Mutiny: The True Events That Inspired The Hunt for Red October

40. EXECUTION

Right after the October Revolution of 1917 the tsar’s police forces were disbanded and in their place a civilian militia was created. But the militia members were factory workers, some of them peasants, who had no experience being cops.

It didn’t take long for the Council of People’s Commissars to start a secret political police force, called the Cheka, led by Felix Dzerzhinsky, whose statue was in the courtyard of the KGB’s Lubyanka Center in 1975. The main power that was given to the new secret police was the right to hold trials outside the normal judicial system. The Cheka was also empowered to execute anyone it found guilty. No appeals. No second chances. No defense attorneys. No writs of habeas corpus. All of it to protect the revolution.

Over the coming years the Cheka’s name was changed to the GPU, the OGPU, the NKGB, the NKVD, and finally the Komitet Gosudarstvennov Bezopasnosti, the Committee for State Security, the KGB. But each of these organizations was charged with doing the same things: finding the bad guys, giving them a down-and-dirty trial in secret, and either sending them to a gulag or giving them what was called their nine ounces or, sometimes, their Russian insurance, which was a 9mm bullet to the back of the head at contact or near-contact range.

Over the history of the Chekas and the KGBs, untold millions of Russians—civilians and military—plus a lot of foreign citizens were stalked, surveilled, arrested, and tried by what were called troikas, or triplets, which were special courts-martial in which three judges, but no jury, listened to the one-sided evidence and passed judgment, very often within minutes.

Witnesses and informers did not have to show up in court to offer their testimony. Most of the time they weren’t even named.

The accused was very often persuaded through his KGB interrogators to cooperate with the court and tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

All of this was legal under Soviet law, to protect the revolution and later the state from what were called public enemies.

Thousands of mass graves have been found across the Soviet Union, some of the graves containing the bodies of more than one thousand public enemies, each of them with the same wound, a bullet to the back of the head. That’s not counting the untold millions killed by the military or the militia on Moscow’s orders. These are just the known graves of the KGB’s victims.

At one point quotas were established specifiying the number of people who were to be arrested, tried, and executed by the KGB. The public enemies were divided into categories, each with its own quota: former members of the royal familes, clergy, military officers, or Ukranians, Germans, and Tatars. Most often the quotas included the children and entire familes of the accused, under what was called NKVD Order 00486.

Very often a purge would have to be organized in order to fill a quota, decided by the Politburo of the Comunist Party in Moscow. For a time engineers became suspect and thousands were arrested and tried and got their nine ounces. It was the so-called Shakhty Case.

Another time it was medical people who were purged in what was called the Doctors’ Plot.

Or it would be military officers who might have begun to think they were better than everyone else, and might have thought about overthrowing Stalin’s government. This was just before the start of WWII and the vast number of capable officers who got their Russian insurance seriously hurt the Soviet military’s ability to fight back.

But there was some poetic justice even in the Soviet Union during Stalin’s regime when the officers of the NKVD—the executioners themselves—were purged and executed by the tens of thousands. The bells surely rang in Moscow on those days.

And it wasn’t just inside the Soviet Union where executions took place. During the Spanish Civil War the NKVD set up a dozen or more secret prisons in and around Madrid to try and then murder enemies of the state.

Until the treaty between Hitler and Stalin went south at the beginning of WWII the NKVD regularly turned over enemies of the state to the Gestapo, and the Germans very often returned the favor, especially in Poland.

Probably the worst of the KGB executions occurred during the winter of 1932-33 in the Ukraine, where Stalin forced millions of independent farmers, called kulaks, into collectives. It was the new Soviet way of doing business. The kulaks objected, so Stalin sent twenty-five thousand Party militants to bring the 10 million farmers into line, executing the tens of thousands who disagreed by shooting them in the back of the head.

But murder on such a vast scale was too slow, so Stalin ordered that in addition to meting out Russian insurance he would take away all the food. All grain, silage, seeds, and farm animals were trucked off. Secret service agents, with the help of the army, sealed off all the roads and rail lines so that not one scrap of anything edible could get in.

Finally, food and fuel was confiscated from every noncollectivized farm in the Ukraine. That winter, while the nine-ounces operation was killing ten thousand Ukranians each week, people began starving to death by the hundreds of thousands. The kulaks ate their pets, then bark from the trees, even their boots and belts and harnesses. Finally they began eating one another. Sometimes parents ate their infant children.

The final tally of deaths by shooting and by starvation is estimated at around 7 to 9 million or more. Fully 25 percent of the entire population had been killed.

When other executions across the Soviet Union were taken into account—the Latvians, Lithuanians, Muslims, Cossacks, and Germans in the Volga region—the number probably rises to 40 million, not counting the 20 million who died in WWII.

On a much smaller and more personal level, executions were a daily occurrence at gulags such as the one in the Solovetski Islands up in the White Sea, close to the Arctic Circle. The camp was established in the early twenties on the site of a monastery and housed, fed, worked, and buried tens of thousands of public enemies.

This was the granddaddy of all the gulags. Solovki, as it was called, was where the Bolsheviks figured out how the system should be run. Like feeding the prisoners who did the most work the most food. This way the poor producers were the first to die. Like repeatedly tossing a prisoner down a long stairway, outside, in the below-zero weather. Sooner or later the poor man would die. Like forcing the prisoners to remain outside during the summer, when mosquitoes would fill a man’s bowl at dinner so that the soup was as thick as molasses or pack a man’s nose so tightly it would bleed. “…and the taste of them,” one prisoner wrote, “was sweet, like blood.”

It wasn’t long after the camp was up and running at full speed when suddenly one day the place was cleaned up, painted, repairs made, trees and bushes planted, and husbands and wives even allowed to live together. This was paradise for the men and women who’d thought they’d been forgotten. At this point all of them firmly believed that they would live out the remainder of their days here and be buried in some anonymous Arctic grave.The famous Russian writer Maksim Gorky came for a three-day visit. He wanted to see for himself how this model prison camp was being run. Solovki was a Soviet experiment for dealing with what Gorky called counter-revolutionaries, emotional types, monarchists. When he got back to Moscow he wrote that “there is no resemblance to a prison” at that place. Like so many Russians before and after him, he had been thoroughly brainwashed by the system.

As soon as Gorky had left Solovki the guards began digging mass graves, enough for hundreds of bodies. The next day the secret police executioners got drunk and started to work—one bullet to the back of the head of each victim. Most of the time it was enough to cause instantaneous death. But not always. Dead or not, the bodies were tossed in the graves in layers, each layer covered with some dirt.

One prisoner wrote that the next morning the earth was still moving. But the executioners had eliminated what were called the superfluous.

The gulags were not meant to be the same as the Nazis’ concentration camps, a place for mass exterminations. Rather, Stalin wanted to keep the Soviet people in an almost constant state of terror. Which he did.

A prisoner who was scheduled for execution often wasn’t told about the sentence. But stories circulated among the people, and anyone caught in the KGB’s web had to understand that death was not only entirely possible; it was likely.

No appeal could be made, and everyone in the trap knew it. Once caught, the prisoner was totally at the mercy of his captors. Escape was out of the question.

All that was open to the prisoner before execution was imagination. On this evening on the Daugava River downstream from Riga, Sablin and the other mutineers—but especially Sablin—had to be thinking about the price they would have to pay if their scheme failed.

They might be attacked or sunk, or they might be boarded and everyone who wasn’t killed in the gun battle arrested. If that happened they would probably all die anyway.

Nine ounces. The entire concept had to be a constant thread running through the zampolit’s head. He was a Russian. He’d heard the stories.

Most often the up close and personal executions are not carried out on some windswept hillside, beside a long open-pit grave, but take place at the end of a short corridor that opens to a small, bare room. Cold tile walls, maybe a painted concrete floor that slopes front to back to a narrow trough with a drain in one corner. Often there is a short section of hose connected to a spigot and sometimes, but not always, a chair or a metal stool in the middle of the room, just below a bare lightbulb.

No windows admit the light of day or the stars at night. No radios at the end of the hall play music. No whir of fans or other machinery can be heard. No one is talking somewhere else in the building, the voices barely a murmur. It’s not hot, nor is it overly cold.

It is an indifferent place. Anonymous, like the people who pass through it.

But it is the end, and all prisoners who come to this point finally understand that this is the very last place on earth that they will ever see. This is the very last bit of the living world that they will experience. Begging, pleading, bribing, screaming, crying, cajoling, threatening will not have any effect. It’s possible that there are miracles, but not in a place like this.

According to a study by the NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, almost every victim who is shot in the head and arrives in the ER deeply comatose will die. In these cases very little can be done to try to save the person, because, according to the report, “of the futility of the situation.”

One of the common tests is the Glasgow Coma Scale. The higher the score, the more likely it is that the patient will recover, and therefore the more aggressive the treatment should be.

Three tests are given, one for eye opening, in which a score of 4 means the victim’s eyes are open and 1 means the eyes remain closed no matter what is said or done to them. Verbal responses run from a score of 4, which means that the victim can talk and make sense, to 1, in which the words make no sense, and finally to 0, where the patient says nothing. Another test is for motor responses, in which a score of 6 means the patient can respond to a command, such as lifting an arm when asked to do so, to 2, in which the patient might twitch, and finally 1, in which there is absolutely no response, even to a pinprick to the bottom of a foot.

Next the ER nurse or doctor looks for some other signs of life or the possibility of survival. What are the sizes of the pupils and their reaction to light? Is there any drainage from the mouth or ears? Does the chest expand evenly? Are the heart tones within limits? Are the lung sounds clear on the right and left? Are wheezes or crackles present? Is the abdomen soft, flat, rigid, or distended? Is the patient incontinent? Does the victim have movement and reactions in the upper and lower extremities? Does the victim have normal movement of the back, or is he or she paralyzed?

If there are any signs of life the victim should be immediately given a normal saline solution for fluid replacement. Blood should be drawn for laboratory analysis.

Above all, if there is to be any chance of survival, the victim should be placed so that he or she is comfortable and can breathe without trouble. He or she should be covered in warm blankets, especially around the head, neck, and shoulders, to prevent shock.

The wound should be cleaned and covered with a sterile dressing.

Drains should be put in place—a nasogastric tube to reduce the risk of the victim throwing up and drowning on his or her own vomit, and a Foley catheter to decompress the bladder and so that the medical staff can check the victim’s urine output.

Then there is blood loss that has to be considered. A small man of around 150 pounds has about five quarts of blood in his body. If he loses about three-quarters of a quart, his heartbeat will increase to try to push what’s left to all the organs so that they will survive and function. He’ll become light-headed and nauseous and will begin to sweat.

If he loses a quart or so, his blood pressure will drop dramatically. The damage to his system becomes almost irreversible unless something is done soon.

Then, with around a 40 percent bleed-out, with loss of nearly two quarts of blood, the damage is complete. The victim goes into shock, which leads to cardiac arrest, and it’s game over. Nothing can be done to revive the victim. He dies.

According to Patricia Ann Bemis, RN, CEN, who conducts an online nursing course on stab, gunshot, and penetrating injuries: “Penetrating injuries to the brain have a high mortality rate. Missile wounds from high velocity weapons [such as a 9mm pistol at contact range] can penetrate the skull. All patients with brain… trauma are assumed to have cervical spine injury until proven otherwise by a negative X-ray or CT.”

A brief NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital article on cranial gunshot wounds warns that death will most likely occur if any combination of factors piles up against the victim: a low Glasgow Coma Scale score, an older age, low blood pressure (because of blood loss or other problems), lack of oxygen after the trauma, dilated, nonreactive pupils, and a bullet trajectory that plows through several lobes of the brain or the ventricular system.

All the medical bulletins and monographs agree on a few basic points: A victim of a gunshot wound to the head, especially to the back of the head, probably will not survive without immediate medical help, and even then the prognosis is extremely poor. Shooting someone in the back of the head at close range is a fairly sure way of ensuring the victim will not survive to tell any tale.

It all comes down to the amount of kinetic energy transferred from the bullet to the bone and soft matter of the skull and brain. So long as the projectle remains inside the skull—it does not plow through brain and come out the other side—all the energy of the bullet is transferred to the skull and brain. The damage is maximized.

If a silencer is used and the pistol is fired into the back of the skull at point-blank or near point-blank range, the entrance wound will probably be greater and the damage to the soft tissue even more extensive than with a nonsilenced gunshot wound. Either way, however, such wounds are usually fatal.

When the bullet hits first the bone of the skull, it deforms and sometimes even fragments before it enters the brain. In each case the damage is worse than if the bullet entered the brain intact.

The energy from a bullet entering the brain at the speed of sound will probably cause hyrdraulic shock, which will rupture blood vessels on all sides of the bullet’s path. Bits of shattered bone fragments pushed into the brain also cause more damage. And the discharge gases that spew out of the muzzle can also enter the brain through the wound in the skull and act like a blowtorch.

When the pistol is pressed against the back of the victim’s head or within an inch of contact, the edges of the wound are seared by the hot gasses, just like a piece of meat held over an open flame will be cooked and turn black from the soot baked into the skin.

The KGB knows all these details, but for men such as Sablin who are caught up in their grand adventure they cannot think beyond the possibility of their arrest and execution. After all, what does it matter how a man dies, so long as it is quick and painless? A bullet to the back of the skull is certainly quick and, for the rare few who get immediate medical attention and survive, almost completely painless.

But the KGB never takes its victims to the hospital. Once they enter the execution room, their next trip will be to an unmarked grave, and just about every Russian knows it. That includes Sablin and his coconspirators.