Page 37 - Communism in Ambush

the clergy, as well as professional
groups such as military officers and
the police. S Sometimes the
Bolsheviks subjected these people
to genocide. The policy of "de-
Cossackization" begun in 1920 cor-
responds largely to our definition of
genocide: a population group Maxim Gorky
firmly established in a particular terri-
tory, the Cossacks as such were exterminated, the men shot, the women,
children and the elderly deported, and the villages razed or handed over
to new, non-Cossack occupants. Lenin compared the Cossacks to the
Vendée during the French Revolution and gladly subjected them to a pro-
gram of what Gracchus Babeuf, the "inventor" of modern Communism,
characterized in 1795 as "populicide." 23
In every city they entered, the Bolsheviks killed those not open to
their ideology and committed acts of excessive savagery intended to in-
still fear. The Black Book of Communism describes the Bolshevik atroci-
ties in Crimea:
Similar acts of violence occurred in most of the cities of the Crimea occu-
pied by the Bolsheviks, including Sevastopol, Yalta, Alushta, and
Simferopol. Similar atrocities are recorded from April and May 1918 in the
big Cossack cities then in revolt. The extremely precise file of the Denikin
commission record "corpses with hands cut off, broken bones, heads
ripped off, broken jaws, and genital removed." 24
The Russian historian and socialist S.P. Melgunov, in his book The
Red Terror in Russia, says that Sevastopol was turned into a "city of the
hanged" because of the extermination campaign against surviving wit-
nesses:
From Nakhimovksky, all one could see was the hanging bodies of officers,
soldiers, and civilians arrested in the streets. The town was dead, and the
only people left alive were hiding in lofts or basements. All the walls, shop
fronts, and telegraph poles were covered with posters calling for "Death to
the traitors." They were hanging people for fun. 25
The Bolsheviks sorted the people they wanted to eliminate into cer-
tain categories. For example, the bourgeoisie (or the "Mensheviks," who