On September 5, six versts from Kerensk in the Penza province, in the area of Pobitom, the Bolsheviks brutally killed 10 local landowners, stabbing them with bayonets and beating them with rifle butts. The bodies of the slain remained along the road for several days to intimidate the bourgeoisie. In September, provincial prisons were overcrowded with people who disagreed with the new regime. The arrested were often sent to liberated barracks, warehouses, and railway depots.

There was lawlessness everywhere. The new authorities treated prisoners cruelly, using perverse methods. For example, nobles were forced to write a thousand times in calligraphic handwriting: "Long live the power of the victorious proletariat and the poorest layers of the peasant and laboring class." Priests were compelled to sing "you fell as a victim in the fateful struggle," while former officers were made to clean boots with their tongues.

In the neighboring Mokshana, executions were carried out at Lysa Gora, and the bodies of the executed were forbidden to be buried. Only when the smell of decay became unbearable did the Bolsheviks douse the remains with kerosene and set them on fire. A few years later, new correctional institutions and concentration camps began to appear in Soviet Russia, where thousands of people lived and worked under inhumane conditions.