Terror

In captured Kyiv the occupiers shot hundreds of people over 1919: they killed at night, printed the names of the dead daily in a newspaper, and in the last week of August proclaimed a "week of red terror." An eyewitness - Kateryna Koval-Medzvedska, a Kyivan who lived seven months in the city under Moscow's occupation, from February to August 1919 - recorded that on 24 August 1919 "a 'week of red terror' was officially proclaimed - blood flowed in rivers. Peters, Voroshilov and Latsis, all-powerful that day, took no account of government members Rakovsky, Manuilsky and others who signed orders for releases from the Cheka, but ordered those people shot 'in the order of red terror.'" The shooting was done at night: "From 2 to 4 o'clock the sinister night silence of the unhappy, tormented city was broken by single shots and the piercing sounds of a car siren. People living near one of the 17 chekas scattered across the city understood that our brothers were being shot, their cries and groans drowned out by the red executioners with the shrill piercing sounds of sirens"^[1].

From 24 to 30 August inclusive the newspaper Izvestia - the organ of the Kyiv occupation authority - daily announced lists of dozens shot "in the order of red terror"; on 26 August "a list was announced of 167 persons shot 'in the order of red terror'" - among them people whose release order the eyewitness had read two days earlier in the chancellery of the central organ of the colonial administration (the VUTsIK). "And how many people perished without announcement, simply vanished without trace!"^[1]. One of those newspaper lists survived in a reprint: Shumakher, acting head of the Whites' Information Section, reproduced in "Summary of Information on the Atrocities and Lawlessness of the Bolsheviks" No. 25 a list printed in the Kyiv Izvestia of people shot by the occupiers: a professor, a gymnasium teacher, merchants, house-owners, attorneys, former Kyiv governor Sukovkin, former vice-governor Neklyudov, 80-year-old Slynko^[2]. The very form of the announcements came from Moscow: the RSFSR government's resolution "On Red Terror" of 5 September 1918, signed by justice minister Kursky and interior minister Petrovsky, required "publishing the names of all those shot, as well as the grounds for applying this measure to them" - the Kyiv lists with the formula "in the order of red terror" delivered names and grounds, exactly what the resolution demanded^[3].

The head of the Soviet colonial administration of Ukraine, Rakovsky, wrote to Lenin on 9 August 1919 that the Kyiv secret police had been carried away with executions by hastily drawn-up lists and that more than 300 people had been shot in Kyiv in total^[4], while Latsis, chairman of the Ukrainian secret police, gave his own statistics in his 1920 report book: "Shot by the Kyiv Extraordinary Commission jointly with the V.U.Ch.K. - 825" people in 1919 up to October^[5].