A more systematic approach in dealing with hostages was adopted in the summer of 1919 in connection with Denikin’s advance toward Moscow and the need to evacuate prisoners and hostages to prevent their falling into White hands. At this time, according to Drugov, Soviet Russian jails held 12,000 hostages. Dzerzhinskii instructed his staff to work out priorities to establish the order in which hostages would be shot as the need arose. With the help of a certain Dr. Kedrov, Latsis and his fellow Chekists divided the hostages into seven categories, the principal criterion being the victim’s personal wealth. The richest hostages, to whom were added ex-officials of the tsarist police, were placed in Category 7; they were to be executed first.
Unlike the mass murder of Jews by the Nazis, every aspect of which is known in sickening detail, even the general course of the Communist holocaust of 1918–20 remains concealed. The executions were often made public, but they were invariably carried out in secret. Of the few available accounts, some of the best are by German journalists in Russia, especially those published in the Berlin
Details of these wholesale nocturnal executions are kept secret. It is said that on [Petrovskii] Square, brilliantly lighted with arc lamps, a squad of Soviet soldiers are kept always in readiness to receive victims from the great prison. No time is wasted and no pity expended. Anyone who does not place himself willingly on the place of execution and range himself according to order in the ranks of those about to be executed is simply dragged there.
These practices recall authenticated accounts from Nazi extermination camps. As for the executioners, the correspondent had this to say:
It is related of some sailors who participated in the executions almost every night that they contracted the execution habit, executions having become necessary to them, just as morphia is to morphia maniacs. They volunteer for the service and cannot sleep unless they have shot some one dead.
Families were not notified of pending or completed executions.*
The worst bestialities were committed by some of the provincial Chekas—which operated at a distance from the eyes of central organs and had no fear of being reported on by foreign diplomats or journalists. There exists a detailed description of the operations of the Kiev Cheka in 1919 by one of its staff, M. I. Belerosov, a former law student and tsarist officer, which he gave to General Denikin’s investigators.97
According to Belerosov, at first (fall and winter of 1918–19) the Kiev Cheka went on a “continuous spree” of looting, extortion, and rape. Three-quarters of the staff were Jews, many of them riffraff incapable of any other work, cut off from the Jewish community although careful to spare fellow Jews.* This “cottage industry” phase in the Kiev Cheka’s Red Terror, as Belerosov calls it, later gave way to “factorylike” procedures dictated from Moscow. At its height, in the summer of 1919, before the city fell to the Whites, the Kiev Cheka had 300 civilian employees and up to 500 armed men.
Death sentences were meted out arbitrarily: people were shot for no apparent reason and equally capriciously released. While in Cheka prisons they never knew their fate until that dreaded moment at night when they were called out for “questioning”:
