Torture and Abuse

The Bolsheviks' secret police tortured detained Ukrainians in the captured cities: interrogations with beatings and torture regardless of sex or age, closet-cells and cellars flooded with water, staged executions, staff executioners paid per person shot. In Kyiv this was put on record by the Red Cross: the report of the Central Committee of the Russian Red Cross Society on the activity of the Kyiv secret police, compiled from the observations of nursing sisters over February - August 1919 and signed by the committee's acting chairman, doctor Lodyzhensky, describes the interrogations: "As soon as a person fell into the power of the ChK [the secret police], he lost all human rights... From the very first interrogation the screaming began... cruel beatings began, accompanied by abuse. Neither age nor sex protected from them" - "the fourteen-year-old daughter of the actress E. K. Chaleeva was cruelly beaten before her mother's eyes, to extract more candid testimony from both daughter and mother"; an investigator beat 60-year-old Vorovskaya in the presence of her arrested daughter^[1]. The arrested Ukrainians were kept in a windowless cellar flooded with water and in a wall closet in which, according to the report, "one could only sit hunched." Interrogation was conducted by staged executions: Ustinsky "was led to the place of execution in the basement, undressed, laid on the floor... The shot did ring out, but calculated so that the bullet flew close but past. So close that... all the skin on Ustinsky's hands was scorched. Such shooting was repeated many times. In the end Ustinsky was shot dead"; Solntsev was forced to attend executions and locked in the basement as "the last living man among the still-warm corpses" - at a night interrogation he went mad, which, at the investigators' demand, was certified by the psychiatrist Kirichevsky, himself a prisoner. One of the sisters summed up seven months of observation thus: "there were no torn-out fingernails, no epaulettes nailed to shoulders, no flayed skin, no people scalded with boiling water. But their whole life was one continuous torture"^[1].

In Odesa an eyewitness who had been held under arrest in the Odesa secret police and published his memoirs there in 1919 under the pseudonym K. Alinin recorded, from the words of the staff executioner Abash, how one of the chiefs of that secret police conducted interrogation: he "'broke a person up by parts.' He would usually sit down before his victim and begin questioning him. - An officer? - he would squint... and, taking aim with his revolver, shoot through the martyr's hand. - A colonel, perhaps? - And the bullet would shatter the elbow"; for each person shot, by the same Abash's words, the secret police paid the executioner^[2].

In Kharkiv Saenko, commandant of the Kharkiv secret police, tortured the interrogated himself: his "favourite method," by testimony collected by the Whites' investigative commission, was this: "he would plunge a dagger a centimetre into the body of the person under interrogation and then turn it in the wound," and the torture went on "in the office of the investigator of the 'special department,' before the eyes of Yakimovich, his assistants and investigator Lyubarsky." The same was independently confirmed by the left SR Karelin, held in the Kharkiv prison: "Usually Saenko shot all the condemned with his own hand... In our presence in the Kharkiv prison he shot a sick man on a stretcher"^[3].