[The following is in regards to the latter stages of the Russian Revolution, commonly known as the Red Terror.]
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 had 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.
Author’s Note:
The Pictorial Archive at the Hoover Institution has a collection of slides, apparently taken by the Whites after capturing Kiev, which shows the local Cheka headquarters and in its garden shallow mass graves containing decomposed naked corpses. In December 1918, the Whites appointed a commission to study Bolshevik crimes in the Ukraine. Its materials were deposited in the Russian Archive in Prague, which the Czech Government, after World War II, turned over to Moscow. There it has been inaccessible to foreign scholars. Some of this commission’s published reports can be found in the Melgunov Archive at the Hoover Institution, Box 11, and in the Bakhmeteff Archive, Columbia University, Denikin Papers, Box 24.
Source:
Pipes, Richard. "The Red Terror." The Russian Revolution. New York: Knopf, 1990. 824-25. Print.
Original Source Listed:
NChS, No. 9 (1925)), 131-32.
Further Reading:
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