Bolsheviks Scalped and Crucified Christians -
Doc Tavish
Date: Thu, Nov 30, 1995 5:32 PM EDT
By Philippa Fletcher
MOSCOW (Reuter) - A Russian presidential commission said
Monday that 200,000 clergy were systematically murdered under
Soviet rule in a horrific cycle of crucifixions, scalpings and
``bestial tortures.''
Commission chairman Alexander Yakovlev, presenting the
report at a news conference, seemed unconcerned that it might
deter electors from voting communist or nationalist in
parliamentary elections on Dec. 17.
``If it has an influence, I will be very satisfied,'' he
said.
The report by the Commission for the Rehabilitation of the
Victims of Political Repression also found that another 500,000
religious figures suffered persecution in the decades after
Vladimir Lenin's Bolsheviks seized power.
``Documents relate how clergymen, monks, nuns were crucified
on royal gates and shot in the basements of the Cheka (secret
police), scalped, strangled, drowned and submitted to other
bestial tortures,'' he said.
Yakovlev said some of the material, from archives of the
former ruling politburo and security services, had not been
previously published and that uncovering it was traumatic.
``I was especially shocked by accounts of priests turned
into columns of ice in winter... But that's not all, there were
crucifixions ... It was total cruelty.''
He said hundreds of people were shot for not giving up
church property, and only a fraction of the proceeds were spent
on the poor as the authorities had promised.
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More on Bolsheviks and who they were:
Click http://lcweb.loc.gov/exhibits/archives/d2persid.html to see:
Letter to Bolshevik
To the Presidium of the Central Executive Committee of
the All-Union Communist Party (Bolshevik)
We appeal to you, asking you to pay a minimum of attention
to our request.
We are prisoners who are returning from the Solovetsky
concentration camp because of our poor health. We went there
full of energy and good health, and now we are returning as
invalids, broken and crippled emotionally and physically. We are
asking you to draw your attention to the arbitrary use of power
and the violence that reign at the Solovetsky concentration camp
in Kemi and in all sections of the concentration camp. It is
difficult for a human being even to imagine such terror, tyranny,
violence, and lawlessness. When we went there, we could not
conceive of such a horror, and now we, crippled ourselves,
together with several thousands who are still there, appeal to
the ruling center of the Soviet state to curb the terror that
reigns there. As though it weren't enough that the Unified State
Political Directorate [OGPU] without oversight and due process
sends workers and peasants there who are by and large innocent
(we are not talking about criminals who deserve to be punished),
the former tsarist penal servitude system in comparison to
Solovky had 99% more humanity, fairness, and legality. [...]
People die like flies, i.e., they die a slow and painful
death; we repeat that all this torment and suffering is placed
only on the shoulders of the proletariat without money, i.e., on
workers who, we repeat, were unfortunate to find themselves in
the period of hunger and destruction accompanying the events of
the October Revolution, and who committed crimes only to save
themselves and their families from death by starvation; they have
already borne the punishment for these crimes, and the vast
majority of them subsequently chose the path of honest labor.
Now because of their past, for whose crime they have already
paid, they are fired from their jobs. Yet, the main thing is
that the entire weight of this scandalous abuse of power, brute
violence, and lawlessness that reign at Solovky and other
sections of the OGPU concentration camp is placed on the
shoulders of workers and peasants; others, such as
counterrevolutionaries, profiteers and so on, have full wallets
and have set themselves up and live in clover in the Soviet
State, while next to them, in the literal meaning of the word,
the penniless proletariat dies from hunger, cold, and back-
breaking 14-16 hour days under the tyranny and lawlessness of
inmates who are the agents and collaborators of the State
Political Directorate [GPU].
If you complain or write anything ("Heaven forbid"), they
will frame you for an attempted escape or for something else, and
they will shoot you like a dog. They line us up naked and
barefoot at 22 degrees below zero and keep us outside for up to
an hour. It is difficult to describe all the chaos and terror
that is going on in Kemi, Solovky, and the other sections of the
concentrations camp. All annual inspections uncover a lot of
abuses. But what they discover in comparison to what actually
exists is only a part of the horror and abuse of power, which the
inspection accidently uncovers. (One example is the following
fact, one of a thousand, which is registered in GPU and for which
the guilty have been punished: THEY FORCED THE INMATES TO EAT
THEIR OWN FECES. "Comrades," if we dare to use this phrase,
verify that this is a fact from reality, about which, we repeat,
OGPU has the official evidence, and judge for yourself the full
extent of effrontery and humiliation in the supervision by those
who want to make a career for themselves. [...]
We are sure and we hope that in the All-Union Communist
Party there are people, as we have been told, who are humane and
sympathetic; it is possible, that you might think that it is our
imagination, but we swear to you all, by everything that is
sacred to us, that this is only one small part of the nightmarish
truth, because it makes no sense to make this up. We repeat, and
will repeat 100 times, that yes, indeed there are some guilty
people, but the majority suffer innocently, as is described
above. The word law, according to the law of the GPU
concentration camps, does not exist; what does exist is only the
autocratic power of petty tyrants, i.e., collaborators, serving
time, who have power over life and death. Everything described
above is the truth and we, ourselves, who are close to the grave
after 3 years in Solovky and Kemi and other sections, are asking
you to improve the pathetic, tortured existence of those who are
there who languish under the yoke of the OGPU's tyranny,
violence, and complete lawlessness....
To this we subscribe: G. Zheleznov, Vinogradov, F. Belinskii.
Dec. 14, 1926
True copy
.................................................................
TRANSLATOR'S COMMENTS: The letter is written in very poor
Russian. For the sake of clarity, the translator corrected the
grammar and substituted a few words.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Return to exhibit text
Go to the Library of Congress Home Page
[Yes, this was at the United States Governement Website of the Library
of Congress!]
Now who were these Bolsheviks that had these concentration camps? Let
us see some documented proofs:
Originally named Lev Davidovich Bronstein, Trotsky was born on
November 7, 1879, in Kherson Province in Ukraine, the son of Russified
Jews. He was educated in Odessa and in Mykolayiv and was a star pupil
with enormous intellectual capabilities.
Trotsky's political involvement began in 1896 in a circle of Mykolayiv
Populists, but he soon converted to Marxism. After a brief stay at
Odessa University, he returned to Mykolayiv in 1897 to organize the
Southern Russian Workers Union. For this he was arrested, jailed, and
exiled. He escaped from Siberian exile in 1902, fleeing to Europe and
adopting the pseudonym Trotsky. Abroad he joined Lenin, L. Martov,
Georgy Plekhanov, and other Russian Social-Democrats, who were
publishing Iskra (The Spark). By vitue of his flair for polemic
writing and oratorical brilliance, he quickly rose in the party.
At the party's Second Congress in 1903 Trotsky opposed Lenin and the
Bolsheviks, siding with the Mensheviks. His characteristic
independence, however, kept him from cementing any organizational
ties. Alone of the major party leaders, he rushed back to Russia to be
an active participant in the 1905 Revolution, where he gained
practical experience as chairman of the Saint Petersburg Soviet of
Workers Deputies. Jailed in December 1905 and later exiled to Siberia,
Trotsky used his time to reconsider the paradoxes of revolution in
backward Russia. He synthesized his thoughts in two books, 1905 and
Results and Prospects.
Escaping from Siberia in 1907, Trotsky spent the next decade defending
his ideas and engaging in émigré squabbling. The March Revolution of
1917 caught him by surprise in New York City, where he wrote for a
Russian newspaper. Trotsky reached Russia in May, quickly assumed
leadership of the independent left Social-Democratic Interdistrict
Group, and joined the Petrograd (as St. Petersburg was renamed)
Soviet. Within weeks, he had gained enormous popularity as the most
eloquent agitator of the Soviet left. In July, after being courted by
Lenin, he joined the Bolshevik party and was elected to its Central
Committee.
As a Bolshevik, Trotsky was elected chairman of the Soviet in
September. He sided with Lenin on the need to overthrow the
provisional government and devoted all his energies to marshaling
support for the armed uprising of the Bolsheviks. With Lenin in
hiding, Trotsky was the general in charge, and he successfully
directed the masses of workers and soldiers in the November
revolution......
Above found at:
http://www.idbsu.edu/surveyrc/Staff/jaynes/marxism/bios/trotsky.htm
"Whatever the racial antecedents of their top man, the first Soviet
commissariats were largely staffed with Jews. The Jewish position in
the Communist movement was well understood in Russia. The White Armies
which opposed the Bolshevik government linked Jews and Bolsheviks as
common enemies" (Univ. Jew Encyc., Vol. I, p. 336).
Consider this:
Among the Jews who remained in Russia, which then included Lithuania,
Ukraine (A History of Ukraine, Michael Hrushevsky, Yale University
Press, 1941, passim), and much of Poland, were the founders of the
Russian Bolshevik party.
In 1897 was founded the Bund, the union of Jewish workers in Poland
and Lithuania. . . They engaged in revolutionary activity upon a large
scale, and their energy made them the spearhead of the Party (Article
on "Communism" by Harold J. Laski, Encyc. Brit., Vol. III, pp
824-827).
From:
U.S. Gov't Printing Office House Document 1868
(1918- 65th Congress, 3d session- file# 861.00/8029):
Report of the Netherland Minister Relating to the conditions in
Petrograd.
"Whole Soviet government has sunk to the level of a criminal
organisation. Bolsheviks realise that their game is up and have
entered into a career of criminal madness."
"I found it necessary to promise that Litvinov should be allowed to
leave England at once..."
"The foregoing report will indicate the extremely critical nature of
the present situation. The danger is now so great that I feel it is my
duty to call the attention of the British and all other Governments to
the fact that if an end is not put to Bolshevism in Russia at once the
civilisation of the whole world will be threatened...."
"...the danger is also being realised in German and Austrian quarters.
I consider that the immediate suppression of Bolshevism is the
greatest issue now before the world, not even excluding the war which
is still raging, and unless as above stated Bolshevism is nipped in
the bud immediately it is bound to spread in one form or another over
Europe and the whole world as it is organised and worked by Jews who
have no nationality, and whose one object is to destroy for their own
ends the existing order of things."