Tens of thousands were arrested after the issue of orders declaring the 
indispensability of registration and tens of thousands were shot. A bloody 
butchery, in the literal sense of the word. It is enough to refer to at least 
the official publications, keeping in view that they always understated. 
For example, in the “News of the Provisional Revkom (Revolutionary 
Commission) of Sebastopol”, on Nov. 28, 1920, the estimate of 1,634 
executions was published, and two days later another of 1,202. In the 
little town of Kertch the local Izvestiya gives an estimate of 800. The 
Odessa Cheka itself fixes the figure of shootings in 1920 to 1921 at 1,418 
men. In the Crimea where Bela Kun held sway, the number of those shot 
in that liquidation of 1920/21 was estimated ad more than 100,000. 
Wholesale shootings became so serious that they even called forth an 
investigation by Moscow, undertaken mostly, it is true, to influence public 
opinion. 
The Red Terror in this period of liquidation was carried on despite the 
official admission that open civil war had virtually ceased and that the 
‘revolutionary proletariat” was able to “lay aside the weapon of terror’, 
to which “the Government of Workmen and Peasants had been obliged to 
resort’. Thus read the declaration of the All-Russian Cheka over the 
signature of Dzerzhinsky, published on Jan. 20, 1920, in the Izvestiya, 
and ordering all organs of the Cheka to discontinue the application of the 
most extreme forms of punishment. It was impossible, however, to attribute 
any great significance to this decree of the Cheka, confirmed somewhat 
later by a decree of the Soviet of Peoples Commissaries and the V. Ts. I. K. 
(the Central Executive Committee), for a whole year before that it had 
also been solemnly proclaimed that “the proletariat... turns away from 
the weapon of Terrorism, making law and justice its weapon’. An in- 
disputable fact: the night before the issue of the decree abolishing the 
death penalty, in the Cheka sentences became a “night of blood”, in the 
words of one of the horrifying inscriptions traced on the walls of the 
cell of the condemned men in the Cheka prison in Moscow. 
And in Moscow and Petrograd and everywhere in the province there 
occurred intensive shootings in those days of the formal abolition of the 
death penalty. Within a month there was introduced by a secret circular 
a formal reservation destroying the intention of the Cheka’s previous 
prohibition of independent shootings. “In view of the discontinuance of 
the death penalty”, the Cheka circular sent to the local Cheka organisations 
read, “it is ordered to send all persons now subject to the extreme penalty 
to the zone of military operations as a place to which the decree of dis- 
continuance of the death penalty does not extend’. 
The shootings continued. In May, in connection with the Polish- 
Russian war, the death penalty was officially revived all over Russia. To 
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