EXCERPTS FROM THE BOOK "ACE OF SPIES" BIOGRAPHY OF SIDNEY
REILLY
by Robin Bruce Lockhart
Steinand Day Publishers...1967
"Reilly, however, was still preoccupied with the problem of staging a
counter-revolution in Russia. If for once he had failed in a mission--his
1918 attempt to overthrow Lenin and Trotsky--the second time he would
succeed, or rather Savinkoff, with Reilly's help, would succeed.
The British Government also hoped for the overthrow of the Bolsheviks but
could not believe that the Soviet system of terrorism and tyranny, unheard of
before in history, could last. Dispatches reaching the Foreign Office spoke
of the operations of the Cheka as "making the history of the French Revolution,
mild by comparison". Photographs were unprintable.
By the hundreds and by the thousands, innocent people were tortured and
murdered with unbelievable cruelty. The Communists would first strip their
victims of their clothes, break their arms and legs, gouge out their eyes and
cut off some fingers or a hand before stabbing them all over with a bayonet
and smashing in their skulls with hatchets. Men would have their testicles
cut off and many women and even schoolgirls under the age of ten had first to
submit to rape.
Other dispatches to the Foreign Office told of people having their mouths
slit by bayonets and their tongues cut out. Ex-Tsarist officers by the
hundred had their shoulder straps nailed to their bodies then, bound naked in
barbed wire they would be lowered into holes made in the ice until they froze
to death. Countless others were burned alive, buried alive, thrown into wells
to drown or placed in slag gas-pits to die of suffocation. Luckier victims
were shot or decapitated with a sword. Beards were torn from faces with the
flesh on them, hot needles thrust under fingernails. Noses were cut off. Some
victims were literally sawn in pieces and given to the dogs in the streets to
eat. Even the sick and wounded were taken from hospitals to be hatcheted to
death. In Petrograd the canals were full of decomposed bodies and in one
month the population of the city fell by 100,000. The situation elsewhere in
Russia was little better. Even peasants were murdered when they protested at
the requisition of their cattle. Factory workers were shot if they complained
about conditions.
Criminals had been loosed from the goals and made commissars. In the
prisons, innocent, starved and terrorized men, women and young girls were
herded together in verminous, ill-ventilated cells with no sanitation. No one
was allowed out except when called for execution.
In Odessa, several hundred officers of the Black Sea Fleet had either been
half-killed in boiling steam and then drowned in the sea or tied to planks
and pushed inch by inch into the ship’s furnaces. The crew of the Bolshevik
flagship replaced their officers by taking on board the entire inmate of the
two largest brothels in the port.
In some districts in Russia, women were actually "nationalized"
for the benefit of the comrades. A commissar would be given a certificate
giving him "the right to acquire a girl for himself and no-one may
oppose this in any way. "Mixed schools were instituted in which pupil
"commissars" sacked their masters and morals disintegrated so
completely that venereal disease spread rapidly throughout Russia's school
children.
To reinforce this ghastly reign of terror, disease took a heavy toll of
the population. The Red Guards rarely buried their victims but left them to
rot where they lay. Typhus, cholera and smallpox were rife.
It is hardly surprising that the main bulk of the Russian people were
anti-Bolshevik, but Lenin's policy was not only to break the spirit of the
masses by terrorism but, by starvation, to break them in body as well. Those
who were not committed Bolsheviks were only allowed a daily ration of 1/4lb.
of black bread or 1/2lb. of unmilled oats. The starving people were
physically incapable of throwing off the yoke of their better-fed oppressors.
Some success he may have had but it was a far cry to Moscow and the
overthrow of the Bolsheviks and he received a severe jolt when an old friend
of his, Maria Shovalosky, was lured back to Russia and never heard of again.
She had defected from the Soviet Embassy in Paris and it had been Reilly who
had helped her escape in a packing case. With her hair cut short and
disguised as a man she had eventually reached America. As a reprisal, the
Russians had arrested her father, but it was not long before she received
letters from him begging her to return to assist in an escape plan he had.
The letters seemed absolutely genuine but in reality were the work of G.P.U.
forgers; their manufactured documents and letters were works of art and had
lured countless victims back to Russia to face torture and death at the hands
of Adamson, the secret police’s Latvian chief executioner, and his
assistants.
Adamson, who was the epitome of all that was base in human nature, had the
unpleasant habit of taking his female victims from the J.O.K. (the solitary
confinement wing for women prisoners) and raping them immediately prior to
execution. He was almost as vicious as " mad Dora", the Cheka
female executioner, who, in a fit of blood lust, personally shot 700
prisoners in the space of a few nights before putting the hangman’s noose
round her own neck. After her mass murder, the prison cellars were filled
with corpses. Torn off fingers and other parts of the human body scattered on
the ground bore silent witness to hideous tortures.
Some women prisoners were shot when eight months’ pregnant or two or three
days after childbirth. Victims of the G.P.U., both male and female, when
condemned to death, were usually taken from their cells with their hands
tied, their noses stopped and their mouths gagged. At the scene of execution
their hands were untied, they were told to walk through a door and were shot
in the back of the head. In the basement of the G.P.U.’s "Inner
Prison" in the Loubianka where countless executions took place, every
stone was stained with blood and tears. Large groups were shot by the G.P.U.
Special Service Regiment"
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