Horrific depictions from Karelia

An eyewitness from Ushkovo Village in White Sea Karelia tells of the following case:

When the company of freedom fighters, due to lack of ammunition, had to retreat and had rested to resume fighting the next day, a message came in the morning that the Bolsheviks had captured village women and taken them to the ice of the lake. After receiving the information our narrator got as close as possible. He saw a Bolshevik soldier cutting a hole in the ice. Then he then saw how the naked women, were grabbed by their hair, were pushed into ice hole and then pulled up again. There had been about 15 poor women in the hands of the fiends. Without being able to help the torturing ones, narrator had to retreat away, because the battle renewed, not seeing what was then done to the women. Later he had learned that before ice-hole the women had been raped and some of them were tortured. So the Bolsheviks using torture tried to force their victims to give information about the Whites.

The Bolsheviks often used women to carry machine guns, as well as to dig graves for their own fallen and killed Karelians. To pick their own fallen, the Bolsheviks have forced women to drag bodies, even between fronts. They have hardly taken prisoners in the battle, they only killed them without mercy.

For an unknown reason, they burned one house in the each conquered village, sometimes even more. Inhabitants permanently fled as front moved. As enemy approached, in each village cows and sheep were left in barns without care and residents fled in fear. For example, there were no inhabitants left in the Melkaya Guba Village. The Russian, Finnish, Kyrgyz and Chinese Bolsheviks were all equally brutal.

In the Minozero Village the Bolsheviks just recently asked owned of the house for food. When there was nothing to give, he was mercilessly beaten to death by a rifle butt. Severed head was brought to the house and placed on the table, body was thrown into its barn.

Horror still shakes the faces of the poor refugee even more as they narrate their horrible experiences.

Uusi Suomi -newspaper no. 42
February 19, 1922