Izvestya published, on July 25th, a Bolshevist military proclamation addressed to the inhabitants of Jaroslav concerning the insurrection which originally arose from the suppression of the Soviet and other popular assemblages: 

The General Staff notifies to the population of Jaroslav that all those who desire to live are invited to abandon the town in the course of twenty-four hours and to meet near the America Bridge.  Those who remain will be treated as insurgents, and no quarter will be given to any one.  Heavy artillery fire and gas-bombs will be used against them. All those who remain will perish In the ruins of the town with the insurrectionists, the traitors, and the enemies of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Revolution.

Next day, July 26th, Izvestya published the information that “after minute questionings and full inquiry” a special commission appointed to inquire into the events relating to the insurrection at Jaroslav had listed 350 persons as having “taken an active part in the insurrection and had relations with the Czecho-Slovaks,” and that by order of the commissioners the whole band of 350 had been shot!

It is needless to multiply the illustrations of brutal oppression—­of men and women arrested and imprisoned for no other crime than that of engaging in propaganda in favor of government by universal suffrage; of newspapers confiscated and suppressed; of meetings banned and Soviets dissolved because the members’ “state of mind” did not please the Bolsheviki.  Maxim Gorky declared in his Novya Zhizn that there had been “ten thousand lynchings.”  Upon what authority Gorky—­who was inclined to sympathize with the Bolsheviki, and who even accepted office under them—­based that statement is not known.  Probably it is an exaggeration.  One thing, however, is quite certain, namely, that a reign of terror surpassing the worst days of the old regime was inflicted upon unhappy Russia by the Bolsheviki.  At the very beginning of the Bolshevik regime Trotzky laughed to scorn all the protests against violence, threatening that resort would be had to the guillotine.  Speaking to the opponents of the Bolshevik policy in the Petrograd Soviet, he said: 

“You are perturbed by the mild terror we are applying against our class enemies, but know that not later than a month hence this terror will take a more terrible form on the model of the terror of the great revolutionaries of France.  Not a fortress, but the guillotine will be for our enemies.”

That threat was not literally carried out, but there was a near approach to it when public hangings for civil offenses were established.  For reintroducing the death penalty into the army as a means of putting an end to treason and the brutal murder of officers by rebellious soldiers, the Bolsheviki excoriated Kerensky. Yet they themselves introduced hanging and flogging in public for petty civil crimes! The death penalty was never inflicted for civil crimes under the late Czar.  It was never inflicted for political offenses.  Only rarely was it inflicted for murder.  It remained for a so-called “Socialist” government to resort to such savagery as we find described in the following extract from the recognized official organ of the Bolshevik government: