“Rozalia Samuilovna Zalkind known under nicknames Devil, Zemlyachka, and “Fury of the Communist Terror” for her personal participation in mass murders of prisoners following the Civil War was a Russian revolutionary, Soviet politician and statesman. Her parents were for the assassination of Tzar Nicholas and his family.
She is best known for her involvement in the organization of the First Russian revolution, and along with Bela Kun, as one of the organizers of the Red Terror in the Crimea in 1920-1921, against former soldiers of the White (monarchists) Army.”
“Rozalia Zemliachka and her lover Bela Kun murdered 50,000 White officers (with Lenin's approval). They were tied in pairs to planks and burned alive in furnaces; or drowned in barges that she sank offshore.” [Crimes of the Century, C. J. Griffin, on 20 July 2005, Amazon book review]
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“After Rosalia Zemlyachka’s arrival in the Crimea the Black Sea coast was red with blood. The first night in Simferopol shot 1800 people. In Feodosia; 420, in Kerch; 1300 and so on,” wrote the historian Sergei Mel’gunov, a superior.
Rosalia not only gave the ordered for the massacres, but she eagerly participated in them. She was commissar, in leather jacket, revolver at her side, going from town to town, from village to village, killing and killing.” (loosely translated excerpt from Аргументы и Факты, Nov. 21, 2012)
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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.
Upon her return to Moscow from the Crimea, Rosalia Zemlyachka was awarded the Order of the Red Banner – then the highest Soviet military award.
She spent the rest of her life climbing the Communist Party’s rungs, joining the Central Control Commission – the organization that kept a watchful eye on the party.
She worked closely with the NKVD during the Great Terror, and so impressed Stalin with her ruthlessness that he made her head of the Control Commission in 1939.
That made Zemlyachka the only woman in the USSR’s highest administrative body, the Council of People’s Commissars. She died of natural causes at age 71 in 1947, and was honored with a burial in the Kremlin.”
CHEKA Women – Bolshevik Secret Police: Sadism, Torture, Summary Executions & Massacres as “Social Justice” - 1918-1920s
