BLOODY DAWN:

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The Northern Dvina flows past sandy shoals and endless forests near Arkhangelsk. This idyllic landscape is deceptive. Here, in the Kholmogory soil, grim discoveries still surface—human skulls and bones emerging during potato planting or spring floods. These are silent witnesses to one of the darkest episodes of the Civil War in the Russian North—the systematic destruction of people under the policy known as the Red Terror.

The preconditions for the tragedy were laid in 1918 when Arkhangelsk became an arena of fierce confrontation. Following an anti-Bolshevik coup on the night of August 1-2, 1918, supported by Entente forces (Great Britain, the USA, France), the autonomous Northern Region was proclaimed. This political entity, headed by People's Socialist Nikolai Chaikovsky, controlled parts of Arkhangelsk, Vologda, and Olonets provinces. The Allies saw the Northern Region as the successor to Russia, continuing the struggle against Germany in World War I, and as a force capable of protecting military warehouses in the ports of Murmansk and Arkhangelsk from possible German capture. However, independence from Moscow proved short-lived. The fall of the Northern Region in February 1920, following the withdrawal of interventionist forces in September 1919, became the trigger for large-scale repressions. The Bolsheviks perceived the existence of a "White" government and the population's collaboration with the interventionists as an act of collective betrayal demanding merciless retribution.

The Red Terror was not spontaneous brutality. Its ideological basis and legal foundations were formed centrally. After the assassination attempt on V.I. Lenin on August 30, 1918, the Council of People's Commissars of the RSFSR adopted the Decree "On Red Terror" on September 5, 1918. This document, signed by People's Commissar of Justice D. Kursky and People's Commissar of Internal Affairs G. Petrovsky, explicitly instructed: "to secure the Soviet Republic from class enemies by isolating them in concentration camps," and to shoot "all persons involved in White Guard organizations, plots, and rebellions." The directive received powerful reinforcement in Lenin's telegrams demanding local authorities "encourage the energy and mass character of terror." Later, on June 20, 1919, the All-Russian Central Executive Committee Decree "On Exclusions from General Jurisdiction in Areas Declared Under Martial Law" granted provincial Chekas the right to extrajudicial execution, including shooting, for a wide range of "crimes"—from belonging to a counter-revolutionary organization to "banditry," interpreted extremely broadly. These documents created a legal (or rather, extra-legal) framework for total violence.

The epicenter of terror in Arkhangelsk Province became the Kholmogory Forced Labor Camp, established in 1920-1921 on the grounds of the abolished Dormition Convent. Despite its formal name, evidence gathered by local residents and historians paints a picture of systematic extermination. "A forced labor camp, but there was no work here, perhaps cutting wood, but that much cut timber wasn't needed. People were killed here en masse," states a modern researcher, relying on the accounts of old-timers and archival work. The camp commander was appointed Chekist Iosif Bachulis, whose name became synonymous with cruelty. According to Elena Leonidovna Pavlova, a custodian of memory about those events, Bachulis practiced a monstrous method of collective responsibility: "He divided prisoners into groups of ten. If one transgressed, they might shoot all ten." The victims were officers of the Northern Region Army, Kronstadt sailors, Cossacks, priests, and peasants accused of spreading "false rumors." Executions were carried out in spruce forests; people were drowned on barges in the Northern Dvina. By the most conservative estimates, over eight thousand people perished in Kholmogory. Exact numbers are unknown—prisoner lists were not compiled; bodies were buried haphazardly, often in mass graves on the monastery grounds or in surrounding forests. The ultimate cynicism of the system came in the 1930s when, for the needs of the newly opened Arkhangelsk Medical Institute, human remains were exhumed from the former camp territory to make educational skeletons.

Although Arkhangelsk was far from the capitals, the methods of terror here mirrored the all-Russian practice developed by the Cheka. The Chairman of the All-Ukrainian Cheka (VUChK), Martin Latsis, whose activities in Ukraine in 1919 horrified even some comrades, openly declared the principle of "class-based extralegality": "We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class. Do not look for evidence or proof during the investigation that the accused acted by deed or word against Soviet power. The first question you should ask him is about his origin, upbringing, education, or profession. These questions should determine the fate of the accused." This approach was applied in the North as well. Arrests in Arkhangelsk after its fall were made not only on genuine suspicion of collaboration with the Whites or interventionists but also on social grounds: officers, officials of the old regime, priests, prosperous peasants, intellectuals. Waves of arrests, night raids, executions without trial—all this created an atmosphere of perpetual fear, described in contemporaries' diaries. A Kiev student noted in 1919: "Every night I leave the window open to hear if they are approaching the house... Life is becoming more terrible. For almost a month I've been sleeping half-dressed... every night someone I know is arrested."

Attempts to comprehend the tragedy began only decades later. In Kholmogory, local residents who had long found human remains while cultivating gardens or cleaning the former monastery grounds raised funds and erected a marble cross in the 2000s with the inscription: "In memory of the victims of the forced labor camp that operated in Kholmogory in 1920-21, whose remains are gathered in this place..." This sorrowful place contrasts with the neglect of another memorial site—the camp on Mudyug Island. Initially created by the interventionists as a transit point, it was later used by Soviet authorities. Soviet propaganda exploited the theme of the "horrors of Mudyug" for decades to condemn the intervention, obscuring or downplaying the scale of repressions launched after the departure of foreign troops. Today, the exhibition on the island, where one larch barrack remains (built, according to historian Igor Gostev's clarification, before the revolution for railway workers), is nearly forgotten and lacks funding. The historical memory of the Red Terror in the North is fragmented and painful. Discussion of the causes and scale of violence encounters both attempts at relativization ("it was a response to White terror and intervention") and outright rejection of the topic. Historian Lyudmila Novikova, who studied the history of counter-revolution in the North, faced sharp criticism from local colleagues for attempting to show the complex picture of relations between the local population and the interventionists and White authorities, including initial hopes for a better life. Debates surrounding the intervention often overshadow the essential point: the fate of thousands of people who became victims of the state machinery of terror, set in motion by decrees from Moscow and implemented locally with brutal efficiency by provincial Chekas and figures like Iosif Bachulis. The blood shed on the shores of the Northern Dvina remains an indelible stain on the history of the region and a stern reminder of the cost of revolutionary upheavals.