Reprisals against Prisoners and Detainees: Killing of Prisoners and Detainees

The Red Guards shot the prisoners taken at Kruty (a station in the Chernihiv region) with the authorization of Yegorov, commander of the First Revolutionary Army. Lapidus, commissar of the 1st Moscow Red Guard detachment, who was with the prisoners at the station and the day before, together with Zombart, commander of the armored train, had talked the Red Guards out of an immediate reprisal, recounted in his testimony to the investigation in the case of commander-in-chief Muravyov: "The next day, as we were pulling out of Kruty station, the train stopped on the way at Yegorov's order; all the detainees were led out of the carriage, and 300 paces from the train they were shot with explosive bullets. I went up to the dead, then went up to Yegorov and asked why they had been shot. Yegorov, puffing on a cigarette and smiling, replied that he had given the Red Guards permission because they insisted on it"^[1]. Moiseyev, a member of the committee of the First Revolutionary Army, described in his testimony who was shot: "At Kruty station about 20 haidamakas were taken prisoner, among them many gymnasium pupils of about 17. They were taken beyond the station and shot in the most shameless manner. There was an outrageous case when one youth ran away from that place, but he was chased down, brought back to the same spot wearing only his underwear and shot" - and specified: "this was done from the train commanded by Yegorov"^[1]. Babenko, commander of the Moscow detachment, captured the prisoners, and Muravyov had appointed Yegorov commander of the First Army - both links are recorded in the investigation materials^[1]. The investigation clarified the number of those shot: Tsvanger, secretary of the army committee, corrected her testimony, naming 24 people instead of the earlier 150, and a member of the investigative commission certified the correction^[2]. The sources differ in describing the manner of the killing: Sotnyk Averkii Honcharenko, who commanded the Ukrainian detachment at Kruty, wrote in his memoirs that the prisoners were not shot but bayoneted, whereas the documents of the Soviet investigation record shooting with explosive bullets^[2].

Retreating from Kharkiv in June 1919, the Bolsheviks' secret police killed its own prisoners and hostages - Ukrainians held in its jails without trial. By the count given in a summary of the Whites' Information Section, over the months of the Bolshevik occupation of Kharkiv more than 1,000 people were shot: 40-50 were killed daily, "and in the last days this figure rose sharply"; among the named dead were former governor Bantysh with his son, generals Nechaev and Kuskov, prince Putyatin^[3]. Excavations after the Bolsheviks left yielded 239 bodies; forensic medical examination established facts of burial alive, of torment and of torture. In the concentration camp the secret police had set up on Chaikovska street, 33 bodies of executed hostages were dug up^[3]. A witness from the camp hostile to the Whites - the left SR Karelin, held in the Kharkiv prison - confirmed both the routine and the last day: Saenko, commandant of the Kharkiv secret police, "usually shot all the condemned... with his own hand," and "on the last day of our stay in the Kharkiv prison... 120 people were shot in the back yard of our prison"^[4]. There were no sentences: Kharkiv secret police investigators Portugeis and Feldman, by the documents studied by the historian Melgunov, "in 1919 shot people without any protocols at all" - by a pencilled resolution, "Baeva, as an incorrigible criminal, to be shot"^[4]. Before leaving neighbouring Vovchansk the Bolsheviks shot 64 hostages, among them the headmistress of the girls' gymnasium^[3]. In the settlement of Velykyi Burluk in the same Vovchansk district the Bolsheviks executed the entire family of prince Vadbolsky - nine people, among them two 80-year-old women and an English governess; the compilers of the summary recorded: "they were stripped naked, led behind the house church, candles were lit, they were ordered to kneel and pray, and then, to whistling and shouting, their ears were cut off, they were hacked with sabres and, as the victims lost consciousness, finished off with shots"^[3].

In the autumn of 1921 the soldiers of the Army of the Ukrainian People's Republic (UNR), who had retreated across the Zbruch River in November 1920, formed detachments and returned to Ukraine to raise an uprising against Soviet rule. This raid is known as the Second Winter Campaign^[5]. On November 17, 1921, occupation troops under the command of Kotovsky encircled the UNR detachment near the village of Mali Mynky in the north of Zhytomyr Oblast^[5].
The captured Ukrainians were taken to the neighbouring village of Bazar and locked in the church. A visiting commission of the Cheka - the secret police of Soviet Russia, predecessor of today's FSB - arrived from Kyiv to judge them; the Communists called it the «Extraordinary Five». Its resolution, signed in Bazar on November 22, 1921, was entered into the collection of orders to the troops of the Kyiv Military District as No. 2578 of November 26, 1921^[6].
The Russian commission described the battle as follows: «Over 400 men were cut down in the battle and 537 captured, including the wounded… In all, 443 men appeared before the extraordinary commission (the Five); the rest died of their wounds before the commission arrived or were in grave condition and left until recovery»^[6].
The commission recorded the motive for the execution in the same document: «Guided by the dictates of revolutionary conscience… and in order to prevent similar crimes… and to show the entire capitalist world and its hirelings that the power of the Soviets mercilessly punishes anyone who attempts to disrupt its peaceful work, the Extraordinary Five resolves: 1. The persons listed in the annex hereto, numbering 359, as malicious, active bandits - TO BE SHOT»^[6].
The fate of the remaining Ukrainian prisoners the commission set out in the same document: forty-one men of the senior command and civil administration it ordered sent for further interrogation by the investigative organs, and forty-two former Red Army soldiers, captured a year earlier, to the special department of the Kyiv Military District for screening^[6].
The resolution was signed by commission chairman Garkavy, members Livshits, Ivanov, Kotovsky and Frinovsky, and secretary Litvinov. Kotovsky, who put his signature under the death sentence, commanded the very troops that had encircled the detachment at Mali Mynky. The order for the district was signed by district commander Yakir, member of the district Revolutionary Military Council Zatonsky, and district chief of staff Pauka^[6].
The Soviet command offered the prisoners a transfer into the Red Army; not one agreed^[7][8]. The colonizers carried out the execution in front of people herded to watch: the day before, they forced local peasants to dig a long ditch in a ravine near Bazar, and brought in the residents of the surrounding villages to the execution site^[6]. Before the ditch one of the commissars asked once more who wished to join the Red Army. From the ranks came the answer: «We will not serve you!.. Shoot!.. The people will not forgive you for this!»^[6]. The condemned embraced and sang «Shche ne vmerla Ukraina» - the song that seventy years later, after Ukraine declared independence in 1991, became the national anthem of Ukraine and remains so to this day^[9]. To the sound of the anthem, Soviet troops shot all 359 Ukrainian prisoners near the village of Bazar^[6][7]. The testimonies were gathered by a courier of the Ukrainian underground who visited Mali Mynky and Bazar immediately after the execution^[6].
The exact day of the execution differs between sources, ranging from November 21 to 23^[6][8][5].
The list of all 359 executed men, name by name, was published by Sotnyk O. Shpilinskyi in Kalisz in 1932; the list was later reprinted together with the text of the resolution^[6].
Historian Larysa Yakubova writes: «This execution became a tragic symbol of the Ukrainian Revolution of 1917—1921. The armed struggle of the regular UNR Army came to an end»^[7].

The special department of the Caucasus Labor Army carried out mass shootings uncontrolled even by its own command: army commissar Vrachev complained that of them "...almost nothing is known not only to the Revolutionary Tribunal or the Political Department of the army, but to me or the army commander either"^[10]. During the disarmament of May 1922 people were first captured and then shot: "up to 30 'bandits' were captured and shot, and their property was confiscated by the authorities"^[10].

The USSR shot nearly all those arrested in the course of the operation of 1925 - people already in the hands of the troops and the OGPU (the political police, a predecessor of today's FSB). Historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov write: "The total number of arrested exceeded 300. Of the total number of arrested, 105 were shot on the spot; against 183 an investigation was opened, which also ended in extrajudicial shooting; 21 were exiled"^[10]. Even the OGPU's own count found few "active" ones among them: the survey submitted to Stalin names 50 "active bandits and prominent counter-revolutionary figures", while "In all, 400 bandits and elements abetting them have been arrested"^[11] - those shot were mostly not leaders but rank-and-file detainees whose guilt was established by no court. So was killed the operation's chief prisoner as well: imam Nazhmuddin Gotsinsky - the spiritual head of the resistance in Dagestan and Chechnya, detained on 5 September 1925 and sentenced in Rostov-on-Don - was shot, in the words of a highlander emigre writing in the Paris journal Prométhée in 1930, "Il fut fusillé sans jugement dans les souterrains du Guépéou de Rostov" - without trial, in the cellars of the GPU in Rostov^[12].

The USSR shot arrested Chechens - including captured leaders of the uprisings. In March 1932 the Nozhay-Yurt district of Chechnya revolted against the forced merging of households into kolkhozes ("collectivization"); historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov write: "The five captured leaders of the uprising were soon shot"^[10]. Next the Chekists came for the clergy - Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov continue: "Arrests befell some well-known Chechen sheikhs, and Kana-Sheikh Khantiev was shot in April 1933"^[10]. Kana-Sheikh Khantiev was a spiritual mentor of Muslims (a sheikh) from the village of Lakha-Nevre, today's Nadterechnoye; researcher A. Dukhaev, quoted by historian K. G. Dendiev, writes of him: "He was arrested for the last time on 17 March 1933, at the age of 85... and on 9 April of the same year sentenced to the supreme measure of punishment. The sentence was carried out on 10 May 1933. In 1990 Kana-Sheikh Khantiev was rehabilitated"^[13]. The sources diverge on the date of the execution: April or 10 May 1933. The count of those shot is not limited to the top: the Chechen historian A. G. Avtorkhanov, who worked in Chechnya in those years and later wrote about it in emigration, writes that in the case of the "Chechen nationalist center", fabricated by the OGPU (the political police, a predecessor of today's FSB), rank-and-file people were shot as well - how many, it is impossible to establish^[14].

On 11 July 1937 the occupation authorities approved the number of people "subject to shooting" in Chechnya: 862 "kulaks" (peasants whom the colonizer deemed "well-off") and 555 "criminals" - 1,417 people in all^[13]; operational order No. 00447 of Yezhov, the People's Commissar (minister) of Internal Affairs of the USSR, of 30 July records for the ChIASSR: 500 people - to be shot (the order's "first category")^[15]. Historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov write of the executed writers: "of the 12 members of the Chechen-Ingush Union of Writers 9 were arrested, 7 convicted, among them four - S. Baduev, A. Dudayev, Sh. Aiskhanov, S. Oziev - sentenced to be shot"^[10]. The NKVD (a predecessor of today's FSB) arrested one of those four - the writer Abdi Dudayev - on 24 November 1937 "without the prosecutor's sanction", on the standard charge of "anti-Soviet agitation", and on 2 December, by decision of the "troika under the NKVD of the ChIASSR", the Chekists shot him - eight days from arrest to killing; the finding on his case of 13 May 1958 states: "The investigation of Dudayev's case was conducted in violation of the law; confrontations with witnesses were not held"^[13]. Moscow personally confirmed the lists of detainees for shooting: Stalin, Molotov and Zhdanov signed the list of 7 December 1937, and on 28 December the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR passed 32 death sentences on it^[13]; on 12 September 1938 the Politburo confirmed a new list of those subject to its court: of the 61 under investigation, 50 went under the case of the "bourgeois-nationalist center", and 55 of them stood "in the shooting article"^[13]. On 29 June 1938 the Military Collegium sentenced a large group of the republic's technical intelligentsia to various terms, and 30 people to be shot - the Chekists shot them the same day^[13]. The indictment in the case of Porubay - deputy People's Commissar (minister) of Internal Affairs of the republic, put on trial after the change of course - states: "Falsified the investigative cases of Khamzatkhanov, Aliev, Khasiev, Kadilov, Ukhuev, Mutushev; all these persons were sentenced by decision of the troika to VMN" - "VMN" meant execution by shooting^[13]. The Chekists dumped the bodies of the killed into two trench-pits at the central cemetery of Grozny - the historian T. U. Elbuzdukayeva writes: there, "in October, November and December 1937", they dumped "the bodies of the shot"^[13]. A. Bozhedomov opened the burial in the summer of 1990 - by excavations with the participation of members of the Chechen-Ingush "Memorial" and staff of the museum of local history^[13].

In April-May 1943 officers of the Soviet NKVD (predecessor of today's FSB), led by Kolesnikov, Deputy People's Commissar (Minister) of Internal Affairs of the republic, in the course of "anti-banditry operations" detained Chechens "suspected of ties with bandits" and shot them "unlawfully, without trial or investigation" - 25 people in two months, "citizens guilty of nothing whatsoever": in the village of Bachi-Yurt, on the orders of cavalry platoon commander Volosov, the convoy shot 17 of 19 detainees, among them a 15-year-old girl; in the village of Belty a convoy headed by Soviet militia section commander Dubasov shot four people "without any pretext whatsoever" and delivered their corpses to the district branch of the NKVD; at the Kuloi hamlet Meishvili, a battalion commander of the NKVD troops (predecessors of today's Rosgvardia), shot the brothers Baisar and Baim Bataev, Dzhamalani Pitalov and Mavla Chebiev^[16]. The executioners wrote the shootings off as "attempted escape," and Kolesnikov issued "findings that the use of weapons had been proper"; all this was established by the Chief Military Prosecutor's Office following a letter from the Chechen Dokhtukaev, written from exile - the results were reported in 1957 to Bulganin, head of the government of the USSR, but no one was ever brought to court: the ten-year statute of limitations had expired^[16].