12. Red Rosalia and the Red Terror
Rosalia Zemlyachka’s zeal and methods alarmed even Felix Dzerzhinsky, head of the Cheka (forerunner of the NKVD and KGB). Considering that Dzerzhinsky was known as “Iron Felix“, alarming him took some doing. So in 1920, she was bundled out of Moscow and sent to the Crimea – one of the last enclaves of resistance to Bolshevik rule – as Secretary of the Crimean Regional Committee of the Russian Communist Party.
She was determined to stamp out opposition, once and for all, and to economize on mass murder while doing so. At a time when the Bolsheviks were running low on munitions, she decreed that wasting bullets on those marked for execution was unreasonable. One of her cost-cutting measures was to tie rocks to the legs of the condemned, then toss them off barges into the sea. Tens of thousands were killed that way, and when the waters were calm and visibility was good, rows of standing bodies could be seen like a horrific underwater forest, swaying with the currents like kelp on the sea bottom.
