Conditions in the Cheka prisons were generally much worse than in any tsarist jail. A government inspection of the Moscow Taganka jail in October 1918, for example, found overcrowded cells, no water, grossly inadequate rations and heating, and sewage dumped in the courtyard. Nearly half the 1,500 inmates were chronically sick, 10 per cent of them with typhus. Corpses were found in the cells. The Peter and Paul Fortress, that great symbol of the tsarist prison state, was now an even more forbidding place. The Menshevik Dan, who had been imprisoned there in 1896, found himself once again behind its bars in the spring of 1921. Whereas before there had been one man to a cell, there were now two or three; and women were imprisoned there for the first time. Dan was held with hundreds of other prisoners in the basement, where the food stores had been previously kept. Four men shared each tiny cell. The walls 'dripped with damp', there was no light and the prisoners, fed only once a day, were never allowed out for exercise.101 Compared to this the old prison regime in the fortress had been like a holiday camp. Most of its inmates before 1917 had been allowed to receive food and cigarettes, clothing, books and letters from their relatives.
Many of the Cheka's most notorious techniques had been borrowed from the tsarist police. The use of provocateurs, stool-pigeons and methods of torture to extract confessions and denunciations came straight out of the
* Brusilov's brother, Boris, was also arrested at this time, along with three other members of his family. They were 'hostages' and were ordered to be executed if Brusilov joined the anti-Bolsheviks. Boris was ill with influenza and had been literally taken from his sick-bed. He died in prison a few days after his arrest. Whilst in jail he received no medical treatment.
Okhrana's book.* This was hardly surprising — and not just because, in Flaubert's words, 'in every revolutionary there is hidden a gendarme'. The Bolsheviks had sat in tsarist jails for years. Literally they had learned the system from the inside. And they now applied it with a vengeance. Dzerzhinsky had spent half his adult life in tsarist prisons and labour camps before he became head of the Cheka. It was not surprising if he set out to inflict on his victims the same cruelty he had suffered in those years. Hatred and indifference to human suffering were to varying degrees ingrained in the minds of all the Bolshevik leaders — and this was no doubt in part a legacy of their prison years.
The ingenuity of the Cheka's torture methods was matched only by the Spanish Inquisition. Each local Cheka had its own speciality. In Kharkov they went in for the 'glove trick' — burning the victim's hands in boiling water until the blistered skin could be peeled off: this left the victims with raw and bleeding hands and their torturers with 'human gloves'. The Tsaritsyn Cheka sawed its victims' bones in half. In Voronezh they rolled their naked victims in nail-studded barrels. In Armavir they crushed their skulls by tightening a leather strap with an iron bolt around their head. In Kiev they affixed a cage with rats to the victim's torso and heated it so that the enraged rats ate their way through the victim's guts in an effort to escape. In Odessa they chained their victims to planks and pushed them slowly into a furnace or a tank of boiling water. A favourite winter torture was to pour water on the naked victims until they became living
Needless to say, there were many sadists in the Chekas. They treated the tortures as sport, vying with each other to perform the most extreme violence. Some victims recall the Chekists standing about and laughing at their torture. There were even 'human hunts'. Most of the sadists were young men in their teens brutalized by war and revolution. Many were out to prove their 'hardness'. There is also evidence to suggest that many of them may have been non-Russians — Poles, Latvians, Armenians and Jews — in so far as they made up a high proportion of the Cheka. Lenin certainly favoured their employment in the Cheka, claiming that the Russians were 'too soft' to carry out the 'harsh measures' of the Terror. Yet many of the Cheka's torture methods were reminiscent of the brutal forms of killing employed by the Russian peasantry.
* During the 1980s the KGB still trained its recruits with Okhrana manuals (see Kalugin,
Women were also not exempt from the perpetration of sadistic violence. Vera Grebennikova, for example, was alleged to have killed over 700 people, many of them with her bare hands, during two months in Odessa. Rebecca Platinina-Maisel in Arkhangelsk killed over a hundred, including the whole family of her ex-husband whom she crucified in an act of savage revenge.
Such was the brutalizing effect of this relentless violence that not a few Chekists ended up insane. Bukharin said that psychopathic disorders were an occupational hazard of the Chekist profession. Many Chekists hardened themselves to the killings by heavy drinking or drug abuse. For example, the notorious sadist Saenko, the Kharkov master of the 'glove trick', was a cocaine addict. To distance themselves from the violence the Chekists also developed a gangsterlike slang for the verb to kill: they talked of 'shooting partridges', of 'sealing' a victim, or giving him the
Executions were the final product of this machinery of terror. Tens of thousands of summary executions were carried out in courtyards and cellars, or in deserted fields on the edge of towns, during the years of the civil war. Whole prisons would be 'emptied' by the Cheka before a town was abandoned to the Whites. At night the cities tried to sleep to the sound of people being shot. The Bolsheviks themselves, however, did not lose much sleep. In 1919, during a session of Sovnarkom, Lenin wrote a note and passed it to Dzerzhinsky. 'How many dangerous counter-revolutionaries do we have in prison?' Dzerzhinsky scribbled, About 1,500' and returned the note. Lenin looked at it, placed the sign of a cross by the figure, and gave it back to the Cheka boss. That night, 1,500 Moscow prisoners were shot on Dzerzhinsky's orders. This turned out to be a dreadful mistake. Lenin had not ordered the execution at all: he always placed a cross by anything he had read to signify that he had done so and taken it into account. As a result of Dzerzhinsky s simple error 1,500 people lost their lives.103
* * * The Red Terror evoked protests from all quarters of society. Patriarch Tikhon condemned the violence and climate of fear created by the Bolsheviks, citing the prophecy of St Matthew: All they that take the sword shall perish with the sword.' The opposition parties denounced the Terror in their underground newspapers. The famous Anarchist philosopher, Prince Kropotkin, whose daughter had been arrested in August 1918,* denounced the Terror in a long and bitter letter to the Bolshevik leader, who was still recovering from Kaplan's bullets, on 17 September: 'To throw the country into a red terror, even more so to arrest
* She had been on her way to England, where she had good contacts with the Trade Union movement, in order to campaign for food aid to the hungry children of Russia, when she was arrested in Yamburg (GARF, f. 4390, op. 14, d. 57, 1. 7).
hostages, in order to protect the lives of its leaders is not worthy of a Party calling itself socialist and disgraceful for its leaders.' Workers also condemned the bloody terror perpetrated in their name. 'Enough blood! Down with Terror!' proclaimed the All-Ukrainian Trade Union Council in September. 'Red is the colour of truth and justice,' declared the railway workers of Kozlov. 'But under the Bolsheviks it has become the colour of blood.'104
As the 'conscience of the Revolution', Gorky was by far the most outspoken critic of the Terror. Hundreds of people, from poets to peasants, wrote to him pleading for his help to save their loved ones. Gorky felt a strong moral obligation to do what he could for all of them. 'I am their only hope,' he told Ekaterina. This was the point when the humanist in him got the better of the revolutionary: he was more concerned for the individual than any abstract cause. He bombarded the Bolshevik leaders with countless letters demanding the release of innocent individuals from the Cheka jails. Their tone became increasingly irate. 'In my view,' he wrote to Zinoviev in March 1919 protesting against the arrest of an academic, 'such arrests cannot be justified by any political means . . . The disgusting crimes you have perpetrated in Petersburg during the past few weeks have brought shame to the regime and aroused universal hatred and contempt for its cowardice.' The following October he wrote to Dzerzhinsky
