Communism -- Soviet Union; Mongolia -- Description and travel
embankments this giant of nature flung upward with a suddenness that
leaves man but a pigmy in force a great wall of ice fifteen to twenty
feet high, which the peasants call “Zaberega” and through which they
cannot get to the river without cutting out a road. One incredible feat
I saw the giant perform, when a block many feet thick and many yards
square was hurled through the air and dropped to crush saplings and
little trees more than a half hundred feet from the bank.
Watching this glorious withdrawal of the ice, I was filled with terror
and revolt at seeing the awful spoils which the Yenisei bore away
in this annual retreat. These were the bodies of the executed
counter-revolutionaries--officers, soldiers and Cossacks of the former
army of the Superior Governor of all anti-Bolshevik Russia, Admiral
Kolchak. They were the results of the bloody work of the “Cheka” at
Minnusinsk. Hundreds of these bodies with heads and hands cut off, with
mutilated faces and bodies half burned, with broken skulls, floated and
mingled with the blocks of ice, looking for their graves; or, turning
in the furious whirlpools among the jagged blocks, they were ground and
torn to pieces into shapeless masses, which the river, nauseated with
its task, vomited out upon the islands and projecting sand bars. I
passed the whole length of the middle Yenisei and constantly came across
these putrifying and terrifying reminders of the work of the Bolsheviki.
In one place at a turn of the river I saw a great heap of horses, which
had been cast up by the ice and current, in number not less than three
hundred. A verst below there I was sickened beyond endurance by the
discovery of a grove of willows along the bank which had raked from the
polluted stream and held in their finger-like drooping branches human
bodies in all shapes and attitudes with a semblance of naturalness
which made an everlasting picture on my distraught mind. Of this pitiful
gruesome company I counted seventy.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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