Consequently we were granted unlimited powers to summon each prisoner, ask them questions, read out the written evidence against them, and listen to their explanations and refutations of all these documents.
This Commission, which one could call a Military-Revolutionary Frontline Tribunal (and so it was considered by Bogadanov), kept me busy for three days. I worked feverishly, without taking time to eat or sleep.
There were a lot of prisoners. They were locked up in old tsarist, Stolypintype wagons. Here were generals, colonels, and other ranks of officers. There were chiefs of police, public prosecutors, and simple soldiers from haidamak units. There was this in common about them: all, or almost all, were sworn enemies not just of the October Revolution but of Revolution in general. Thus they knew what they were doing when they acted against it.
Nevertheless the majority of them were not guilty of the crime of which they were accused. Most of them were arrested in their own apartments, without weapons, even, one can say confidently, without a thought of taking up arms and fighting against the Revolution. They were arrested because of the denunciations of evil people. I mean people who, in order to conceal their own dirty past record vis-à-vis the revolutionaries, had become even more odious by reversing themselves and hypocritically supporting the Revolution. These people denounced those who, due to their own social situation, were formerly outside the revolutionary movement but yet did not hinder its development. These vile people fabricated accusations in order to save themselves and contrived to find enemies of the Revolution in all ranks of the population. But to the commanders of Red Guard detachments these informers were welcome since their denunciations of “enemies of the Revolution” assisted in cleansing the rear areas of enemies.
In this way were combined, in the course of the Revolution, the meanness of some with the self-sacrifice of others, and this because those with full powers in the struggle against the enemies of the Revolution were unable to discern the duplicity of their self-appointed accomplices. Under my chairmanship, the Commission examined over 200 dossiers and gave its opinion on each of them. There were many cases in which the persons involved were recognized by the Commission as being active enemies of the Revolution. The Commission remanded their files to the headquarters of Commander Bogadanov who forwarded them to the headquarters of Antonov-Ovseyenko. (This meant, in the Bolshevik-Left SR jargon of the day, that the accused would be shot.)
Among the detainees interrogated by the Commission, almost all of those who were acknowledged as guilty showed themselves to be weak and cowardly. Facing imminent death, they had recourse to the most shameful means to try to save their skin. We saw generals weeping. On the other hand there were colonels who regretted falling into the hands of the revolutionaries because they were convinced they could have organized a sizeable force of volunteers to help General Kaledin restore the Romanov dynasty. And as they were led out of the salon carriage where the Commission was sitting, they cried out: “Long Live the House of Romanov! Long Live Tsar Nicholas Alexandrovich, Master of All Russia! May He Crush the Revolution!”
Mind you there were only two such colonels who remained true to their aristocratic-monarchist principles.
Among the many accused released after the review of their case by the Commission, I especially remember the commander of the Aleksandrovsk Military District. He was arrested for having followed orders from higher up to mobilize young recruits during the short-lived triumph of the Ukrainian Central Rada. There was no other evidence proving him to be an enemy of the Revolution. However, the Commission was divided on the question of releasing him. Four members of the Commission saw him as a convinced, active counter-revolutionary and insisted that the Commission accept their opinion and record the result in writing. Three members were against. It was clear that the district commander would be shot. A storm broke out among us. Comrade Mirgorodsky suggested to me that we quit the Commission and go back to the Revkom: perhaps the Revkom would delegate someone else in our place. The Petrograders started laughing at us, saying we were not conducting ourselves as revolutionaries. So Comrade Mirgorodsky and I explained to them how to act like revolutionaries. And then three of them changed their opinion that the district commander was so guilty against the Revolution that he must die. And the commander was freed.
While we were studying the dossiers, the Red Guards led in some newly arrested persons: Mikhno (the government commissar from the Kerensky period — the very same Mikhno who had threatened me with legal action four or five months previously for disarming the bourgeoisie in Gulyai-Pole raion), the uyezd chief of police Vasilyev, the public prosecutor Maksimov, and Peter Sharovsky. The latter had been a member of the Gulyai-Pole A-K Group and on May 1, 1910, betrayed our comrades Aleksandr Semenyuta and Marfa Piven, receiving for this vile deed 500 rubles of the 2,000 promised by the State for giving up A. Semenyuta. It was very painful for me to meet this old “comrade”. On seeing me, he fell to his knees, raised his hands, and uttered: “Nestor Ivanovich, save me. My betrayal was unintentional. I talked too much to an undercover cop”, etc.
Maybe I would have believed him, if not for information received from close friends while I was serving time at forced labour in Moscow. Furthermore, after my return to Gulyai-Pole, this information was confirmed by Marfa Piven who was present when A. Semenyuta was killed. She had been struck by a bullet in the forehead but fortunately survived. Sharovsky’s own brothers, Prokofii and Grigorii, had helped me in 1917 establish his role as a provocateur. One of them had even helped our comrade “Yaponetz” try to assassinate Peter Sharovsky soon after Semenyuta’s death. Peter took two bullets but unfortunately was not killed. He himself showed that he was guilty. After recovering from his wounds, he bricked up all the lower windows in his house; and upon my return from prison he disappeared completely.
Then in Aleksandrovsk I spotted him going around from one group of workers to another with a tin cup in his hand. When I tried to grab him, he escaped.
I made use of my influence with the Red Guard commander Bogdanov to insist that the revolutionary authorities in Aleksandrovsk make the capture of Peter Sharovsky a priority. Bogdanov, without hesitation, dispatched two group of Red Guards to the square where I had seen Sharovsky, and they arrested him.
On January 6, 1918, I made a detailed report to the Commission (of which I was the chair) about who Peter Sharovsky was, and who A. Semenyuta was, and how Semenyuta had been betrayed by Sharovsky and how much reward Sharovsky received for his betrayal. In presenting my report I advised my listeners that I was not speaking to them as members of the Commission, but as Socialist-Revolutionaries and Bolsheviks who were to witness that Peter Sharovsky would not be killed unjustly. The Petrograd Bolsheviks on the Commission proposed handing over Sharovsky to Commander Bogdanov, but Mirgorodsky and I didn’t agree with this and requested only that the Commander put Sharovsky in a holding cell until I was freed from pressing business. Then comrades from our Gulyai-Pole group arrived: Filipp Krat, Savva Makhno, Pavel Korostelyev, as well as some members of the Aleksandrovsk anarchist group. We repeatedly interrogated Sharovsky and then one of the comrades put a bullet in his head.
Another painful encounter was with the former commissar Mikhno. I had a gut feeling that it would be hard to establish his guilt before the revolutionary peasants and workers. He had ordered my indictment during his stint as Commissar of the Provisional Government for revolutionary actions carried out by the Committee for the Defence of the Revolution in Gulyai-Pole raion. He demanded the Gulyai-Pole Public Committee exclude me from any organizing activities. But when I wrote him a letter of protest in the name of the Gulyai-Pole raion Peasants’ Congress and insisted that he withdraw his demand, he did indeed withdraw it. I felt that in determining his guilt I would be prejudiced and that this would lead to his doom; and yet, he compared favourably with many of the zemstvo leaders of Aleksandrovsk uyezd — he was known as an honest man and a liberal still in tsarist times. Moreover I was persuaded that he shouldn’t be destroyed just for carrying out his obligations as a government commissar of the Provisional Government, even if he was from a hostile camp. Our raion never followed his orders, always rejecting them, and he was powerless to impose them on us so long as the toilers had the upper hand.