“To overcome our enemies we must have our own socialist militarism. We must win over to our side 90,000,000 of the 100,000,000 of population of Russia under the Soviets. As for the rest, we have nothing to say to them; they must be annihilated.”
To be sure that the Jewish Bolsheviks were not boasting, the following report of the American Consul General at Moscow, dated September 3, 1918, is of the utmost significance. This report, which was published in the “Memorandum on Certain Aspects of the Bolshevist Movement in Russia,” Washington, Government Printing Office, 1919, reads in part as follows:
“Since May the so-called Extraordinary Commission to Combat Counter-revolution has conducted an openly avowed campaign of terror. Thousands of persons have been summarily shot without even the form of trial. Many of them have no doubt been innocent of even the political views which were supposed to supply the motive of their execution.”
The American Consul General concludes his report by stating:
“The situation cries aloud to all who will act for the sake of humanity.”[13]
Trotzky made an attempt to justify “mass terror” in an article signed by him in the official daily newspaper Izvestia on January 10, 1919, under the title “Military Specialists and the Red Army.” In this article Trotzky states among other things as follows:
“Terror as the demonstration of the will and strength of the working class, is historically justified, precisely because the proletariat was able thereby to break the political will of the Intelligentsia, pacify the professional men of various categories and work, and gradually subordinate them to its own aims within the fields of their specialties.”[14]
The London Times of November 14, 1919, printed a letter “sent by a British Officer in South Russia to his wife” stating that “the letter is published exactly as sent, except that names and dates have been altered so that the writer and his wife will not be embarrassed.” The officer appeals to his wife to do all she can to put before the British public the information which he gives her as to the atrocities committed by the Bolsheviki which he had himself witnessed while fighting with the army of General Denikin.
“The Bolshevists are devils.... I hope to send you copies of 64 official photos taken by British officers at Odessa when the town was retaken from the Bolshevists.... As no paper will print them I suggest that you should have copies done. If we’re too hard up you could pay for them by sending me no parcels, or selling my Caucasian dagger, or Persian book, or something. And I suggest that you should then do with them as you think fit, to make them most widely known. Their horror may make people realize. They must realize. By God, they shall realize! They show men who’ve been crucified with the torture of the ‘human glove.’ The victim gets crucified, nails through his elbows. The hands are treated with a solution which shrivels the skin. The skin is cut out with a razor, round the wrist, and peeled off, till it hangs by the finger nails—the ‘human glove.’ I’m not sparing you. I hope you’ll show and send them to everybody we know. People at home, apathetic fools they are, do not deserve to be spared. They must be woken up. John and Katie ought to see them. Most of the photos are of women. Women with their breasts cut off to the bone.... Two little bits, ref. Bolshevist atrocities, you might type in as many copies as you can. If you and several others left them in different tea-shops every afternoon, it might touch quite a lot of people. I shall send you chapter and verse if I can. If I haven’t sent chapter and verse in a month, do your best without. Papers are no good, because papers would put it more delicately. We have here at H. Q. passes issued to Bolshevists by commissaries on occupying Ekaterinodar. These passes authorize their holders to arrest any girl they fancy for the use of the soldiery. Sixty-two girls of all classes were arrested like this and thrown to the Bolshevist troops. Those who struggled were killed quite early on. The rest, when used and finished, were mutilated and thrown, dead and dying, into the two small rivers flowing through Ekaterinodar. In all towns occupied by Bolshevists and reoccupied by us ‘slaughter-houses’ are found choked with corpses. Hundreds of ‘suspects,’ men, women, and children, were herded in these—doors and windows manned and the struggling mass fired into until most of them were dead or dying. The doors were then locked and they were left. The stench in these places, I am told, is hair-raising. These ‘slaughter-houses’ are veritable plague spots and have caused widespread epidemics. I want you to proselytize Robinson and galvanize the Colonel and everybody else you can get hold of. I’d like James to see this and No. 47 and Dorothy. Above all the Mater. For I feel sure, that whatever happens, she and you will be glad that I’ve come out.”
(“The Horrors of Bolshevism,” reprinted from The Times, November 14, 1919, pp. 5 and 6.)