HORRORS OF BOLSHEVISM.

Taranaki Daily News, 6 March 1920, Page 12

HORRORS OF BOLSHEVISM.

BRITISH CHAPLAIN'S STORY, MURDER. AND TORTURE AT ODESSA. The Rev. R. Courtier-Forster, late British Chaplain at Odessa and the Russian ports of the Black Sea, contributes to a recent issue of the Times, a moving account of hi* experiences during nearly a year spent in Soviet Russia. ]fo lias read ail the published accounts of the appalling atrocities and brutal tyranny of the Bolshevik rule in Russia, and finds that, far from being an exaggeration, they coincide with his own experience and observation. He writes: — While 7 was still British chapfam of Odessa the city was deluged with blood. When the Boishevik elements, grafting on to their main support the J .OOO criminals released from the city gaols, attempted to" seize the town, people of education, regardless of social position, offered what armed assistant was in their power. Workmen, shop assistants, soldiers, professional men, and a handful of officers, fought through the streets of the great port for three days and nights against the despotism of the Bolsheviks. Train cars were overturned to make barricades, trenches dug in the streets, machine-guns placed in the upper windows of houses to mow the thoroughfares with fire. The place b«came an inferno. The Bolsheviks were victorious. On capturing Odessa, railway station, which had been defended by a few officers and a number of antiBolshevik soldiers, the Bolsheviks bayoneted to death the nineteen wounded and helpless men laid on the waitingroom floor to await Red Cross succour. Scores of other men who fell wounded in the streets also became victims to the triumphant Bolshevik criminals. The majority of these wretched and unhappy sufferers completely disappeared. Inquiries at the hospitals and prisons revealed the fact that they were not there, and no trace of them was to be found. A fortnight later there was a terrible storm on the Black Sea, and the bodies of the missing men were washed up on the rocks of Odessa breakwater and along the shore; they had been taken out to sea in small boats, stones tied to their feet, and then been dropped over alive into (leap water. Hundreds of others were captured and taken on board the Almas; and the Sinope, the largest cruiser of the Black Sea Fleet. Hero they became the victims of unthinkable tortures.

VICTIMS BURNED ALIVE ; On the Sinope, General Chormichoff ! and some otlitr personal friends of my own were fastened one by oiv; by iron chains to planks of wood and pushed slowly, inch by inch, into the ship'e furnaces and roasted alive. Others were tied to winches, the winches turned until the men were torn in two alive. Others were taken to the boilers and scalded with boiling steam; tliey wcre then moved to another part of. the ship and ventilating fans set revolving that currents of cold air may blow on the scalds and increase the'agony of the torture. There are people who maintain that, with the theatres open and electric trams running, anarchy does not e:>-4, and that life in Soviet Russia is both secure and pleasant. I did not find it so. There is a halting-place for the electric cars at the 'corner of Kanatnaya and Grecheskya. Returning from the town at 11-30 one morning I encountered a scared and frightened group at this point. Inquiry revealed the" fact that, the BoWieviks' had just successfully murdered two unprotected and defenceless women waiting for the tram to sro into the city shopping. Their crime was'that both clothes and manners showed them to be "Bourjouic." Also in the ICanatnaya one morning a working woman was shot- for the sport of the thing while running across the road to purchase a bottle of milk for her children. Her body was lying by the kerb as I came by, the' bottle smashed, and milk and blood streamins down the gutter. The house door stood open, her two little children crying with grief and terror at the entrance.*

TREATMENT ■OF WOMEN. " Week by week the newspapers published articles for and against the nationalisation of women. In South TJussia the proposal did not become a legal measure, but in Odessa bands of Bolsheviks seized women and girls and carried them off to the port, the timber yards, and the Alexandrovsky Park. ' Women used in this way were found in the mornings either dead or mad or in a dying condition. Those found still alive'were shot One of the most awful of my own personal experiences of the new civilisation was hearing at night from my bedroom windows the frantic shrieks of wi*men being done to death in the park opposite—screams of shrill terror and despair repeated at intervals until they become nothing but hvirse cries of agony like the death-calls of a dying animal.' This happened not once, or twice, but many times. Never to the day of my death shall T forget the horror of those dreadful shrieks of tortured women., nnd one's own utter poworlessncss to aid the victims or punish the Bolr-hcvilc devils in their bestial orgies. To be decently clothed and washed was a crime in the eyes of the Bolshevik proletariat Tloth men and women were stopped hi the streets of Odessa, robbed of their loots, stripped of their clothes, and sent home naked through the frost anil the snow.

SLAUGHTER OF THE CLERGY. It was the martyrdom of the two metropolitans, and the assassin,!!ion of so many* bishops, and the killing of hundreds of various Christian ministers of religion, regardless of denomination or school of thought, that proved the undoing of the scourge. Russian Orthodox clergy, Protestant Lutheran pastors, Roman Catholic priests, were tortured and done to death with the same lighthearted indiscrimination in the name of Toleration and Freedom. Then it was that the Scourge, seeing the last remnants of liberty ground under the heel of tyranny more brutal in its methods than a mediaeval torture chamber, published a full-page cartoon representing Moses descending from the burning mount, bringing in his arms the tables of the Ten Commandments to humanity, and being stoned to death by a mob of workmen's and soldiers' delegates. The following Sunday morning I .was passing through the Town Gardens, when I saw a group of Bolshevik soldiers insulting an ikon of the thorn-crowned face of Christ. The owner of the ikon was spitting at the pictured face, while others were standing round watching with loud guffaws of laughter. Presently they '

tore the sacred picture into fragments, danced upon it, and trampled/and stamped the pieces into the mud. By tin's time the devastated corruption of the holy revolution had so spread that I saw open acts of indecency being committed in broad daylight in the parks and public gardens. These are but a few experiences from the mass of events crowded into my life in Soviet Russia. In England numbers of people are incapable of believing the ghastly conditions to which Bolshevism has reduced llussia, but those of us who have lived in the country for many years and seen the abominable Bolshevik system bearing fruit, know the absolute truth of these things. The men at home who are deliberately duping and deceiving our trade unions and manual workers as 'to the true conditions of practical Bolshevism are not only committing ft criine against democracy, but an outrage on humanity.