A 10,000 strong rally of the workers, peacefully discussing their difficult situation, had been surrounded by the machine gunners, sailors and grenadiers. After the workers refused to disperse, they were shot with rifle volleys. Then the machine guns went off aimed into the crowd and grenades started exploding among the rally participants. The rally has fallen to the ground and became quiet. Neither screams nor groans of the wounded and dying cold be herd from the machine gun fire...
The city became deserted and quiet. Some escaped, some hid. The workers lost no less than 2000 victims. That was the first act of the horrible tragedy in Astrakhan. The second – even more horrible act – stared 12 March. Many workers have been captured by the “victors” and imprisoned in 6 detention centers, in the barges and stem ships. The most horrible was the stem ship “Gogol”.
The wires about a “riot” have been sent to the capital. The chair of Revolution Military Soviet L. Trotski responded with a brief wire: “Deal with mercilessly”. That sealed the destiny of the unfortunate prisoners.
Bloody madness ruled on the land and on water. Executions were being carried out in the basements of the detention centers and just in the yards. The imprisoned in the ships and barges were being drowned in Volga river. Some of the victims had rocks tied to their necks. Some were hogtied and simply thrown in water. One of the workers, who hid amidst the machines and survived, told that about 180 people have been drowned from the stem ship “Gogol” in one night.
There were so many executed in the detention centers in the city, that they barely managed to bury them in the mass graves in the cemetery under the guise of “typhus victims”. The emergency commissar Chugunov had to issue an order, that prohibited loss of corpses being transported to the cemetery under the threat of execution. The residents of Astrakhan were coming across the half-naked bloodied corpses of the workers in the streets almost every morning. And the families of the captives sought the dear dead from corpse to corpse in the dawn.
The executions of the workers only continued 13 and 14 March. But then the government came to a sudden realization, that the executions could not be blamed on bourgeois revolt. And they decided, that “better late than never” and dealt with the first “bourgeois” they came across: arrested every building owner, fish merchant, small business owner and executed them...
By 15 March there was no household, that did not mourn a loss of father, brother, husband. Some households lost several men. The figure of executed could be found from a census in Astrakhan! At first 2000 seemed to be correct, then three...
Then the government started publishing the lists of executed “bourgeois” with hundreds of names. By April the number increased to 4000 and the repressions still raged on. The powers apparently decided to take revenge for all previous strikes on the Astrakhan workers: for Tula, Briansk, St. Petersburg strikes, wave of which rolled over the country in March 1919. The executions abated by end of April only.
Astrakhan was a horrible sight those days. The streets were dead quiet. The households were in tears. The fences, store windows and booths pasted with the execution orders, and more, and more...
onepeterfive.com
