Reprisals against Prisoners and Detainees: Torture and Abuse

The appointed occupation administration used corporal punishment and unlawful arrests: a petition submitted to Tsar Mikhail Fyodorovich by the service Okochans of the Terek town stated that the Kabardian prince Sunchaley Yanglychevich Cherkassky «orders us to be thrown into prison and beaten with the knout without your sovereign knowledge and without guilt»^[1][2].

During the May 1839 invasion of Ichkeria (mountainous south-eastern Chechnya) the imperial troops tortured their captives. The imperial officer Milyutin, a participant of the march, recorded that five Aukhovites (the Aukhovites - a Chechen community in the north-east, by the Kumyk border) captured with weapons after a fight were made to run the gauntlet on 15 May 1839 near the village of Yaryksu-Aukh (an execution-torture: a man was led between two ranks of soldiers, each of whom struck him with a shpitsruten rod): they "were subjected to cruel torture by being driven through the gauntlet. The soldiers vented their spite on these unfortunates; of the five only one remained alive"^[3].

In the October 1841 expedition through Chechnya the troops of general Grabbe, commander of the troops of the Caucasus Line (the chain of imperial fortifications on the land of the Nokhchi), tortured a captive to death. Historian N. I. Pokrovsky cites the episode from the manuscript of an eyewitness - officer Chaikovsky, "The Caucasus in 1841": a disarmed Chechen captive who refused to walk "was dragged for a whole march on a rope tied to a cannon. Mangled by being dragged along the stony road, he died the next day"; a second captive was bayoneted^[4].

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^[5]. 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"^[5].

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^[6].

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"^[7].

Torture of the arrested was officially sanctioned by the Central Committee of the Bolshevik party (the TsK VKP(b)). Historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov write: "...against all those arrested under political articles torture was widely applied, officially permitted as measures of 'physical influence'"; Stalin's letter, circulated to party organs in January 1939, said: "The TsK VKP(b) explains that the application of physical influence in the practice of the NKVD was permitted from 1937 with the sanction of the TsK VKP(b)"^[8]. One of the executors in the republic was Porubay, named in a 1938 memorandum of the oblast committee of the party as deputy People's Commissar (minister) of Internal Affairs of the republic. After the change of course he was put on trial - the charge: he "applied perverted methods of conducting the investigation and coerced the arrested into giving knowingly false testimony", and on the cases he falsified the troika passed death sentences^[9]. The Chechen historian A. G. Avtorkhanov, who worked in Chechnya in those years and later wrote about it in emigration, writes that the investigation of the case of the "bourgeois-nationalist center" lasted three years, and describes its methods: "The investigation was conducted with the application of the physical tortures usual for the whole USSR, with a certain supplement for the specific 'national character'"^[10]. Avtorkhanov names those whom the Chekists tortured to death: "During this investigation there were tortured to death: the former chairman of the oblast executive committee D. Machukayev, the former head of the obkom culture-and-propaganda department M. Gisayev, the former secretary of the Ingush obkom VKP(b) Idris Zyazikov, and others"^[10]. He writes also of those whom torture drove to suicide: "Unable to endure the regime of torture, the following committed suicide: the chairman of the planning commission of the republic M. Islamov, the secretary of a district party committee M. Bektemirov"^[10]. Avtorkhanov writes of the result: "By way of this unheard-of inquisition, named the 'preliminary investigation', the Chekists forced up to 90 percent of the members of the 'bourgeois-nationalist center' to sign and even to compose 'sincere confessions' of crimes they had, of course, not committed"^[10]. Abdul-Khalim Salamov, deputy chairman of the government of the republic, under torture signed "sincere handwritten testimony" about the delivery into the republic from England through Turkey of 50 mountain guns, 1,000 machine guns, 200 thousand rifles, 5 million cartridges, 10 thousand shells and grenades for an armed uprising; there too he wrote that England had promised to support that uprising from the air. He also named the exact place where the weapons were buried in the mountains; Avtorkhanov writes: "the Chekists dug up all the indicated mountain gorges. Naturally they found nothing, but the beatings continued, with demands to point out the true place where the weapons were buried"^[10]. The defendants showed the tribunal the marks of torture; Avtorkhanov writes: "The defendants, pointing to the scars of inflicted wounds, to knocked-out teeth, to mutilated parts of the organism (one had even been castrated during interrogation), declared that they had signed their false testimony under the influence of these physical tortures and in the hope that the day of trial, or of death, would thus be brought nearer"^[10].

Administration of destructive pharmaceutical drugs (neuroleptics) as a means of physical and psychological pressure on healthy human rights defenders in closed institutions^[11].

The systematic use of torture and physical violence against civilians for a pro-Ukrainian stance: the UN recorded that "armed groups continued to commit abductions, to subject people to physical and psychological torture and ill-treatment, and to commit other grave human rights violations"^[12]. Abducted Automaidan activists were held in a basement where they were "allegedly beaten several times, with their hands bound," and their hair was cut off in reprisal^[13].