I. Surgucheff, who escaped from Stavropol, tells of a

garden there, which the Red soldiers called the Chinese Barber’s Shop: “ Very slowly, with the eye of a connoisseur, Achikhine, President of the local Cheka, surveyed the pri- soners, chose a sabre, felt its edge, then suddenly amputated an ear, an arm, another ear, grinning with joy over the groans and the curses of his victims and their entreaties to be despatched at once. Then he rolled a cigarette, lighted it from the sun with a burning-glass, smoked it voluptuously, rose with apparent reluctance and cut off another arm. After that he made a mocking speech to his victim, cajoled him, offered him tobacco, pretended to mourn over the lost limbs, caressed the bleeding stumps, knelt beside the dying wretch, gently raised an eyelid, and extin- guished his cigarette by pressing it sharply into the un- protected eyeball.’’
Many of the executioners were recruited from lunatic asylums and penal settlements. Among the notorious mad- men was Podvoiski, Trotski’s chief assistant, who had lost his reason from a blow on the head at Novgorod. His son- in-law, Djerdjinski’s assistant, was completely abnormal. Djerdjinski himself suffered from grave mental perturbation, due to neglected syphilis. Sternberg-Jakovleva, the female torturer, was a Sadic lunatic, as all who knew her testify. One commissary, described by the deputy Alexinski, who spent nine months in Bolshevik prisons, used to bite his own arms and suck the blood in savage voluptuousness during a massacre.
The Cheka always prided itself upon abstaining from tumbril-processions, scaffolds, all the pomp and circumstance
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of public executions. It preferred the modern simplicity prescribed by Lenin. Guillotines with their comparative decorum, heads brandished over howling mobs, such cere- monies of slaughter might suit bourgeois revolutionaries with time to waste, but Communists must do the maximum of execution with the minimum of effort and expense. The feverish Chekists of Odessa suppressed their victims on the brinks of sewers, prompting Lenin’s boast, “‘ We have made sewers our scaffolds.” The habitual method was to keep prisoners in suspense. At about eleven p.m. a commissary entered and called out names, adding, “‘ Come without lug- gage for the town” (na gorod), which became a familiar phrase, no luggage being needed for the supreme journey. The prisoners were bound to one another and hustled into the yards, where their throats were cut almost mechanically from behind.
Chinamen became synonyms for axes or guillotines, as indifferent to pain as steel. They were paid by the piece, receiving 500 roubles, a bottle of vodka, two pounds of bread, one pound of lard and the victims’ clothes every time. By a Government decree, recognising their useful- ness as executioners, all Chinamen were promoted to the rank of first-class citizens with the same political and ali- mentary privileges as Red Guards.
In the autumn of 1918 all citizens were divided into cate- gories of consumers: (1) the digestive aristocracy of manual workers ; (2) office-workers ; (3) their parasites and de- pendents. In the rare event of anything being left over, two ounces of bread might be allowed daily to members of the bourgeoisie. But soon this fourth class received nothing on their ration cards, or perhaps a few mouldy potatoes, sometimes derisively a little salt. As Zinovietf declared, “burghers must forget even the smell of bread.” And they must be humiliated as well as starved. For a time they might earn scraps by selling bootlaces. Then licenses for hawkers and porters were restricted to members -of exclusive syndicates, whereupon taunts of laziness followed.
All houses having been socialised, furniture was decreed to form part of a house. Every article was inventoried,
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and people who had not yet been evicted were not allowed to move a chair from one room to another. ‘“ Enough indulgence !” cried Zinovieff; ‘‘ there shall be no more homes.”” From day to day, at an hour’s notice, whole families were driven out of their dwellings, abandoning linen, furniture, kitchen utensils, with nowhere to sleep save in the frozen mud of the streets. Lenin had taken all they had.
Nor was there joy for those who by special grace con- trived to remain. Their home became a prison, for in every building a Soviet was established, the Komuitet Bednoti (Committee of the Poor) commonly abbreviated Kombed, with power to dispose of space, apportion rooms, control purchases, confiscate excessive rations. It kept books, distributed tasks, denounced counter-revolutionaries, specu- lators and deserters. None could quit a town without its authority, counter-signed by the Soviet of the district, and during a state of siege (always existing at Moscow and _ St. Petersburg) a written permit was also required for leav- ing the house. The State indeed was everywhere—in the kitchen, the bedroom, the empty larder. French penal settlements are scarely more severe, more difficult to flee. On the walls of railway stations were lists of places whither citizens were forbidden to travel, places so numerous that almost all Russia was closed to Russians. A French writer had described the process of attempting to escape to the Paradise Lost of Finland. ‘‘ In summer you swim the Sestra ; in winter you wade for many days through snow amid corpses, mummified by frost and serving as the only milestones ; or you crawl over ice perhaps with a dying child on your back, and if you arrive at all, it may be with your leg mortified and needing immediate amputation. And in early days refugees were sent back, if they had not been shot down by the suspicious authorities at the frontier. Finland was poor in resources, famished, inhospitable— sometimes so intolerable that fugitives voluntarily returned to the Russian hell.”
“Only citizens who are useful to the State will henceforth receive bread,’’ Lenin announced ; “‘ the others can die.”
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And usefulness to the State involved the most degrading tasks. “‘ Sometimes in the murky dawn of St. Petersburg,” we are told, ‘“‘you see a procession of dung-carts containing heaps of corpses. Behind them, shivering in the piercing wind, a livid procession of men in old straw-hats and women in ragged finery, the bourgeoisie mobilised as undertakers. These are the galleys of the Bolshevik paradise.” By a law of the 1st of October 1918, ‘‘ every citizen between the ages of eighteen and fifty not living on a salary—women, priests, and monks included—must perform municipal tasks ; street- cleaning, barrack-cleaning, cartage of wood, flushing latrines, etc.,’”’” These tasks were entered by the police in booklets to be produced on demand.
The old world was abolished. All bourgeois habits and traditions were attacked. All meals had to be taken in common in immense refectories served from the crumbling kitchens of Imperial palaces. No more family meals. No more samovars with their kindly purr beside the lamp at home. We havea picture of a mournful crowd tramping up and down outside a Bolshevik refectory, waiting till the Red Guards and the Chinamen have finished their dinner. Lawyers, engineers, officers, all the new prole- tariat are sent empty away to the ice-bound hovels whither the latest decrees have consigned them. St. Petersburg is scarely recognizable. The monuments of Emperors have been replaced by images of such new divinities as Marx, Lassalle, Engels, Bebel, in frock coats. Scarlet draperies are everywhere, the colour of fresh blood to match the blood- sodden earth. Art and architecture have become cubist. Gleams of madness shiver through degraded faces. On heydays, there are Communist sabbaths when whistles and rattles are distributed to the crowds for revelry.
The Soviets of Briansk, Kuznetsk and others in the Gov- ernment of Vladimir socialised women. In 1918, the commissariat officer of the Ist revolutionary regiment at Ekaterinodar received a typewritten, numbered official document ordering him to requisition alcohol and girls between sixteen and twenty for the needs of the troops. Spies are everywhere, for the supply is unlimited. Every foul pri-
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son and torture-chamber is an easy recruiting-ground where the acceptance of secret service is the only hope of a re- prieve from the shambles. There are schools of spies, professors of provocation. All workmen are exhorted to be spies, promised rewards for successful arrests—z2o per cent. of the money, goods and even food confiscated. Twelve thousand workers of both sexes took part in the perquisitions of July 1919. Greed and hunger lead to false denunciations, for “in time of famine one needs to kill and eat: bread in Russia nearly always tastes of blood.”
Wild animals cherish and defend their young, but physical force is now the only sanction in Russia and children are treated as pariahs. In 1925, the Soviets threw dust in the eyes of Europe by encouraging a “‘ Society of Children’s Friends,”’ the only private enterprise tolerated for social relief. The Pravda opened a subscription list and large sums were collected, but the Society was soon wound up because all the funds were misappropriated by the officials.
Most Russian children are in the habit of lying about in the streets like the pariah dogs of oriental cities, sleeping on pavements or under arches. Like the dogs, they have established a sort of organisation, primitive secret societies with a jargon and pass-words and punishments for informers. They are known as besprisornt or outlaws, and may be seen travelling about in packs along the high-roads or drifting down rivers in stolen barges, and when they come to a village they attack it like locusts, carrying off all the food and clothes they can find. One pack reached Moscow from the Ukraine border in February 1927 and succeeded in sacking hundreds of small shops before the grown-ups could disperse them. On rare occasions, when they have become a nuisance to important Bolsheviks, they may be collected in carts with lassoes like stray dogs and brought before a magistrate. Thus a band was recently tried, whose chief ornament was Ivan Roinen, aged twelve. Being the smallest, he could squeeze through panes of glass when his companions had broken them, and hand out the goods. The Kvrasnaia Gazeta (Red Gazette) published pictures of the leaders, puny, sickly creatures, the eldest
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of whom was ‘fifteen. All were professional burglars, provided with the regular stock in trade for picking locks and breaking safes, as well as sacks for carrying off their booty to be shared in a neighbouring forest.
In the spring of 1927, the Government made an attempt to deal with the scandal. Vorovski, formerly the property of a Prince, was allocated as a colony for 350 of the pariahs. It consists of one country house with forty-four rooms and two annexes with twenty-five each. There is a vast park with artificial lakes and neglected pleasure grounds. The following is a report on the colony translated from an article by a leading Bolshevik in the Komsomolskaia Pravda :
‘“‘ The children have gone barefoot all through the winter. Their clothes are all in rags. They are huddled together two or three in a bed, and the most elementary rules of sanitation are neglected. All are devoured by vermin. Indescribable filth, an asphyxiating atmosphere prevails everywhere. Heaps of muck are accumulated outside every door.’ Details of habits follow, too disgusting for reproduction. ‘‘ All the children are always ill,” the report proceeds, “‘ skin maladies being the most prevalent. Twelve per cent. are tuberculous. In cases of infectious or con- tagious diseases, there is no attempt at isolation. Never a smile is seen, never a note heard of the merriment associated with childhood. No wonder that attempts to escape from this living hell are constantly recorded.” The critic con- cludes with the despairing enquiry, ‘‘ What will these children be like when they grow up ?”’ Perhaps the answer is that they never will.
A whole literature exists to reveal the horrors of Bolshevik prisons, and the embarrassment is solely one of choice, for we have not only the evidence of aristocratic and middle class partisans, but all the wails and squeals of Social Democrats, Anarchists, and other heretical revolutionists who would have rejoiced to be torturers themselves. Here is a quotation from a letter written with a match-end in Derebinski gaol by a discomfited democrat: ‘‘ This cell held 20 under the Czars. We are now 215. No linen, mats or soap. Water is a bourgeois luxury. To quench thirst,
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we have a foetid pail with a glutinous liquid. We are devoured alive by parasites, some of them crawling up to our eyebrows, and often we do not feel strong enough to drive them away. And if we do, they always return. Thousands of venomous suckers plunge into the living flesh. Hunger is intolerable. We receive 6 oz. of tar- coloured bread, a foul paste containing refuse of straw, then two bowls of nameless soup, a nauseous liquid with heads of rotten herrings floating about. I am so hungry that I cannot think. My legs have become blue, swollen, mon- strous. Every moment I look at my fingers. They seem to be rotting. I am decomposing before death. What a herd in this prison: an ex-minister, two bank directors, princes, counts, a general of division, four colonels, popes, monks, students, clerks, all shivering with fever, emaciated with famine. A hussar of the Guards and a famous painter have gone mad, and most of us will follow their example. Here in prison, it is war against the intellectuals, while hooligans, all ordinary criminals, are treated as comrades, receive 3 roubles a day from the State and better food.”’ Nor is all the evidence ex-parte. Trilleser, President of the Soviet of Vyborg quarter, wrote in the Commune of the North on the 4th of December 1918, under the heading, “One Cannot Remain Silent”: ‘‘I am ashamed, after visiting the Krestys, though they are considered penitential paradises, to have to admit the incontestable superiority of the Imperial prisons. Prisoners remain up to eight months without being interrogated, not knowing from what author- ity they depend. Their dirt is repulsive. They have no mattresses, no blankets. For the most futile motives they are flung into dungeons. In the infirmaries, I have seen veritable live corpses just strong enough to whisper that they are dying of hunger. The dead often remain several hours on the beds and all the sick await death from famine.’’ The reader having now sated himself with the social conditions of an Empire reduced to a prison-house, may be invited to return to political events and economic conse- quences. As Mr. Box says, “ The worst excesses of the Red Terror were due to fear. The Communists from 1918 to
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1920 were fighting for their lives.” Indeed, they had already begun to tremble immediately after the surprise of their facile seizure of power in 1917. As Lenin once said to Maxim Gorki, ‘‘ The most astonishing part of the whole history is that no one has yet been found to show us the door.” The terms of the treaty of Brest-Litovsk were disastrous from the national point of view, and though Communists were not Nationalists, many of them were opposed to territorial surrenders that would deliver Russia bound and defenceless into the hands of a possibly vic- torious Germany. For a victorious German Empire was unlikely to tolerate the continuance of Communism. The workmen of St. Petersburg were all for resistance to the death. Lenin retorted that resistance meant not only death but slavery, whereas a pretence of acquiescence afforded a breathing-space. ‘“‘ Sign,” he said, ‘‘ why not ? A signature on a bourgeois document involves no obligations, When we are strong enough we can re-make the map of Europe.”
There were plenty of taunts that he was actuated by German gold. True he did not spend money on himself, cared nothing for wine or women, seemed to possess only one suit of clothes that always looked as though it had been slept in. But there are other uses for money besides self- indulgence. German gold had certainly helped on _ his miraculous career. The Germans had used him as their tool, spared him their prisons, sent him in the “ sealed waggon ”’ to stir up strife, financed his conspiracy against the Provisional Government. And though he might be the ‘‘sea-green incorruptible,” which Carlyle dubbed Robespierre, it was often useful to be able to buy and secure his abomin- able tools. He was as ready to move them with money as he was to shoot them when they had served their purpose, witness the course he pursued with the criminal agent Mali- novski. Indeed, the great force of the sanguinary despot lay in his crafty play upon the baser instincts of human nature.
At the time of the Brest-Litovsk crisis, Sobelsohn alias Radek said to him: “ If there were five hundred courageous
FAMINES 197
men here we would cast you into prison,” to which the bald answer was, “ I am more likely to send you there.” Lenin, however, grew more and more unpopular, mobs gathered round his hiding place in the Smolny Institute, and there was talk of firing on them. There were rumours of his flight to Finland. He tried to negotiate with the Entente Powers, and it was only by one of his mysterious black miracles that he contrived to stem another storm.
Then he proceeded to establish economic Communism, though the impossibility of working it was evident to all. Civil war raged for a time, and the Bolsheviks would un- doubtedly have been crushed but for white livers in the White armies—cowardice at home and exhaustion abroad. The Central Powers were in the dust. Italy was undermined by Communists, Poland nearly succumbed to a Red raid, the British Labour Party frightened Mr. Lloyd George out of intervention.
But Russia soon realised the vanity of her hopes of world- revolution. Large tracts of confiscated country were di- vided up after the revolution in the hope of pacifying the peasants and, as the possession of land has always been their chief conscious desire, they began by acquiescing in the new state of things. But when they were compelled to hand over almost everything they possessed to the famine-stricken, non-producing cities, receiving nothing in exchange, serious discontent arose. Moreover, without proper agricultural machinery or sufficient manures or expert advice, the yield of their newly-acquired fields was disappointing. Russia, which used to feed half Europe, was soon unable to feed her- self. There were terrible famines and piteous appeals for international charity. It was Communism in practice, though even at the height of the class war in the villages, says Kurt Wiedenfeld, a Labour champion, eighty-six per cent. of the land in Russia remained in individual holdings.
Lenin decided to cut the Gordian knot, to sacrifice the main pretext for his bloody revolution, to throw Communism overboard like an old shoe. At the Tenth Congress of the Russian Communist Party, in March 1921, he calmly an- nounced his New Economic Policy. ‘Had the followers of
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the prophet,” Mr. Box observes, “‘ been called upon to hear from the lips of Mahomet himself the suggestion that Allah was after all only a convenient hypothesis, the sensation could not have been greater.’”’ The opposition was very sharp, but another black miracle enabled Lenin to hold his own, purging his party of 181,000 members, perhaps nearly one-half, and sending as many of them as he could to his stifling gaols. Mr. Box surpasses himself on the subject: ‘“‘ Behind the far-reaching utterances of Lenin and the radi- cal change of policy by which, with all the intuition of a great statesman, he had again saved his party from destruction and the State from catastrophe, shone an invincible deter- mination to retain power and so continue the great task of the remaking of Russia.”
But God was not mocked. The kingdom of Lenin’s hell slumbered within him. Paralysis, lunacy, some say syphilis, or perhaps the consequences of the bullet of a young Jewish girl in 19g18—some Nemesis sported with the hands and brain that had been the instruments of incalculable evil. For two years he tasted torture, and on the 21st of January, 1924, his troubled spirit passed away. ‘‘ The Devil is dead !’’ sanguine folk cried as in 1658.
But the curse of Lenin was not immediately removed The leading miscreants fell out in 1927, trying to relegate: each other to Siberia. The saner Powers of Europe broke relations with the evil dispensation. But fresh fears pro- voked fresh orgies of bloodshed, especially after the execution of Voikoff, an alleged regicide, by a youth in Warsaw. And Russia continued to worship the Beast, saying, ‘‘ Who is like unto the Beast? Who is able to make war with him ?”
It was reported in 1927 that no educated persons remained in Russia, at least outside the gaols. Those who had escaped murder were eating the bread of penury in exile. Legal proceedings had become an absolute farce. Juries had long been abolished, and capital cases were decided point blank without any pretence at evidence or jurisprudence, accord- ing to the whims of brutal young criminals who could scarcely read or write and should be considered rather beast than
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human if they were not chronically under the influence of liquor.
The ordinary Socialist agitator grows angry and deems us ignorant when we say he wants to divide up all property, or as the needy knife-grinder had it, “ pull out his penny and pocket our shilling.”’ But in practice Communists employ far worse methods than that. In Russia they deliberately set out to plunder the capitalists, not merely to enrich them- selves but to prevent the capitalist from ever raising his head again. Past thrift is penalised, future industry pro- hibited. There is not even a pretence of carrying out Communistic theories and assuring the masses a maximum of enjoyment with a minimum of toil. All are over-worked and underfed, except a gang of wire-pullers who live not according to their means but their desires.
The proletariat being too ignorant to rule, all government remains in the hands of a clique led by rapacious and un- scrupulous Jews. The clique itself, known as the Communist Party, had only 400,000 registered members in 1927, in- cluding renegade Czarist officials, who saved their skins by joining the Red army. All were held together by brutal terror- ism. A despotism infinitely worse than any ever attributed to the Czars was exercised for years by the grace of despera- does numbering less than five per thousand of the population. The proletariat was not freed, but enslaved.
In 1927 the outward and visible organisation of the Bol- shevik State relied on a system of Soviets or councils, wherein industrial workers predominated. The peasantry were entirely excluded. According to the constitution, there was an All-Russian Soviets’ Congress above every- thing, formed out of the representatives of local Soviets and consisting of several thousand persons. This congress was to meet only once a year, and sit during one or two weeks. During the rest of the year business devolved on a Central Executive Committee, known as the Wzik, a kind of parlia- ment of a few hundred people meeting every two months. It acted with difficulty, so there was also a Soviet for Work and Defence, which was not a committee of the Wzik but an independent body exercising certain control over the
200 SECRET SOCIETIES
administration. The actual centre of government was the Soviet of Péople’s Commissaries, that might be compared with a ministry in a civilised State. There were eighteen People’s Commissionss under the presidency of the People’ Commissary. Furthermore, each Commissary was also controlled by a special representative of the Communist Party.
All this worked far less smoothly than the old bureaucracy, unsatisfactory though that was in many ways.
Above the whole apparatus of government was the Presi- dent ot the Wzik, analogous to the President of a republic. The fundamental policy was established at the Party Con- gress of the Communists, and they decided how members of the Soviet Congresses were to vote, thus making the Soviet Congresses mere formalities.
The administration of the whole distracted country rested with the Political Bureau and the Organisation Bureau. These and the whole Soviet State were entirely under the thumb of Lenin until his death in 1924. It was the personal tyranny of a Red Czar, and a fight for his suc- cession followed with great bitterness. Neither Russia nor Communists readily produce outstanding administrators, and the appearance of another dictator did not immediately tollow. At the same time, despite all their intricate machi- nery and multiplication of public bodies, the Communists always concentrated power in very few hands. Mutual jealousies were largely responsible for that, and a man who was not strong enough to seize the highest posts for himself might still contrive to pack his rivals off to Siberia. And Siberian exile proved far more extensive under the Soviets than under the Czars. Perhaps the greatest wonder is that the Red army remained so long under control, neither inten- sifying anarchy nor rallying round some Mongol or Hebrew Napoleon.
Opinions are divided about the value of the Red army. Some represent it as a model of efficiency, but General Hoff- man, who made the peace of Brest-Litovsk, gave a very different opinion to an Austrian journalist just before his death in 1927. ‘“‘ Where can they have found instructors ?”
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he asked. “ We are always told they have been trained by ex-Czarist officers, but that is an absolute lie. The imperial army possessed 85,000 officers. Two-thirds of them fell fighting against the Bolsheviks or in the torture chambers ot the Cheka—four thousand of them murdered at Kieff alone. The remaining third were enrolled trom captured general staffs, or by pressure of the well-known hostage sys- tem against their families, and have never given any real assistance to Bolshevik organisations. As to the arms and equipment of the Red army, they are good only in the case of sixty thousand picked men known as the Cheka troops. Their efficiency is restricted to the execution of workmen on strike and to punitive expeditions against unarmed peasants who refuse to surrender their crops.- These troops supply the famous Moscow parades, which impose upon foreigners possessing more sympathy than military experience. The rest of the Red soldiers are not only badly armed and equipped, but so little trusted that weapons are withheld when they are not on duty. Their instruction is political rather than martial, and their main duty is to propagate Bolshevism in the villages. The railway system is in such a state that a mobilisation or an advance would mean a catastrophe. As to the issue of an Anglo-Soviet conflict, we must not forget that the vastness of Russia imposes the necessity of a strong attacking army, but it need not inspire alarm. The precedent of Buonaparte’s Moscow expedition does not apply to these days of railways, aeroplanes, motors, telegraphs and telephones. it is idle to fight bloody mis- creants, as Sir Austen Chamberlain has done under pressure, by breaking off diplomatic relations. The essential is to strike quickly and successfully, for a repulse might be impos- sible to retrieve. And the war of liberation will attract Rus- sian peasants and workmen by offering them a prospect of re- covering all they have lost during the last ten years. If our prudent politicians shrink from the cost of a war, let them remember that a nation of 140 millions is craving to be replenished with every necessity from boots to agricultural machinery and railway material.”
Bolshevism may be summed up as a monster stretching
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its tentacles over ‘the whole world to devour and destroy civilisation. «Its army may not be so formidable as worn- out nations represent, but the Third International is the most effective secret organisation for strengthening and developing subversive ideas. It represents an uncanny insidious power working everywhere beneath the surface, already beginning to bury mankind in dust and ashes, to cast down churches and states, to inaugurate the reign of Antichrist. Nor is the danger lessened because Bolshevism has recently seemed more occupied with Eastern lands. Rather will the danger be magnified when Transcaucasia, China and India have been overawed. Has not Trotski raised visions of statues to Marx and Lenin in Trafalgar Square? Would it not be more prudent for the civilised world to unite in liberating mankind from the fetters of this monstrous tyranny, in liberating not only millions of men but millions of acres of fertile land and devoting them to the sustenance of humanity, rather than to sacrifice every prospect to a policy of hatred and mutual mistrust ? A new war between Western States would place Bolshevism in the position of the fertius gaudens, perhaps seal the fate of the world and open the floodgates of a final deluge.
AUTHORITIES