea again and again from a slightly different angle. Some of his pamphlets being subversive, he soon slunk into hiding in the slums, but was caught and sent to Siberia for three years, a milder punish- ment than Nihilists pretended, for he was allowed to devote twelve to fifteen hours a day to the study of Marx.
On his release in 1900, he plunged deeply into the Russian Social Democratic movement. He was not aiming at the happiness of mankind or even of one class, but merely struggling to accomplish his own incredible elevation to supreme power. And his one weapon for this convulsion of the world was the poison of Marx, which he distilled, unravelled, played with like a puppy tossing a cake of dung, proclaimed as the infallible panacea for the world. Marx was Allah ; Lenin was to be his exclusive interpreter and prophet. But who can tell how he contrived to, establish his ascendancy over his fellow-conspirators ? Later on, he
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BLOODY SUNDAY 175
developed the qualities of a leader, swayed masses by his oratory, exercised personal magnetism, but except for rare congresses attended by a score or so of desperadoes, years elapsed without his emerging from his slums or coming into contact with any but rare and ragged refugees. His only weapons were unreadable leaflets and the enrolling of agitators to spread sedition in workshops and canteens. One is struck by the smallness and meanness of the elements which provoked the awful avalanche. Those international congresses, for instance, tailors of Tooley-street, repre- senting scarcely anyone but themselves, yet proclaiming them- selves delegates of all kindreds, nations and languages, voices of humanity, proletariats thundering for emancipation after centuries of oppression! And the one plausible pretext for mob-rule has always been the majesty of multitude, the representation of multitude.
But here were these handfuls unable to agree even among themselves. When Socialist Russian refugees adopted Marxism in 1883, disputes immediately arose within their party, not about principles, but about organisation and tactics. These disputes came to a head at the London Congress of 1903, when one group, including Lenin, sup- ported central direction and terrorism, the other was for federalism and comparatively peaceful persuasion. It was here that Lenin and his friends took the name of Bolsheviks,—some say because they secured a majority, others because they advocated the most extensive policy.
It was not until the 22nd of January, 1905, commonly called Bloody Sunday, that revolutionary history really began in Russia. The Czar has been blamed for refusing the famous petition brought by a mob of St. Petersburg workmen, led by the fanatical pope, Father Gapon, and it was perhaps unfortunate that they should have been fired upon by the troops. But the demonstration was a move in the revolutionary game and would have provoked trouble, however conciliatory its reception. As it was, the bloodshed served malcontents as a useful pretext for mass meetings and general strikes, uprisings, barricades, every sort of violence all over Russia. Yet the revolution
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may almost be regarded as stillborn, though Lenin des- cribed it a& “one of those glorious failures which assure ultimate victory.”
The only really ominous, if transitory, successes were the appointment in the autumn of workmen’s councils, which were the precursors of Soviets, and the entanglement, for the first time, of peasants in a Russian revolutionary movement, with burning castles and hideous outrages in South Russia, especially in the Government of Saratoff. Significant also, though no one knew it at the time, was the appearance of Bronstein, alias Trotski, among the ma- rauders. But the Government obtained the upper hand, dissolved the workmen’s councils and made voluntary concessions of an unwanted parliament and insufficient agrarian reforms. The revolutionary leaders had also become notorious to the police, who wormed their way into the various secret societies and had practically destroyed or dislocated the whole organisation by 1908.
The only chance of recovery lay in training fresh con- spirators. Maxim Gorki conducted a propagandist school at Capri. There was another near Paris, and one at Bologna, where Mussolini and Balabanoff doubtless co- operated. But the activities of the extremists flickered until 1911, when Lenin carried out a successful state-stroke. At that time a Socialist comic paper offered “a reward of half a kingdom for the discovery of a fourth Bolshevik in addition to Lenin, Zinovieff and Kameneff.” During the two previous years, revolutionists had been restricting themselves to the comparatively moderate programme of the London Conference of 1909—a democratic republic in Russia, an eight hours’ day, employers’ liability and so forth. Work outside Russia was conducted by a foreign bureau, and communications with the home conspirators became increasingly difficult. Then Lenin concerted with Semashko, the treasurer of the Foreign Bureau, to steal its funds. They summoned a conference of the whole party, had the elections cooked and assembled eighteen delegates, of whom only two were moderates. In January 1912, twenty-
LOST OPPORTUNITIES 177
three sessions were held and the conference elected a su- preme council of seven, including Lenin and Zinovieff with control of the whole party funds. Lenin now possessed the power of the purse and his rivals were scattered. The comment of his adulator, Pelham Box, is ‘‘ Lenin’s uncanny prescience, revealed in his tremendous fight for the control of the party, told him the sands were running out. Like Zulus, he smelt the blood of future slaughter.”
He was certainly shrewd in foreseeing that revolution would come most easily through the army. The Russians have never been a fighting race. They soon lose heart in a campaign, despite the vastness of their numbers, and they have never had good military organisation to buoy them up. There were resounding munition scandals in 1915, the transport system broke down during blizzards, and pro- pagandists found propitious soil in the trenches. But they were still far from numerous. Lenin, writing to Zinovieff from a Zurich slum, rejoiced that he had enrolled seven young men and hoped to secure an eighth, and Zinovieff remarked that Lenin’s “ courage was not flamboyant.”
Neither was that of His Majesty’s army, which had been disintegrating ever since the Polish campaign of 1915. On the 13th of March, 1917, four regiments of the Guards revolted in St. Petersburg, disarming and killing or im- prisoning their officers. Box writes that “a mass move- ment unparalleled in modern history swept like a prolonged shudder all over Russia.”” That is poetical nonsense. The revolt was on a par with some of the French mutinies dur- ing the Serajevo war and should have been speedily re- pressed. If the Czar had mounted a horse and placed himself at the head of General Ivanoft’s loyal troops, he might still have made a triumphant entry into the capital, and all would have been saved. That is the opinion of Count Paul Beckendorff. But the Czar seems to have been in a vast hurry to abdicate. “ Mount a horse!” he almost exclaimed, in the words of Louis XVI. ‘“‘ But does the constitution allow it?’’ So a Provisional Government was formed out of the official parties, army soviets appeared as the official opposition everywhere. ‘‘ C’est une révolution
M
178 SECRET SOCIETIES
exempte de sang,’ the egregious Prince Lvoff observed complacently.
There were now two rival parties in Russia, the Reform- ists under Kerenski, and the revolutionaries, whose com- mand was quickly seized by Lenin. The chief point at issue between them was the continuation of the war, and the Germans repatriated Lenin in the so-called “ sealed waggon”’ to increase the confusion of their enemy. He secured the support of the masses by declaring against such imperialist aims as the conquest of Constantinople, Armenia or Galicia, even against a defence of the fatherland. The Provisional Government announced that it would fight on against German militarism. Mobs retorted with wild demonstrations in the streets. Within three weeks of his return, Lenin was the autocrat of the revolutionists, and, thanks to the army, he soon became autocrat of Russia. Indeed, the revolution was not the cause but the effect of army decay.
On the 29th of December, 1916, General Verkhovski, afterwards Kerenski’s last war minister, wrote in his diary, “Tt is hard to believe, but nevertheless it is a fact that we mobilized 15,000,000 men and now have only 2,000,000 combatants. The deserters number 2,000,000, another 2,000,000 are in German prisons. So much for Mr. Lloyd George’s Russian steam-roller !”’
The Provisional Government, however, determined on an offensive that could not possibly succeed. Kerenski, we are told, attempted to win the troops over by touring the trenches with ‘‘ mystical oratory that acted like cheap alcohol.’’ It was recalled that the army had crushed a revolution in 1905, and Korniloff thought he could restore discipline now, though bread was lacking even in the capital. Still, the offensive of July, 1917, began well, but the Ger- mans counter-attacked, and in less than three weeks Russia had ceased to count among the Powers. A telegram from the parliamentary commissioners at the front announced, ‘““Immeasurable calamity. Authority and obedience things of the past.”” Peasants immediately began a seizure of estates and the murder of their owners.
“SOAP-BOX TALK ” 179
But there was a last flicker of resistance. Korniloff decimated regiments and conducted executions on a vast scale. Kerenski stigmatised as “ revolted slaves” those whom he had recently hailed as “‘ heroes of the revolution.” He quashed a revolt of the St. Petersburg garrison with the aid of Cossacks recalled from the front. On the 6th of August he formed a middle-class coalition cabinet and thought he had triumphed. Lenin thought so, too, and fled into hiding, first in the slums of the capital, then across the Finnish border. On the gth of September, Korniloff broke with Kerenski and advanced on St. Petersburg with 70,000 men to proclaim a dictatorship, but the revolution- aries rallied round Kerenski, and Korniloff’s men faded away as rapidly as only Russian soldiers can. It looked
like a complete victory for Kerenski, but he was soon
absolutely dominated by the Bolsheviks, and the only power that counted was the St. Petersburg Soviet, presided over by Trotski ; even Lenin found it safe to return in a wig and false beard. Thus arrayed, he ventured on the 2oth of October to attend the opening of a Parliament that Kerenski had at last been persuaded to summon.
Events moved rapidly. On the 2nd of November 1917, General Knox, the British military attaché at St. Peters- burg, was talking contemptuously of Lenin and Trotski and their “‘ soap-box talk.”” On the 5th the Bolsheviks seized the arsenal and the fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul. On the 7th Kerenski fled, vainly hoping to return with troops from the front.
Still it was touch and go whether the revolution could succeed. Lenin was shivering with fright and preparing to run away again, hoping against hope that his victory would be announced by the guns of the fortress opening fire on the Winter Palace, where the Provisional Govern- ment awaited its end, guarded by the remnants of the - Women’s Battalion, the only manly soldiers surviving in Russia. Lenin showed almost every sign of lunacy in his anxiety, cursing and foaming and pacing his hiding-place like a panther.
At eleven a.m. the bombardment began. Lenin heard the
180 »-SECRET SOCIETIES
roar of adyancing mobs. He was informed that the Pro- visional Government had been taken seated at a table “like a grey, shivering spot.’ At midnight it was safe for him to attend the Congress of Soviets.
His reception was rapturous, and he proceeded coldly to read out decrees: Land for the peasants, production to be controlled by the workers, peace to be assured to all belligerents. Bolshevism was now enthroned in Russia. The dictatorship of the proletariat was accepted in accord- ance with the gospel of Karl Marx. The State, he taught, depends upon force, and must be used as an instrument for subjecting all men to the working classes. There were no pretty flatteries about liberty, equality and fraternity. There was still to be a ruling class, but that class was to be the working class, which was to go on doing precisely what it found blameworthy in its predecessors. There was no pretence of establishing itself in the interests of all, or even of a majority. No rights, no freedom were to be conceded to any but the working class. An iron discipline served to protect the workers in the enjoyment of all their whims, in the enjoyment of confiscated property, in the seizure of _ the fat of the land, including the first fruits of the labours of the unfortunate peasantry. To protect the workers ? No, to protect, to enrich and glorify a small minority of the misguided workers, a small minority pushed forward by superior craft and recklessness in crime. It was for their benefit and their benefit alone that, in the course of a few years, Russia became a sea of blood and tears, a vale of grief and hunger, a vast cemetery, a howling desert.
The working classes! If any comparatively honest workman dared to call his soul his own or failed to see absolutely eye to eye with the new tyrants, his doom was sealed. No other evidence than that of his heresy was required for casting him into the deepest dungeon and condemning him to torture and execution. The most pious and innocent opinions served as death-warrants in these incredible shambles. The persecutions of the old Roman emperors, the severities of Spanish discoverers the intolerance of Cromwell’s Puritans were pale forms of
RELIGIOUS PERSECUTION 181
impatience compared with the diabolical fanaticism of these hell-hounds of modern revolution.
It is difficult to fathom the mentality of men who are zealous with fire and axe and halter in defence of a negation, but some glimmering of the aberration may be found in a quotation from the propaganda of Stepanoff, one of the foremost of these new Antichrists. ‘‘ It must be clear even to the blind,” he declares, ‘‘ how necessary is a determined fight against every pope, whether he calls himself pastor or abbé, rabbi or patriarch, mullah or pontiff, and no less unavoidable at a given stage of this campaign must be the fight against God, whether he goes by the name of Jehovah, Buddha or Allah. Religion is an opiate, faith is serfdom, God and the priests are as necessary to a worker as chains to an enfranchised slave.’’ Again, ‘It is not sufficient to be an unbeliever ; every workman must be an agitator
_and a propagandist against ecclesiastical organisations ; his mission is not to reform churches but to destroy them.”
And not content with plundering churches, the Bolsheviks surpassed Puritans in the vandalism and indecency of their desecration. In a church of the Don district they cele- brated the mock marriage of a pope and a mare, after which they led the pope out to execution. According to the nar-
- rative of Dr. Bostunitch, a refugee, the archimandrite of a
- Russian monastery was boiled alive in a cauldron in the presence of his monks, who were afterwards forced to con- sume the soup with revolvers held to their temples. All clergy were proclaimed outside the pale and anyone was entitled to slay them without comment.
A great gathering was held at the Moscow Military Club in the presence of Trotski and Lunatsharski for the erection of a High Court of Justice to try God Almighty for high crimes and misdemeanours, and sentence of death was passed in contumaciam after the funds of ribald blasphemy had been exhausted. And, be it noted, such acts were performed for the diversion, not of half-witted mobs, but of responsible leaders of the State.
According to an official estimate presented to the House of Lords by the British Government, 1,223 clergymen of
182 SECRET SOCIETIES
the Orthodox Church were murdered during the first year of Bolshevism, while no less than twenty million persons lost their lives through pestilence and famine and the practical application of Marxist principles. According to Dr. Bostunitch, the Bolsheviks were responsible, up to March 1925, for the execution of two million political offenders, whereas the Emperor Nicholas was denounced as a blood- hound because five individuals were put to death during his whole reign. According to the Bolsheviks’ own statis- tics, they had, previously to 1925, slaughtered 28 bishops, I,215 popes, 6,000 monks, 55,000 army officers, 55,000 policemen, 350,000 soldiers and watchmen, 350,000 grad- uates and students, 500,000 workmen and peasants.
In those days men sought death and could not find it. They desired to die and death fled from them. In June 1927, after nearly ten years of Bolshevism, all the people of a village congregated in their church and set fire to it, singing hymns as they perished in the flames, praising God that they had found an issue from the living death which they had endured in the power of the beast.
The murder of the Czar and his innocent family is almost too ghastly to be recorded. Even though pity may be mitigated by the thought that perhaps he knew in advance of the fate which Russia had authorised for the hapless Sovereigns of Serbia, even though we may not altogether acquit him of Panslavist plots that provoked the great Serajevo war, horror cannot be withheld from the judgment of God. Even if we attached credit to the inventions about Rasputin, to what do they amount? That the Empress employed an unorthodox, perhaps undesirable, healer to relieve the sufferings of her son. Nothing else has ever been proved. Cromwell said of King Charles, ‘“ Let us blacken him’; French rebels used a poisonous legend about a pearl necklace ; fables about a crazy monk and his political influence proved incredibly potent weapons against a benevolent Czar.
Nicholas IIT was a good son, husband, father, everything that is expected from weakness and kindness. He ought never to have occupied the throne of an autocrat. He was
THE IMPERIAL CALVARY 183
not born to fight cataclysms. He listened too much to his mother and his magicians and full advantage was always taken of his weakness by everybody. He seemed almost glad to abdicate at the first hint. And the weakness of those who might have fought and died for him may veil some of our sympathies for what they lived to endure.
The Imperial Calvary began. At Tsarskoie Selo we find the renegade Prince Lvoff of the Provisional Government refusing to protect His Majesty’s children from the foul insults of the soldiers. Endless interrogatories sought to prove that the Czar had desired a separate peace and could be tried for high treason to the nation. Treason to traitors, who had been pocketing German gold and took the first opportunity of concluding that same peace them- selves !
Then the torments of gaol, some say slow poisoning at dour Tobolsk. A sudden summons to fatal Ekaterinburg. Fifty Red guards caracolling round the tumbrils con- taining the gentle victims. The scarcely existent roads, the crumbling bridges, the horse almost swimming at the fords. The Empress like marble, staring straight before her. The Grand Duchess Marie weeping silently. The Emperor bravely keeping up his good humour, wondering about the weather, paying small attentions to the ladies, crossing himself at every church.
Presently they are huddled into a stuffy second-class carriage while their noisy guards carouse in a Pullman. At every stoppage during the night shots are fired at the train, cries of hate are heard, demands for the blood of the unhappy “ tyrant.”’
The prison at Ekaterinburg was a dirty, tumbledown house, guarded by barbarous Lett ruffians. During the nights drunken gaolers broke in to search the party, especially the Grand Duchesses, tearing off night-dresses with obscene gestures. Soon the prisoners were all con- fined in one room, and when the Czar tried to defend his daughters, he was beaten, insulted, thrown out into the passage with fierce kicks. The Empress alone possessed a bed, a miserable verminous wooden bed crumbling with
184 SECRET SOCIETIES
age. The Emperor and the Grand Duchesses slept on straw and soon ceased to undress. By day, the Empress spent the endless*hours reading her Bible, the girls sewing, the Czarevitch drawing soldiers, the Czar pacing up and down or scribbling notes on scraps of paper torn from the walls.
Details of the murders are obscure and contradictory. The night of the 17th of June 1918 is the most probable date, but M. de Chessin gives the 16th of July. He says that the Bolshevik garrison clamoured for murder, fearing a Czecho-Slovak offensive and the release of the prisoners, whereupon Belborodof, President of the Executive Com- mittee, and Juroffski, President of the Extraordinary Commission, summoned a soviet, which voted death after a long sitting at one a.m. Within an hour, these two gave a verbal order to the guards and went to preside over the crime.
The assassins found the Imperial pair at prayer. The sickly Czarevitch was sobbing on his knees in a corner. The four Grand Duchesses clung to one another convul- sively. The Czar did not interrupt his prayer.
“So much the better! You are prepared,” Juroffski exclaimed with a brutal laugh.
“Yes,” the Czar replied impassively.
“ But it is not only you we want. All this "(an obscene word) “has to go through it. Come along, no monkey-tricks! To the cellars.”
The Czar led the way to the door, carrying his fainting son in his arms. The Czarina followed, crossing herself incessantly. The Grand Duchesses, incapable of walking, were dragged along amid choruses of oaths.
The dank cellars with their leprous walls were filled with moving shadows cast by the torches of the murderers. The victims were pushed or thrown. together into a corner, then shot with revolvers in the eyes and temples without . any word of command, the Empress first, then the children, then the Czar and his little court. The bodies were fur her riddled with bullets, some dying only after several mint ¢, of martyrdom ; the Grand Duchess Tatiana received fifutte shots before a Red guard smashed her skull with the by;
CZAR’S MURDER 185
end of his rifle. At dawn a motor-lorry carried off a load of
eleven corpses to a deserted quarry, where petrol was poured over them and lighted. This is the story, omitting foul particulars of Sadic horrors.
In March 1927, Sevolodoff, a retired Soviet General, added further details which he received from colleagues on the staff of the 9th army corps, how Juroffski and ten soldiers committed the murders and burned the bodies at Ekaterinburg, cut off the heads of the Imperial pair and sent them to the Kremlin, where Lenin identified them and they were burnt under the personal supervision of Trotski.
Lenin and Trotski had ceased to fear Social Democrats and Revolutionary Socialists, but they knew that, however remotely concealed, the White Czar, the Little Father of popular legend must always remain a menace to their rule. They knew that they could never kill traditions, but they could cause symbols to disappear.
Other members of the Imperial family followed. Grand Duke Serge, Prince John, even Prince Paley, morganatic son of Grand Duke Paul and possessed of no remote claim to the succession, were thrown down a coal-mine and left to die of hunger with broken legs and arms. The psychology of Bolshevism was illustrated by an announcement in the Commune of the North newspaper for the 30th of January 1919; “On the 24th instant, the Extraordinary Commiss- ion to resist Counter-revolution and Speculation ordered that the following persons should be shot. Affair 6440, Lavrentieff, guilty of having robbed a messenger in the Street of the Decembrists ; 6189 Kulikoff and Petroff, for sacking apartments in Marat and Kirochnaia Streets ; Affair of the Grand Dukes Paul Alexandrovitch, Nicholas Michailovitch, Dimitri Constantinovitch, George Michai-
«s lovitch. Signed: The President, Skorokhodoff. Acting
Secretary, Luloff.”
To have possessed the title of Grand Duke sufficed for a capital charge. Other crimes punishable with “ preventive execution’’ were ‘eventual treason’? and “ possible insurrection.’’ Sometimes a death-warrant was annotated
186 SECRET SOCIETIES
in pencil: ‘‘ Might be dangerous to the power of the Soviets.” All aristocrats and members of the middle class were indeed ipso facto outside the pale. The Bolsheviks were not content with the massacre of open enemies. They went on to persecute the tepid, the neutral, the indifferent. The only comparative safety lay in membership of the high Red bureaucracy, and even then it was unwise to arouse the jealousy of powerful tyrants.
Much of the bloodshed was doubtless due to fear. After an attempt on Lenin’s life by a dissatisfied Communist, the Red Gazette wrote: ‘“‘ Every drop of his blood must be paid for by hundreds of bourgeois executions.” After the killing of Moses Uritski, arch-butcher of the Bolsheviks, the Pravda gave a list of 512 murdered hostages ; then fol- lowed a list of 29, including ex-ministers, a Moscow list of 1 general and 70 officers, long daily lists till the end of October. All through the autumn there were drownings on the lines of the noyades of Nantes. Great barges were filled with middle-class victims and sent drifting before the sinister Bastille of Cronstadt to be riddled and sunk by the batteries. Serried lists of hostages appeared every day at this time, columns of names of generals, bankers, merchants, professional or commercial persons whose lives were to depend on the fluctuations of civil war. There were enormous concentration camps for them all over the country. One at Nijni-Novgorod herded five thousand in a former nunnery like cattle awaiting butchery, lingering, perhaps, for months with no hope of acquittal, for there was no charge; no mercy, for retribution had been decreed. If a shot had been fired at Trotski, a number of hostages would be chosen at random and killed in cold blood. As the Red Gazette observed, ‘‘ Every bourgeois is guilty of drinking the blood of the people, so none can die innocent. Their massacre leaves a sense of duty done.”’ The whole bour- geoisie were regarded as an international freemasonry leagued against the Reds, and to save trouble, a wholesale decree was issued in the autumn of 1918 finding them guilty of treason and condemning them to death. When some questioned Zinovieff in the St. Petersburg Soviet of the
CHEKA’S TENTACLES 187
22nd of September 1918 about a possible miscarriage of jus- tice, he replied impatiently, ‘‘ We are not arresting innocent people ; we are arresting the bourgeoisie.”’
Lenin’s chief instrument of execution, created by himself, was the Vserossiskaia Tchrezvitchainaia Kommissia (Pan- Russian Extraordinary Commission) Vetcheka or Cheka— a Soviet of executioners, nominally suppressed later on, but continued under another name. For the whole policy of calculated destruction Lenin must be held responsible, for he was the absolute, unquestioned dictator, the spider brood- ing and weaving at the corner of the web. For Lenin the Terror was a weapon for levelling minds in an effort to nationalise public opinion simultaneously with his nationali- sation of capital. The Cheka’s tentacles stretched every- where, gripping and biting ; it had eyes and ears in the most distant villages; it directed massacres systematically, po- groms like those which whilom vexed the Jews. The Cheka’s president, Djerdjinski, ridiculed people who wanted judicial forms. “‘ We have nothing in common with justice,” he declared, ‘‘even revolutionary justice. We are the Terror, and our object is to terrify the enemies of the Soviets.” At Moscow, in June 1918, at the first Congress of Chekas, a manual of murder was issued, codifying systematic crime. The Cheka was a police brigade with unlimited powers of espionage, arrest, trial, judgment and execution ; a revolu- tionary inquisition to wipe out heresies with rifles. Its fanatics combined the psychology of epileptics with the habits and training of clerks, cataloguing human heads in their game-books, chronicling their own crimes complacently in ledgers.
Cheka interrogatories rarely failed to secure any desired admission. A prisoner might be dragged in the course of one day before twenty or thirty judges, who posed the same questions in the same tone of voice. If a famished, totter- ing wretch hesitated for a moment or sought to modify a single word, he would be sent back to his first inquisitor and the infernal questioning began all over again. Interroga- tories became hypnotic. Eventually a judge had only to suggest in order to obtain the desired answer from a semi-
\
188 SECRET SOCIETIES
cataleptic prisoner. All sorts of tricks might be used. A prisoner would have to address a blank wall, behind which his judge sat concealed. Violent reflectors or searchlights would be flashed into his eyes. Old tortures were also re- vived—water dropped on shaven skulls, “‘ little ease ” cells, whose occupants perpetually crouched, insomnia enforced by cudgels, water refused and diet reduced to herrings steeped in brine, nails and needles driven inside the quicks of toes and fingers. The Anarchist Gavriloff had his breast sliced with daggers to make him confess. Vissotski made admissions after three days and three nights with the muzzle of a revolver held against his bandaged eyes. Tchakolski lay in a cellar with a sack over his head, his only nourishment water filtered through the sacking every twenty-four hours. In the country districts the discipline was more severe, for there was no one to restrain or supervise. Every function- ary became a little autocrat, possessing all the genius for refinements of torture, all the cold cruelty of the Tartar perfected by the discoveries of modern science.
Trios of terrorists were sent out on roving commissions, pleasure parties where drunken orgies alternated with fusil- lades. Kedroff, a recruit from the moderate Socialist Party, conducted a train filled with merry fellows and prostitutes. He stopped at every station in the Government of Vologda, when he sent out his myrmidons to scour the neighbourhood and make a random bag of burghers or peasants. Then the blood festival began. The usual preliminary was to force the captured women, amid huge hilarity, to dig their hus- bands’ graves. As M. de Chessin comments, “ the lecherous gorilla anticipated by Taine for humanity when relieved of its restraints has taken possession of Russia, and in its passion of destruction weds obscenity with torture.”
At Kursk, the usual postprandial entertainment supplied by Chekists for their mistresses was a series of executions, At Odessa, a party of Bolshevik sailors, maddened with drink and drugs, stripped their prisoners naked, pushed them into a dark cellar and fired volleys at random from the doors. The victims flung themselves against the walls, lurching into one another, and at last the prolonging of
TERRORIST CORLURES 189
their agony exasperated the executioners, who rushed into the midst of this palpitating humanity, prodded brains with bayonets, dug fingers into eyeballs. When sated or weary, executioners often suspended a séance, leaving victims in agony to be finished off another day. At Odessa, the Cheka was provided with a regular theatre where privileged guests of both sexes sat over their alcoholic refreshment at little tables and watched executions as burghers watch songs and dances in music halls.