He saw but one hope—the Cossacks and officers who were rallying, through incredible hardships, to Denikin's army in the Caucasus; and Denikin could make no important move unless the Allies backed him with arms and munitions. Until this happened his small army would be but an oasis in the desert of hopelessness.
We were present at several gatherings of officers, in Vladimir Franzovitch's room. Over bread and salted fish, washed down by tea, they discussed the black past and the blacker future. From them we heard awful tales of massacres and looting during the Bolshevist domination over the Black Sea regions. Of these the most dreadful was that of the cruiser Almaz. There have been published many imaginative reports of Bolshevist massacres; but for horror these are equalled by many true stories that have never been fully told, and never will be until the veil of isolation is lifted and the seeker after truth is free to gather his information at first-hand.
I have every reason to believe the story of the Almaz. It was vouched for not only by Vladimir Franzovitch and other Russians whom we met in Odessa, but by Englishmen who were living in the city at the time, and are now back in England. Moreover, it is perpetuated in a local song similar to those of the French Revolution.
The Bolsheviki who first occupied Odessa, in the early spring of 1918, made their headquarters on the cruiser Almaz. Their first batch of arrests comprised about two hundred officers, with a few officials and other civilians. These were taken to the Almaz, and lined up on the deck. Each man in turn was asked: "Would you prefer a hot bath or a cold?" Those that chose a cold bath were thrown into the Black Sea, with weights tied to their feet. Those that said "hot" were stoked into the furnaces—alive.
Later, one Murravieff, believed to have been formerly a agent provocateur of the Tsarist secret police, came to Odessa as Bolsheviki commissary. He divided the city into four sections and the Red Guards into four parties, each of which was allotted its particular district for three days of licensed looting. The Saturnalia was due to begin in three days' time, when the first Austro-Hungarian detachment landed to restore order, in response to the Ukrainian Provisional Government's invitation. Many of the looters were rounded up and shot; but the Bolsheviki leaders, including Murravieff and several Jews, escaped with millions of roubles, commandeered from the bank reserves. Murravieff afterward had the decency to commit suicide, but his Jewish colleagues continued to flourish in Soviet Russia.
Odessa had a respite from Bolshevist domination until the tragedy of March, 1919. Then, after a period of occupation by an insufficient Franco-Greek force, the city was evacuated in the face of an army of Soviet troops. Credible eye-witnesses report the massacre of three thousand people within a few days of Odessa's recapture by the Bolsheviks.
For all I know to the contrary, Lenin—despite the proved and damning evidence of past connections with the German Kaiser's penetration agents and the Russian Tsar's police agents—may be an intellectual idealist who considers all means justifiable in establishing a form of communism that may eventually better the world. But I do know with certainty that Bolshevism, as practised locally in Russia by unthinking hordes who are not and do not pretend to be intellectual idealists, means universal injustice, flagrant robbery, senseless, butchery, and a tyranny at least equal to that of Ivan the Terrible or any Oriental despot. All the writings of biased minority mongers who have confined their investigations to consorting with Soviet officials at Moscow and Petrograd, all the blinkered sympathy of labour agitators who devote their lives to fostering a diabolic discontent, all the chirruping of the mentally perverted women and men who, at a safe distance of thousands of miles from actuality, have adopted theoretical Bolshevism as the latest fashion in parlour enthusiasms, cannot condone the fact.
Money and life were the only cheap commodities in Odessa. Paper roubles of every denomination—Imperial notes, Kerensky notes, Ukrainian notes, and Municipal notes—they were in scores and hundreds of thousands; and each issue was trailed by several kinds of forgery, so that only an expert could tell the true from the false.
Everything else was rare, and wildly expensive. Meat was ten, weak tea a hundred and ten roubles a pound. New suits of clothes were unobtainable at any price, for there was no cloth. Second-hand clothes could be bought in the Jewish market, where the dealers demanded from eight hundred roubles for a shoddy suit and from five hundred for an overcoat. A collar cost eight roubles; a handkerchief four. Other prices were proportionate.
Seven-eighths of the factories were idle. As for the rich grain lands of the Ukraine, about three-quarters of their produce went to Austria and Germany, this being the price paid by Skoropadsky's government for the policing of the Ukrainian Republic.