I will not describe in detail my moral and physical sufferings, the blows, the insults, the attempts to extract information from me by provocateur methods, which I endured while in the custody of the Batoum Tcheka. Suffice it to say that I was finally taken to be examined at two o'clock in the morning. They again went through my biography for the last few years with the greatest exactitude, and proposed that I should confess everything and name my principal accomplices, ten in number (the number was given quite correctly). Persuasion was exchanged for abuse, and abuse for revolver shots over my head to intimidate me.
I denied my guilt, and refused to name any accomplices. I and three other men were taken into the yard to be shot. They killed one prisoner two paces from me. The second likewise was shot dead. The third fell, covered with blood. They yelled at me:
"Now it's your turn!"
I stood beside the bodies of my companions in imprisonment. Almost touching my head with the muzzles of their revolvers, the Tchekists exclaimed:
"Now confess!"
I was silent. For some reason they did not kill me. Probably my life was still useful to them in some way.
I spent a few days in the prison of the Batoum Tcheka. Then they took me to the Trans-Caucasian Tcheka at Tiflis; its headquarters were in the Sololaki quarter, in the centre of the town. As regards cruelty, there was no difference between the regime there and that at Batoum. The president and omnipotent master of the Trans-Caucasian Tcheka was at that time the well-known Tchekist Mogilevsky,[[4]] who was killed not long ago in an aeroplane accident.
Blood was flowing in streams in the Caucasus. The Communists were taking a triple vengeance on their prisoners for the murder of Vorovsky in Switzerland, the insurrection in Georgia and Lord Curzon's ultimatum. In the countless prisons of the Caucasus thousands of people were being slaughtered daily.
The Caucasus has not yet been finally pacified by the Communists, and at the time of which I write the whole country was ablaze with civil war. Insurgent bands burst into the towns and hanged all the Bolsheviks. The latter replied by intensifying their already merciless reign of terror.
One day the rebels descended on the "Kursk settlement," close to Vladikavkaz, and, among other things, drove off the herds belonging to the Soviet. A pursuit was set on foot, headed by the celebrated executioner, the Lett Shtybe, President of the Gpu[[5]] of the Mountain Republic. The rebel band went into hiding in the mountains, taking the cattle along with it, and could not be traced. The Tchekists succeeded in discovering and surrounding in the mountains only one rebel leader.