Page 38 - Communism in Ambush

COMMUNISM IN AMBUSH
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understood socialism differently from the Bolsheviks) were the new
regime's chief enemies. The ""kulak," the most numerous category, was
specially targeted. In Russian, a kulak is the name given to a rich
landowner. During the revolution and the civil war, Lenin issued hun-
dreds of orders that rained pitiless terror on the kulaks. For example, in
one telegram to the Central Executive Committee of Penza soviet, he
said:
Comrades! The kulak uprising in your five districts must be crushed with-
out pity. The interests of the whole revolution demand such actions, for
the final struggle with the kulaks has now begun. You must make an ex-
ample of these people. Hang (I mean hang publicly, so that people see it) at
least 100 kulaks, rich bastards, and known blood-suckers. Publish their
names. Seize all their grain…Do all this so that for miles around people see
it all, understand it, tremble…Reply saying you have received and carried
out these instructions. Yours, Lenin. 26
Lenin gave many orders like this one. Bolshevik militants gladly
carried out his instructions, even inventing their own styles of savagery.
The famous author Maxim Gorky witnessed some of these methods and
later wrote:
In Tambov province Communists were nailed with railway spikes by their
left hand and left foot to trees a metre above the soil, and they watched the
torments of these deliberately oddly-crucified people. They would open a
prisoner's belly, take out the small intestine and nailing it to a tree or tele-
graph pole they drove the man around the tree with blows, watching the
intestine unwind through the wound. Stripping a captured officer naked,
they tore strips of skin from his shoulders in the form of shoulder straps... 27
The Bolsheviks undertook to exterminate those who did not want
to adopt Communism. Tens of thousands were executed without a trial.
Many opponents of the regime were sent to concentration camps, collec-
tively called the "Gulag," where prisoners were worked almost to death
under very harsh conditions. Many never left these camps alive. In the
period from 1918 to 1922, they murdered hundreds of thousands of
workers and villagers who had opposed the regime.
In the “Novaia Zhizn” newspaper published on July 14th, 1918, one
of the communist leaders of the time, Felix Dzerzhinsky, stated as fol-
lows how terrorism was a sine qua non of the communist revolution: