On November 5, 1918, Izvestia said:
A riot occurred in the Kirsanoff district. The rioters shouted, “Down with the Soviets.” They dissolved the Soviet and Committee of the Village Poor. The riot was suppressed by a detachment of Soviet troops. Six ringleaders were shot. The case is under examination.
The Weekly Journal of the Extraordinary Commissions to Combat Counter-Revolution is, as the name implies, the official organ in which the proclamations and reports of these Extraordinary Commissions are published. It is popularly nicknamed “The Hangmen’s Journal.” The issue of October 6, 1918 (No. 3), contains the following:
We decided to make it a real, not a paper terror. In many cities there took place, accordingly, mass shootings of hostages, and it is well that they did. In such business half-measures are worse than none.
Another issue (No. 5), dated October 20, 1918, says:
Upon the decision of the Petrograd Extraordinary Commission, 500 hostages were shot.
These are typical extracts: it would be possible to quote from this journal whole pages quite similar to them.
How closely the Extraordinary Commissions copied the methods of the Czar’s secret police system can be judged from a paragraph that appeared in the Severnaya Communa, October 17, 1918:
The Extraordinary Commission has organized the placing of police agents in every part of Petrograd. The Commission has issued a proclamation to the workmen exhorting them to inform the police of all they know. The bandits, both in word and action, must be forced to recognize that the revolutionary proletariat is watching them strictly.
Here, then, is a formidable array of evidence from Bolshevist sources of the very highest authority. It is only a part of the whole volume of such evidence that is available; nevertheless, it is sufficient, overwhelming, and conclusive. If we were to draw upon the official documentary testimony of the Socialist parties and groups opposed to the Bolsheviki, hundreds of pages of records of Schrecklichkeit, even more brutal than anything here quoted, could be easily compiled. Much of this testimony is as reliable and entitled to as much weight as any of the foregoing. Take, for example, the statement of the Foreign Representatives of the Russian Social Democratic Party upon the shooting of six young students arrested in Petrograd: In the New York World, March 22, 1920, Mr. Lincoln Eyre quotes “Red Executioner Peters” as saying: “We have never yet passed the sentence of death on a foreigner, although some of them richly deserved it. The few foreigners who have lost their lives in the Revolution have been killed in the course of a fight or in some such manner.” Shall we not set against that statement the signed testimony of responsible and honored spokesmen of the Russian Social Democratic Party?