World War, 1914-1918 -- Personal narratives, English; World War, 1914-1918 -- Russia (Federation) -- Siberia
It is no part of my business to deal with atrocities such as have
disgraced the proletarian dictatorship of Moscow. Where I could not
avoid them in my narrative of events, I have done so without reference
to the revolting details which everybody so hungrily devours. History
shows that it is not possible to avoid these excesses whenever the
safeguards of civil order are swept away by the passions of the mob. Our
own revolutionaries should remember this before and not after the event.
They should be considered not as a risk but as a certainty when once the
foundations of order are uprooted. At Perm the breaking of the ice
revealed some of the truth, and it formed quite sufficient evidence of
the callous behaviour of the Bolshevik administrators.
Below a steep bank a few yards from the Terrorist headquarters a small
shed was erected on the ice. It was called a wash-house, and during the
day washing was done there. At night the place, apparently, was, like
the streets, deserted, but as a square hole was cut through the ice, it
was an ideal place for the disposal of bodies, dead or alive. The people
knew that after an inspection of the better-class homes by officers of
the Soviet if there was evidence of valuable loot; the whole family
would quietly disappear, and the valuables were distributed by sale, or
otherwise, amongst the Soviet authorities. If a workman protested
against this violence, he disappeared, too, in the same secret fashion.
The poor women who used the shed during the day for its legitimate
purpose told from time to time grim stories of blood and evidence of
death struggles on the frozen floor as they began the morning's work.
Several thousand people were missing by the time the Koltchak forces
captured the town.
The ice in the shelter of the bank began to thaw before the more exposed
part of the river, which enabled the people whose friends and neighbours
were missing to put a rude and ineffective screen below the shed in the
hope of recovering the bodies of some of their friends. I knew about the
shed but not about the screen, until I was informed by Regt.
Sergeant-Major Gordon that he had seen several hundred bodies taken from
the river. The following morning I walked into the crowd of anxious
people who were watching the work. The official in charge told me quite
simply that they had not had a very good morning, for three hours' work
had only produced some forty bodies. I looked at these relics of the new
order; they were of both sexes and belonged to every condition of life,
from the gruff, horny-handed worker to the delicately-nurtured young
girl. A miscellaneous assortment of the goods, among other things,
revolutions are bound to deliver.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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