Decree No. 903: Seeing the increasing number of deserters, especially among the commanders, orders are issued to arrest as hostages all the members of the family one can lay hands on: father, mother, brother, sister, wife, and children.
The evening edition of Severnaya Communa, September 18, 1918, reported a meeting of the Soviet of the first district of Petrograd, stating that the following resolution had been passed:
The meeting welcomes the fact that mass terror is being used against the White Guards and higher bourgeois classes, and declares that every attempt on the life of any of our leaders will be answered by the proletariat by the shooting down not only of hundreds, as the case is now, but of thousands of White Guards, bankers, manufacturers, Cadets, and Socialists-Revolutionists of the Right.
On the following day, September 19th, the same journal quoted Zinoviev as saying:
To overcome our enemies we must have our own Socialist Militarism. We must win over to our side 90 millions out of the 100 millions of population of Russia under the Soviets. As for the rest, we have nothing to say to them; they must be annihilated.
Reference has already been made to the fact that the Council of the People’s Commissaries ordered that the Extraordinary Commission publish the names of all persons sentenced to be shot, with particulars of their cases, and the further fact that the instruction was ignored. It is well known that great friction developed between the Extraordinary Commissions and the Soviet power. In many places the Extraordinary Commissions not only defied the local Soviets, but actually suppressed them. Naturally, there was friction between the Soviet power and its creature. There were loud protests on the part of influential Bolsheviki, who demanded that the Chresvychaikas be curbed and restrained and that the power to inflict the death penalty be taken from them. That is why the resolution of September 5th, already quoted, was passed. Nevertheless, in practice secrecy was very generally observed. Trials took place in secret and there was no publication, in many instances, of results. Reporting a meeting of the Executive Committee of the Moscow Soviet, which took place on October 16, 1918, Izvestia, the official Bolshevist organ, contained the following in its issue of the next day:
The report of the work of the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission was read at a secret session of the Executive Committee. But the report and the discussion of it were held behind closed doors and will not be published. After a debate the doors of the Session Hall were thrown open.
From an article in the Severnaya Communa, October 17, 1918, we learn that the Extraordinary Commission “has registered 2,559 counter-revolutionary affairs and 5,000 arrests have been made”; that “at Kronstadt there have been 1,130 hostages. Only 183 people are left; 500 have been shot.”
Under the heading, “The Conference of the Extraordinary Commission,” Izvestia of October 19, 1918, printed the following paragraph:
Petrograd, October 17th.—At to-day’s meeting of the Conference of the Extraordinary Investigating Commission, Comrades Moros and Baky read reports giving an account of the activities of the Extraordinary Commission in Petrograd and Moscow. Comrade Baky threw light on the work of the district commission of Petrograd after the departure of the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Moscow. The total number of people arrested by the Extraordinary Commission amounted to 6,220. Eight hundred people were shot.