them. He asked permission to tell his wife, who, he explained, was following him in a few minutes to the house of a friend, and would be extremely anxious The leader of the at his nonappearance. declaring: request, the refused band He also "She will know soon enough." declined to permit one of the men to ring the bell and inform his family he had been arrested.

The guards led him downstairs. In the vestibule they shot him dead, and, leaving his body in a pool of blood, lighted Three cigarettes and went their way. minutes afterward his wife came down on her way to join him at tea, and found Two her husband's corpse in the hall. hours later on the same afternoon other Red Guards came to the same house and this execution," carried out more From

44

time in the flats of the victims.
day to day one's social circle diminished.
Friends with whom one conversed in the
the following
had vanished
evening
morning.

THIEVES FALL OUT

Sometimes the Red Guards in searching houses were content with giving insults and taking loot. Frequently their object was not confined to murder or robbery, but to inflict the greatest possible amount of mental distress and harassment by repeated and systematic visitations, which might or might not result in assassination.

As many as five search parties came to my flat in one morning. Some friends of mine had their house thrown into the wildest disorder and confusion, and everything overhauled seventeen times in one day. Many officers were done to death under circumstances of unexampled torThere was no honor ture and cruelty. even among thieves, and for nearly a year one never had a night's rest without being awakened by the tumult of shots fired in the street without, or the shrieks of agony of some hapless victim of the New Civilization.

On one such occasion when the night was more hideous than usual by reason of the incessant firing, a conflict took place

a right to.

The

The larger party were the victors. four members of the smaller band were When on the all left dead in the street. following morning the death carts made their rounds to gather up the victims of the night, a pocket of one of the dead bandits was found to have been overlooked by the triumphant murderers; in it was found a further 20,000 rubles.

Life became ever of lighter value. The brutality of assassination increased daily. There lived a few houses further down the street in which I had my quarters the young wife and little son of a junior officer, absent at the time in Petrograd. She went one day to draw her allowance, which amounted to only a few pounds. Small as the sum was, it aroused the cupidity of a few watchf 1 Bolsheviki. the following morning her apartment was found looted, and she and her boy both dead in the bed, pierced through and through with thrusts from bayonets.

same

On

In the street, the Kanatnaya, another ghastly affair came to my notice. One morning at about 11:30 two quietly dressed ladies were standing at the corA ner waiting the coming of a tramcar. party of Bolsheviki approached and noticed them as members of the persecuted Without the formal"Bourjouy" class. ity of any arrest or mockery of a trialwas no charge possible indeed, there against the two middle-aged, middle-class women setting forth to the town to make some purchases-both were shot dead on the pavement at the street corner. was a return of this wanton brutality and reign of terror which awaited those harassed and luckless citizens who found themselves once again in the clutches of the Red Army after the fall of Odessa in the Spring of 1919.

It

HE defeats

THE

the vanquished Bolsheviki before they The innocent victims were evacuated. numerous, and the photographs, which we reproduce,* with extracts from the evidence given in official documents, reveal the true nature of their martrydom.

On Jan. 17 last the Esthonian troops regained the town of Wesenberg, which had been for some time in the hands of the Bolsheviki. In presence of the Commander of Militia of Küti, the Lieutenant Commander of Militia of Tenneberg, and Drs. Wiren and Utt, many freshly dug graves, pointed out to the liberating forces by the population, were opened.

A few days before, seized by a fury of massacre, the Bolsheviki had slaughtered hundreds of notable people. They had used the abominable methods characteristic of them, and which they employed, according to the report of Prince Lvov, in the case of the members of the royal family, and more recently, on Jan. 28, in the cell of a prison of Petrograd in the case of the four Grand Dukes, put to death, according to the explanation of the assassins, in reprisal for the murders of Liebknecht and Rosa Luxembourg. [See "The Affair of the Grand Dukes," elsewhere in this issue of CURRENT HISTORY.]

The bestiality with which the Bolsheviki carried out their crimes was evidenced by lamentable traces on a considerable extent of ground around the tombs. The soil was covered with pools of blood, fragments of hats and clothing, brains and skulls, to which hair was still adhering. In the first grave sixteen corpses were found and photographed. The following were identified: Dr. Reinik, army physician; Serge Filorenski, orthodox priest; Hospital Nurse Ellenburg of Revel; Gustave Bock, a merchant; Tönis Pödra of Untea; Tonu Poiklik, a railway employe of Wesenberg; Ferdinand Tops of Undla; Rudolf Roost, hospital nurse of Tudalinna; Edvard Sepp of Welso, and a shoemaker, Kolb, of Wesenberg.

In the next grave there were also sixteen victims. The third grave-the largest one-was opened the following day, Jan. 18. It contained fifty victims. A certain number of them were identified, notably landed proprietors, railway and postal employes, and one woman

The photographs mentioned on the preceding page, showing piles of corpses, eyes gouged out and noses cut off, are not reproduced in CURRENT HISTORY.

nurse. The victims had been stripped of all their clothing and their shoes. The heads of thirty-three of them were completely crushed. Besides wounds made by firearms, most of the bodies were pierced by bayonet thrusts, and often horribly disemboweled. The arm and leg bones of almost. all were broken.

Concerning the Bolshevist procedure, one of the hostages, M. A. Munstrum, who miraculously escaped the butchery, gave the following account:

On Jan. 11, in the afternoon, fifty-six of us were brought to the place of execution. A grave had already been dug. We were divided into two groups and lined up at the edge of the grave. There were among us six women who were killed first because their piercing cries resounded disagreeably in the ears of our executioners. One of these women tried to flee. A volley of shots brought her down immediately. She was only wounded. Several Bolsheviki seized her by the legs and dragged her back to the grave, into which they pushed her. Five of the executioners jumped into the hole, fired their guns at her, and stamped on her until her cries ceased. This execution accomplished, they turned to the other unfortunates, who still stood there, terrorstricken. At the word of command a volley of shots resounded. All fell. The victims were thrown into the grave, into which the Red soldiers Jumped to finish them off with the butts of their guns, with their bayonets, and even with their feet.

At Dorpat the Bolsheviki committed the same kind of atrocities as at Wesenberg. On Christmas Eve they assassinated Max von zur Muhler, the wellknown Director of Fisheries. On Dec. 26 were shot Mikkel Kus, Alex Lepp, Alexander Aland, and Karl Soo. On Jan. 9 the Reds assassinated eleven other hostages. All these executions took place on the brink of the Embach River. The corpses were thrown into the water through holes cut in the ice. After Dorpat was retaken by the Esthonian troops the sixteen victims were fished out of the water. It was discovered that they had all been tortured before being put to death. The arm and leg bones of most of them were broken and the skulls crushed. Karl Soo, shot on Dec. 26, had had his eyes put out.

On the eve of their expulsion from Dorpat, on Jan. 14, the Bolsheviki put more

than twenty of their prisoners to death. The official inquest brought to light the details of this last act of ferocity. The unfortunate victims, numbering more than 200, had been incarcerated in the building of the Credit System and the police station; they were assembled and the roll was called; the designated victims, about twenty in number, were then stripped of clothing, shoes, and articles of value, and brought into the cellars of the building of the Credit System, where their skulls were crushed with axes and the butts of guns. The rapid flight of the Reds before the Esthonian Army prevented the Bolsheviki from executing the rest of the prisoners, among whom were nearly eighty women.

The bodies were so horribly disfigured that it was difficult to identify them. The searchers, however, were able to recognize Archbishop Platon, the priest Michel Bleiwe of the Orthodox Church of St. George; the old priest of the Uspenski Church, Nicholas Beshanitzki; a university professor, Dr. Traugott; Herman von Samson Ilimmelstjernade Kavershov, Heinrich von Krause, landed proprietor of Revold; the banker, Arnold V. Tidebohl; Herbert V. Schenk, Baron Konstant von Knorring, Pastor Wilhelm Schwartz, the Councilors of Justice, Gustave Tensmann and Gustave Seeland; the merchant, Susman Kaplan; the potter, Ado Luik; the merchants,

Harry Vogel and Massal, and M. Kärner of the paper Postimees.

Dr. Wolfgang von Revher, who visited the cellars of the Credit System immediately after the execution-the bodies were still warm at the time of his visit -gave the following impressions:

The floor was covered with piles of corpses, heaped upon each other in bizarre positions as Death had surprised them. They formed three layers; they were clad only in their shirts. Almost all bore traces of gunshot, delivered at close range, in the head; the skulls of several were crushed; in one case there was almost nothing left of the skull. Some had been shot several times. The floor and the walls were covered with dried blood and bits of brain. I counted twenty-three corpses. The way in which the bodies were piled made the horrible inventory very difficult. The human remains covered the ground so thickly that it was impossible to put down one's foot without touching a corpse.

A more detailed examination showed that Archbishop Platon had received an explosive bullet in the right eye. The priest Bleiwe had been killed by an axeblow, which had taken away half of his face. The priest Beshanitzki, also killed with an axe, had been struck in the face. These two priests were recognized only with the greatest difficulty. The same applied to Pastor Schwartz, whose head and arms had been cut off. One officer was found, whose epaulettes were fastened to his body with nails.

Ο

N Jan. 30, 1919, a short item appeared in a Bolshevist newspaper at Petrograd, an item printed in small type and lost amid a chaos of decrees. It read as follows:

On Jan. 24, 1919, the Extraordinary Commission for Struggle Against the Counter-Revolution and Speculation ordered that the following persons be shot: Affair 6,440, Lavrentiev, guilty of theft from the tax messenger in Decembrist Street. Affairs 7,354, 7,385, Radtchenko, Tychkine, Polianof for pillage in the Zagorodny Prospekt. Affair 8,819, Koulikov and Petrov, for sacking apartments in Marat and Kirotchnaia Streets. Affair 7,477, Andreef, Dmitriev,

the Russo-Finnish frontier, on Jan. 31. The young man was Count Paul Shuvalov, whose exploit in penetrating to Petrograd in disguise and rescuing Princess Palley, wife of the Grand Duke Paul Alexandrovitch, from the hands of the Bolsheviki, was recounted in L'Illustration, March 8, 1919. A passage in Count Shuvalov's article tells, from a source declared to be impeccable, the short and tragic story of the execution of the four Grand Dukes in the Petrograd Fortress of Peter and Paul.

The Grand Dukes, Count Shuvalov relates, were transferred from the prison of Shpalernia to the headquarters of the Extraordinary Commission on Jan. 28. Believing that the hour of liberation had come, the Grand Dukes departed gladly. They were brought before Skorokhodov, who, having signed a decree of execution four days before, went through the form of a trial as quickly as possible, hastily, reluctantly, like one who considers the proceedings in the light of a boring and completely superfluous ceremony. The prearranged verdict of death was mumbled off within fifteen minutes. In company with another victim-an Englishman, according to the testimony of the

Red Guards-the four Grand Dukes were brought in an automobile truck to the Fortress of Peter and Paul. Locked up in separate cells, they passed their last night on earth within a few steps of the cathedral which holds the remains of their ancestors.

Early next morning the five condemned men were brought together in a large cell. After waiting a few minutes, they saw the door open, and the noncommissioned officer on duty cried out a name. One of the Grand Dukes rose, and went out to answer the summons. He was pushed into another cell, and two Red Guards shot him dead with their revolvers. Again the noncommissioned officer cried a name; a second Grand Duke went out, and met the same fate; and then the third, and fourth; a fifth name was called, and all was over. The names of the two executioners were Blogovidov and Soloviev. The method of execution was a new one, invented by Skorokhodov, (his name, curiously enough, signifies "he who goes quickly,") successor to the hysterical and bloodthirsty Mme. Jakovleva, whose own execution by the Bolsheviki was recently announced, for reasons not given.

TH

come

HE battle-scarred soldiers of Serbia have come back home to find their country more than doubled in size and population, with new frontiers and tariff boundaries, new lines of communication, and even to a large extent new rulers. For half the members of the new Jugoslav Ministry are from beyond the boundary of Serbia proper. The Minister of the Interior is a Croatian. Side by side with the Serbian Army there now exists a Jugoslav Army. How is all this to evolve into one homogeneous State? Such questions are agitating every one in the new Jugoslav nation today. But transcending the scope of merely political considerations

are the very vital problems connected with railway transportation, food supplies, export and import, harbor outlets, and other needs of this kind on which the future economic prosperity of the newly created nation depends.

RAILWAY TRANSPORTATION According to a British correspondent of The Manchester Guardian, the question of Jugoslav transportation is serious. He wrote in April:

There are two gateways to Serbia. The first is from Saloniki up the newly repaired railway line to Uskub, and thence by any available means of transport into Old Serbia. The second is over Croatia or Dalmatia to Belgrade. The traveler

by either route will find himself held up at each stage of the journey by difficulties of transport.

The systematic destruction of the railways by the Bulgarians and Austrians has complicated a thousandfold the difficulties of the Serbians and of the various relief agencies that are at work there. All last Autumn hundreds of British army lorries were at work on the road between Nish and Veles, (on the railway between But although the Saloniki and Uskub.) round trip only takes a few days, all these hundreds of three-ton lorries could only manage to put down twenty tons of This was due to the food daily at Nish. bad condition of the roads, which made it impossible to load the lorries fully, and made it necessary for them to carry a very large quantity of petrol. The drivers spent days climbing in and out of holes on the road. The hardships experienced during the Winter weather by the British drivers on these roads caused heavy losses off among men already worn out by malaria. carried and pneumonia Influenza twenty and thirty men out of some M. T. companies.

The difficulty of getting supplies to repair The gangs delayed the reconstruction of the railway and the repair of the roads. line was opened to Uskub in December; from there to Vranja in January; but between Vranja and Nish a serious and still remained. difficult gap

Between

Nish and Belgrade the line is entirely destroyed and will not be open before the Spring at the earliest.

The narrow-gauge

A

In

It is responsible for the empty shops in Belgrade and for the hospitals idle for lack of medical stores up country. January this year [1919] the medical officer of the British Naval Mission in Belgrade was unable to obtain dressings or instruments from his base or to borrow them from any of the hospitals in Belgrade.

Apart from the transport difficulty, life Enemy is now something like normal. occupation has gone like a bad dream, It is comleaving only bitter memories. ing to seem quite natural to have the Government settled again at Belgrade, the Court in residence, Serbian instead of street corners. Austrian police at the Schools are reopening, dancing classes are already in full swing, and many returning commercial men are beginning to take up the threads of their business. The peasants, who form the vast mathe population, have mostly jority of managed to hide sufficient corn and maize As the army is not for seed and food. yet demobilized, the sowing of the Winter corn has been carried out again by the In most cases the wives who were left behind during the evacuation appear to have struggled hard to keep the farms going during their husbands' abA fair amount of stock has been left, and some peasants are now obtaining compensation for stock and carts carried off.

women.

sence.

One or two districts where the population rebelled against the Bulgarians have been laid waste and the population either killed or left in a wretched condition. Relief work is being undertaken in these areas, though certainly not on a larger scale than is needed.