In the same letter the writer refers to the Bolshevist plans of extending their power to Asia and Africa, and discusses the part played by the Jews in the Bolshevist régime in Russia.
“... Bolshevist Russia is a channel of communication to the Committee of Union and Progress, to Egypt, India, and Afghanistan. Unless beaten by us, the Bolshies will beat us. It’s a side issue for the present, but the danger of their rousing and letting loose the Chinese is not so very remote. They have declared war on Christianity. The Bible to them is a ‘counter-revolutionary’ book, and to be stamped out. They are aiming at raising all non-Christian races against the Christian countries. The Bolshevists form about 5 per cent. of the population of Russia—JEWS (80 to 90 per cent. of the commissaries are Jews), Chinese, Letts, Germans, and certain of the ‘skilled labor’ artisans. The conscribed peasantry, originally captured by the catchwords mentioned in the pamphlets, now often goaded beyond endurance, is rising against them over wide districts. Still conscribed and put up to fight, under severe penalties, they form most of the ‘cannon fodder’ used by the Bolshies. They desert, often en masse, and many a peasant who marched for the Bolshevists last week is fighting for Denikin in the Volunteer Army to-day. Ref. Jews—In towns captured by Bolshevists the only unviolated sacred buildings are the synagogues, while churches are used for anything, from movie-shows to ‘slaughter-houses.’ The Poles, Galicians, and Petlura have committed ‘pogroms’ (massacres of Jews). Not the Russian Volunteer Armies under Denikin. Denikin has, in fact, been so strict in protecting the Jews that he has been accused by his sympathizers of favoring them. If, however, a Commissary, steeped in murder, with torture and rape, with mutilation, happens to be a Jew, as most of them are, should he receive exceptional treatment?”
(“The Horrors of Bolshevism,” p. 5.)
The London Times of December 3, 1919, published the statement of an eye witness of the “reign of torture” under the Bolsheviki at the time of the first capture of Odessa. The witness is the Rev. R. Courtier-Forster, late British Chaplain at Odessa and the Russian Ports of the Black Sea. Space permits the reprint here of only the following passages from this important testimony as to one chapter of the Bolshevist terror:
“While I was still British chaplain of Odessa the city was deluged with blood. When the Bolshevist elements, grafting on to their main support the 4,000 criminals released from the city gaols, attempted to seize the town, people of education, regardless of social position, offered what armed resistance was in their power. Workmen, shop assistants, soldiers, professional men, and a handful of officers fought for freedom and liberty through the streets of the great port for three days and nights against the bloody despotism of the Bolshevists. Tramcars were overturned to make barricades, trenches dug in the streets, machine-guns placed in the upper windows of houses to move the thoroughfare with fire. The place became an inferno. The Bolshevists were victorious. On capturing Odessa Railway Station, which had been defended by a few officers and a number of anti-Bolshevist soldiers, the Bolshevists bayoneted to death the 19 wounded and helpless men laid on the waiting-room floor to await Red Cross succour.
“Scores of other men who fell wounded in the streets also became victims to the triumphant Bolshevist criminals. The majority of these wretched and unhappy sufferers completely disappeared. Inquiries at the hospitals and prisons revealed the fact that they were not there, and no trace of them was to be found. A fortnight later there was a terrible storm on the Black Sea, and the bodies of the missing men were washed up on the rocks of Odessa breakwater and along the shore; they had been taken out to sea in small boats, stones tied to their feet, and then been dropped over alive into deep water. Hundreds of others were captured and taken on board the Almaz and the Sinope, the largest cruiser of the Black Sea Fleet. Here they became victims of unthinkable tortures.
“On the Sinope General Chormichoff and some other personal friends of my own were fastened one by one with iron chains to planks of wood and pushed slowly, inch by inch, into the ship’s furnaces and roasted alive. Others were tied to winches, the winches turned until the men were torn in two alive. Others were taken to the boilers and scalded with boiling steam; they were then moved to another part of the ship and ventilating fans set revolving that currents of cold air might blow on the scalds and increase the agony of the torture. The full names of 17 of the Sinope victims were given me in writing by members of their families or their personal friends. These were lost later when my rooms were raided, my papers seized, and I myself arrested and thrown into prison.
“The house in the Catherine Square in which I was first in captivity afterwards became the Bolshevists’ House of Torture in which hundreds of victims were done to death. The shrieks of the people being tortured to death or having splinters of wood driven under the quick of their nails were so agonizing and appalling that personal friends of my own living more than a hundred yards away in the Vorontsoffsky Pereulok were obliged to fasten their double windows to prevent the cries of anguish penetrating into the house. The horror and fear of the surviving citizens was so great that the Bolshevists kept motor lorries thundering up and down the street to drown the awful screams of agony wrung from their dying victims.
“This House of Torture remains as much as possible in the condition in which the Bolshevists left it and is now shown to those who care to inspect its gruesome and blood-bespattered rooms.
“Week by week the newspapers published articles for and against the nationalization of women. In South Russia the proposal did not become a legal measure, but in Odessa bands of Bolshevists seized women and girls and carried them off to the Port, the timber yards, and the Alexandrovsky Park for their own purposes. Women used in this way were found in the mornings either dead or mad or in a dying condition. Those found still alive were shot. One of the most awful of my own personal experiences of the New Civilization was hearing at night from my bedroom windows the frantic shrieks of women being raped to death in the park opposite. Screams of shrill terror and despair repeated at intervals until they became nothing but hoarse cries of agony like the death calls of a dying animal. This happened not once, or twice, but many times. Never to the day of my death shall I forget the horror of those dreadful shrieks of tortured women, and one’s own utter powerlessness to aid the victims or punish the Bolshevist devils in their bestial orgies.”