RED TERROR

There was virtually no control over the application of Red Terror by sailors, from both the Baltic and Black Sea Fleets. Assembled into anti-profiteer detachments, they based themselves at railway stations and seized any articles at random. There was no appeal. One man whose goods had been impounded described the head of one these groups: ‘a sailor with high cheekbones, a Mauser on his belt, and a pewter earring in one ear. He was eating salt fish with a wooden spoon, like porridge, and he was not at all eager to talk.’ Their favorite task was spotting disguised burzhui and taking revenge. A group searching a train seized General Abaleshev, who could hardly pass himself off as a worker. He was forced to open his suitcase. Right at the top were his shoulder boards with Tsarist insignia. They shot him beside the track.

Indiscriminate class revenge was the mission of many sailors. In mid-January Bolsheviks from the Black Sea Fleet took part in the confused fighting in Odessa against junker cadets, officers and Ukrainian nationalists. There were estimated to be 11,000 unemployed officers in Odessa alone. ‘An arrested officer has just been led past,’ Yelena Lakier noted in her diary. ‘He was tall and very young. Poor man. Are they taking him to the Almaz, a cruiser anchored in the port? They take officers there, torture them and then dump the bodies in the sea.’ The next day, when their apartment was searched by sailors, one of them poked around under beds and cupboards with a sword. He boasted to Yelena Lakier ‘I took this sword from an officer on the Chumnaya Hill, then I finished him off.’ ‘Didn’t you feel sorry for killing him? He was a fellow Russian.’ ‘Who should feel sorry for killing a counter-revolutionary? We “bathed” a lot of them from the Almaz.’

Echoes of the atrocities in the south soon reached Moscow. A friend of the writer Ivan Bunin who had just returned from Simferopol in the Crimea reported that ‘indescribable horror’ was taking place there. ‘Soldiers and workers are “walking up to their knees in blood.” An old colonel was roasted alive in the furnace of a locomotive.’ On 14 January, Bolshevik sailors from the Black Sea Fleet killed some 300 victims at Evpatoria by throwing them in the sea from the steamship Romania, having first broken their arms and legs. ‘The most senior officer, who had been wounded, was picked up and thrown headfirst into the ship’s furnace. On the transport Truevor, the officers were brought up from the hold one by one, and their bodies were mutilated while they were still alive before being thrown overboard.’

Antony Beevor, Russia (137-138). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.