3. Postnov—mother and sister arrested.
4. Agalakov, A. M.—wife, father, and mother arrested.
5. Haratkviech, B.—wife and sister arrested.
6. Kostylev, V. I.—wife and brother arrested.
7. Smyrnov, A. A.—mother, sister, and father arrested.
8. Chebykin—wife arrested.
In September, 1919, practically all the Bolshevist papers published the following order, signed by Trotsky:
I have ordered several times that officers with indefinite political convictions should not be appointed to military posts, especially when the families of such officers live on the territory controlled by enemies of the Soviet Power. My orders are not being carried out. In one of our armies an officer whose family lives on the territory controlled by Kolchak was appointed as a commander of a division. Consequently, this commander betrayed his division and went over, together with his staff, to the enemy. Once more I order the Military Commissaries to make a thorough cleansing of all Commanding Staffs. In case an officer goes over to the enemy, his family should be made to feel the consequences of his betrayal.
Early in November, 1919, the Petrograd Extraordinary Commission announced that by its orders forty-two persons had been shot. A number of these were ordinary criminals; several others had been guilty of selling cocaine. Among the other victims we find one Maximovich, “for organizing a mass desertion of Red Army soldiers to the Whites”; one Shramchenko, “for participating in a counter-revolutionary conspiracy”; E. K. Kaulbars, “for spying”; Ploozhnikoff and Demeshchenke, “for exciting the politically unconscious masses and hounding them on against the Soviet Power.”
In considering this terribly impressive accumulation of evidence from the Bolshevist press we must bear in mind that it represents not the criticism of a free press, but only that measure of truth which managed to find its way through the most drastic censorship ever known in any country at any time. Not only were the organs of the anti-Bolshevist Socialists suppressed, but even the Soviet press was not free to publish the truth. Trotsky himself made vigorous protest in the Izvestia of the Central Executive Committee (No. 13) against the censorship which “prevented the publication of the news that Perm was taken by the White Guards.” A congress of Soviet journalists was held at Moscow, in May, 1919, and made protest against the manner in which they were restrained from criticizing Soviet misrule. The Izvestia of the Provincial Executive Committee, May 8, 1919, quotes from this protest as follows: