The peasants in Siberia dug pits and lowered Red Army prisoners into them upside down, leaving their legs to the knees above ground; then they filled in the pit with soil, watching by the convulsions of the legs which of the victims was more resistant, livelier, and which would be the last to die.
In Tambov province Communists were nailed with railway spikes by their left hand and left foot to trees a metre above the soil, and they watched the torments of these deliberately oddly-crucified people.
They would open a prisoner's belly, take out the small intestine and nailing it to a tree or telegraph pole they drove the man around the tree with blows, watching the intestine unwind through the wound. Stripping a captured officer naked, they tore strips of skin from his shoulders in the form of shoulder straps, and knocked in nails in place of pips; they would pull off the skin along the lines of the sword belt and trouser stripes — this operation was called 'to dress in uniform'. It, no doubt, demanded much time and considerable skill.4
The single biggest killer of these years — it accounted in all for some five million lives — was the famine crisis of 1921—2. Like all famine crises, the great Volga famine was caused in part by man and in part by God. The natural conditions of the Volga region made it vulnerable to harvest failures — and there had been many in recent years, 1891—2, 1906 and 1911 just to name a few. Summer droughts and extreme frosts were regular features of the steppeland climate. Gusting winds in the spring blew away the sandy topsoil and damaged tender crops. These were the preconditions of the Volga famine in 1921: the crop failure of 1920 was followed by a year of heavy frost and scorching summer drought that transformed the steppelands into one huge dustbowl. By the spring it became clear that the peasants were about to suffer a second harvest failure in succession. Much of the seed had been killed off by the frosts, while the new corn stalks which did emerge were weedy in appearance and soon destroyed by locusts and field-rats. Bad though they were, these cracks in nature's moulds were not enough to cause a famine crisis. The peasants were accustomed to harvest failures and had always maintained large stocks of grain, often in communal barns, for such emergencies. What made this crisis so disastrous was
the fact that the peasant economy had already been brought to the brink of disaster, even before nature took its toll, by the requisitionings of the civil war. To evade the levies the peasants withdrew into subsistence production — they grew just enough grain to feed themselves and their livestock and provide for seed. In other words they left no safety margin, no reserves of the sort that had cushioned them from adverse weather in the past, since they feared that the Bolsheviks would take them. In 1920 the sown area in the Volga region had declined by a quarter since 1917. Yet the Bolsheviks continued to take more — not just surpluses but vital stocks of food and seed — so that when that harvest failed it was bound to result in the ruin of the peasants.5