Page:Samuel Gompers - Out of Their Own Mouths (1921).djvu/81

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THE REIGN OF TERROR
55

mitted, but as "suspicious persons" whom it was necessary to isolate. Men and women, boys and aged people—all were shot because two men, political fanatics, had plotted the murder of two leaders of the Communist party.

The official execution and wholesale butchery of hostages referred to by Martoff is boastfully avowed in the official Soviet pamphlet by which the Bolshevists have sought to sum up and popularize the Red Terror and the Extraordinary Commission. This pamphlet, written by Latsis, is printed by the Soviet Printing Office in Moscow, 1920. As to the 1918 butchery, Latsis in Chapter 5 of the pamphlet declares:

But the murderess, the hysterical Kaplan, missed her aim. The Extraordinary Commission exacted costly retribution for these murders. In Petrograd alone as many as 500 persons were shot as an answer to the shots fired at Comrades Lenin and Uritzky.

Those who dreamed of killing the revolution by murdering the leaders severely wounded themselves, and the damages inflicted by the proletariat were a whole year in healing.

The Bolshevist remedy for insufficient productivity on the part of labor, known as sabotage, is thus summarized in Chapter 3 of this illuminating document:

Those who were practicing sabotage were (either) shot to death or imprisoned by us, but nevertheless up to this time they have eluded us in large numbers and destroyed our apparatus and transports. Such work is nothing else than the same counter-revolution. It was so regarded by the Extraordinary Commission,