Page:Samuel Gompers - Out of Their Own Mouths (1921).djvu/86

 60 us will be shot, while their minor relatives will be deported to Central Russia.

In the event of a mass rising of any village, stanitza or city, we shall apply mass terror against these localities; for every Soviet representative that will be killed hundreds of inhabitants of these villages and stanitzas will have to suffer.

The Bolshevist remedy for any and all opponents is to find some opprobrious epithet to apply to them, indicating treason to Bolshevism, and then to crush them with the Red Terror. This method is evidently to be used even against the valiant Red Army. The peasants who constituted ninety per cent, of the Army are being demobilized. The remainder, said to be some hundred thousand men, are either mercenary foreigners, Chinese, Hungarian, Letts, etc., under the name of the "international" army, or communist fanatics. The first step towards the persecution of the rank and file of the Red Army was to deprive them of all rights. Leon Trotzky in his Order of the Revolutionary Military Council, No. 296, dated November 10, 1920, declared:

It may be recalled that the Bolshevists came into power by standing for the rights of soldiers even to the point of the right to elect their own officers. But now, having deprived the peasant soldiers of all rights, Lenin is apparently upon the point of turning the Red Terror against them. To a meeting of the railway