ABSTRACT

The first executions took place about a month after the Reds had entered the town. During the night, in a wood outside Riga, called Bickern Wood, thirteen well-known citizens were shot. The Revolutionary Tribunal and the Proletarian Courts sat in secret and made use of an entirely arbitrary procedure. They were not so much intent on proving a crime against the accused person as on establishing his "anti-Soviet attitude" and condemning him for that. The spirit of the Inquisition, the hateful spirit of intolerance and control of opinions, had nevertheless a certain kinship with the Bolshevist revolutionary judicial system. The mixture of brutal despotism in action and sanctimonious self-righteousness in speech, the fanatical persecution of entirely innocent people merely because they held different opinions, and much else that the Reds said and did, evoked in our minds visions and pictures which we had previously only associated with descriptions of conditions during the tyranny of the Spanish Inquisition.