On September 3d members of the Section to Combat Speculation of the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission arrested Citizen Pitkevich, who was trying to buy 125 food-cards at 20 rubles each. A search was made in the apartment of Pitkevich, which revealed a store of such cards bearing official stamps.
This section also arrested a certain Bosh, who was speculating in cocaine brought from Pskov.
On September 5, 1918, the Council of the People’s Commissaries ordered that the names of persons shot by order of the Extraordinary Commission should be published, with full particulars of their cases, a decision which was flouted by the Extraordinary Commission, as we shall see. The resolution of the Council of People’s Commissaries was published in the Severnaya Communa, evening edition, November 9, 1918, and reads as follows:
The Council of the People’s Commissaries, having considered the report of the chairman of the Extraordinary Commission, finds that under the existing conditions it is most necessary to secure the safety of the rear by means of terror. All persons belonging to the White Guard organizations or involved in conspiracies and rebellion are to be shot. Their names and the particulars of their cases are to be published.
On September 10, 1918, the Severnaya Communa published in its news columns the two following despatches:
Jaroslavl, September 9th.—In the whole of the Jaroslavl Government a strict registration of the bourgeoisie and its partizans has been organized. Manifestly anti-Soviet elements are being shot; suspected persons are being interned in concentration camps; non-working sections of the population are being subjected to compulsory labor.
Tyer, September 9th.—The Extraordinary Commission has arrested and sent to concentration camps over 130 hostages from among the bourgeoisie. The prisoners include members of the Cadet Party, Socialists-Revolutionists of the Right, former officers, well-known members of the propertied class, and policemen.
Two days later, September 12th, the same journal contained the following:
Atkarsk, September, 11th.—Yesterday martial law was proclaimed in the town. Eight counter-revolutionaries were shot.
On September 18, 1918, the Severnaya Communa published the following evidences of the wide-spread character of the terrorism which the Bolsheviki were practising:
In Sebesh a priest named Kikevitch was shot for counter-revolutionary propaganda and for saying masses for the late Nicholas Romanov.
In Astrakhan the Extraordinary Commission has shot ten Socialists-Revolutionists of the Right involved in a plot against the Soviet power. In Karamyshev a priest named Lubinoff and a deacon named Kvintil have been shot for revolutionary agitation against the decree separating the Church from the State and for an appeal to overthrow the Soviet Government. In Perm, in retaliation for the assassination of Uritzky and for the attempt on Lenin, fifty hostages from among the bourgeois classes and the White Guards were shot.
The shooting of innocent hostages is a peculiarly brutal form of terrorism. When it was practised by the Germans during the war the world reverberated with denunciation. That the Bolsheviki ever were guilty of this crime, so much more odious than anything which can be charged against czarism, has been many times denied, but the foregoing statement from one of their most influential official journals is a complete refutation of all such denials. Perm is more than a thousand miles from Petrograd, where the assassination of Uritzky occurred, and no attempt was ever made to show that the fifty hostages who were shot, or any of them, were guilty of any complicity in the assassination. It was a brutal, malignant retaliation upon innocent people for a crime of which they knew nothing. The famous “Decree No. 903,” signed by Trotsky, which called for the taking of hostages as a means of checking desertions from the Red Army, was published in Izvestia, September 18, 1918: