The British High Commissioner, R. H. Bruce-Lockhart, in his telegram to the British Foreign Office, November 10, 1918, thus describes one of the methods of torture and the taking of hostages as practiced by the followers of the "gentle" Lenine:
"The Bolsheviki have restored the barbarous methods of torture. The examination of prisoners frequently takes place with a revolver at the unfortunate prisoner's head. "The Bolsheviki have established the odious practice of taking hostages. Still worse, they have struck at their political opponents through their woman folk. When recently a long list of hostages was published in Petrograd, the Bolsheviki seized the wives of those men whom they could not find and threw them into prison until their husbands should give themselves up."
When the Bolsheviki were forced to evacuate Riga, in May, 1919, they left behind them in the [**] prisons 1,600 hostages who were found to be in a state of unspeakable misery and starvation.
An Associated Press despatch of March 22, 1919, states that "a Russian girl of 19 years, who, in December, 1918, had been charged with espionage, was tortured by being pierced thirteen times in the same wound with a bayonet. She lived, however, and made an affidavit to these details."
The same dispatch states that "an examination of dead bodies of persons alleged to have been killed by the Bolsheviki in the Perm district, shows a preponderance of bayonet wounds in the back, but in other instances mouths were slit, fingers and hands cut off, and the heads of the victims smashed."
"Struggling Russia," in its issue of April 5, 1919, informs us that "officers have come out of Petrograd prisons with their nails torn off, and that