Page:Samuel Gompers - Out of Their Own Mouths (1921).djvu/80

 54 in Soviet Russia. In September, 1918, after the murder of Uritzky, Chief of the Petrograd police, and the attempt to shoot Lenin, the Soviet Government declared all the anti-Bolsheviks to be hostages in the event of further assassinations, and at the same time, as a reprisal for the acts of terrorism already committed, ordered a number of these "hostages" in several towns to be shot.

It is impossible to estimate the number of men and women killed at that time. The general public commotion forced the Government to conceal the true extent of the hideous massacre after the publication of the first lists of victims. But from these lists it is known that in Petrograd 512 people were shot, 152 in Penza, 41 in Nijni-Novgorod, 30 in Smolensk, 29 in Moscow, 6 in Mojaisk, 4 in Morshansk, 7 in Nijni-Lvoff, and 7 in Schemlara. The last echo of this madness was the proclamation of the Petrozavodsk (in Northern Russia) Extraordinary Commission that it shot 14 bourgeois hostages as a revenge for the murder of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht!

Just after the above-mentioned attempts on the lives of Lenin and other Bolsheviks, the Social-Revolutionary party stated officially that it had nothing to do with these assassinations; but this statement did not prevent the Bolsheviks shooting down like dogs members of the Social-Revolutionary party. The terrorist madness of the Bolsheviks, once let loose, ignored the difference between the different sections of their political opponents. In Petrograd they shot the metal worker Krakovsky, a member of the Social-Democratic Labor Party; three members of the same party in Ribinsk, leaders of local trade unions (Ramin, Sokoloff and Levin); and in Nijni-Novgorod the secretary of the local party committee, Comrade Ridnik.

The great majority of the victims belonged to the bourgeois class, and were not mixed up with politics; they were arrested, not because of some crime com-