An Associated Press despatch of March 22, 1919, states that "a Russian girl of 19 years, who, in December, 1918, had been charged with espionage, was tortured by being pierced thirteen times in the same wound with a bayonet. She lived, however, and made an affidavit to these details."
The same dispatch states that "an examination of dead bodies of persons alleged to have been killed by the Bolsheviki in the Perm district, shows a preponderance of bayonet wounds in the back, but in other instances mouths were slit, fingers and hands cut off, and the heads of the victims smashed."
"Struggling Russia," in its issue of April 5, 1919, informs us that "officers have come out of Petrograd prisons with their nails torn off, and that prisoners after having been fed on herrings were given nothing to drink for two or three days."
A dispatch from Warsaw, dated April 10, 1919, stated that fugitives from Russia were pouring into that city, each of them bringing fresh tales of Bolsheviki horrors. The people in Russia, it was said, were being shot on the least provocation. For instance, men who remained in bed during the cold weather to keep warm because they had no fuel were accused of "discontent" and dragged into the streets and shot. Dead bodies, it was claimed, were left lying in the streets in heaps.
In order to maintain their popularity with the workingmen and with their hired mercenaries, the Bolsheviki paid their supporters enormous wages by means of an unchecked paper issue. In fact they have turned out so many tons of paper money, without financial guarantees of any sort, that today in Russia money has lost practically all its value.
"Struggling Russia," March 22, 1919, publishes an appeal issued in Petrograd and signed by the following organizations: Committee for the Defence of Freedom of the Press; Central Committee of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party; Central Committee of the Party of Socialists-Revolutionists; Central Committee of the Councils of Peasant Deputies and the Union of Workmen-Printers. Among other things the appeal says:
"Civil war has inflamed the whole country. Cities are being destroyed. The war of brother against brother is consuming the strength of our revolutionary democracy. The cannons, secured to guard the conquests of our revolution, shatter monuments, homes, and shrines of art. The cities of Russia fall at the hands of her own citizens....
"The nation is being driven towards ruin. The people are deprived of all liberties won by the revolution."
The April 26, 1919, issue of "Struggling Russia," under the caption, "City of the Dead," describes the deplorable condition of Petrograd as follows:
"Vladimir Bourtzev published in his paper, 'Obscherye Dyelo,' (The Common Cause), appearing in Paris, an interview with a well known pedagogist and journalist, C. L. Avaliani, who recently arrived from Petrograd. Mr. Avaliani lived in Petrograd during the bright, early days of the revolution and has also witnessed the tragic period of the Bolshevist rule:
"'That Petrograd that used to draw to itself the leading social and scientific forces is no more. That living spring that sent upward a spray of rainbow hues and colors has gradually died out and is now finally extinct.
"'There is no scientific activity, no research work, no literary or artistic life. All is leveled down and compressed under one Bolshevist lid. The only burning question is the problem of food. The only blessed object of Bolshevist providence is the remaining bourgeois element, the only axis around which all their creative experiments revolve. On the one hand, those who toil,--and on the other the "parasites," and to the latter class all the members of the liberal professions, all the literateurs, the lawyers and the clergy were assigned. The sympathizers and upholders of the "rule of the Soviets" get a food ticket; all the others are sentenced to starvation.
"'It is a rule that rests solely on bayonets! There is no popular confidence, no social support. It is all regarded as superfluous and a "burgeois" prejudice. The sole means of enlightenment and conviction are the bayonet and machine gun....
"'A real Kingdom of the Dead! Petrograd is empty. Many have been summarily shot, but still more have died from exhaustion and disease, and some have fled. From a population of three million only 976,000 remain.'"
"Struggling Russia," on April 5, 1919, published a detailed list of 76 places or districts in which there were uprisings against the Bolsheviki in the year 1918. In the year 1919 the revolutionary outbreaks seem to have become far more numerous.