[3] The decree is considered the official response of the Soviet government to the murder of V. Volodarsky and Moisei Uritsky by the Popular Socialist Party.

Not all Soviet party leaders approved of the activities of the Cheka and the excessive powers granted to it; it was criticised, among others, by Nikolai Bukharin, Lev Kamenev, Mikhail Olminsky, and Grigory Petrovsky.

Since the commune was formally an independent, and in reality to some extent autonomous, entity, the legislation adopted in Soviet Russia did not automatically apply to it.

The commission's activities expanded and became bloodier after an operation by the partisan Julius Kuperjanov in Elistvere parish on 4 January, during which former Red Rifleman Johannes Pärn was killed.

Among those executed were Orthodox Bishop Platon Kulbusch, two Orthodox high priests (Nikolai Bezhanitsky [ru] and Mikhail Bleive [ru]), two Lutheran pastors, professors of theology at the University of Tartu (Gotthilft Traugott Hahn and Moritz Wilhelm Paul Schwartz), three estate owners, one estate manager, one restaurant owner, two city councilors, the head of the Baltic Germans in Tartu Arnold Johann Heinrich von Tideböhl, a lawyer, a potter, a student, and even a Red Army soldier with a Russian surname.

[4][5] The death sentence was carried out by the 2nd Viljandi Penal Squad, formed from the Estonian Red Riflemen Regiment, led by Commissar Aleksander Jea.

[citation needed]  However, the Estonian historian Taavi Minnik believes that these shootings were primarily as revenge for the activities of the Kuperjanov Partisan Battalion.

[6] The Western world was informed about the massacres in Tartu and Rakvere organised by the Bolsheviks by the writer Eduard Vilde, head of the Estonian News Bureau in Copenhagen, whose description of the massacres, together with photographs, was initially published in the largest French illustrated magazine, L'Illustration, under the title "Lescrime du bolchevisme en Esthonie".

In the late 1920s, prayers and memorial services for the victims began to be held in Orthodox and Lutheran churches in Tartu on 14 January.

[9] The memory of the victims of the massacre was also honoured after the restoration of Estonia's independence, in January 2009, as part of events marking the anniversary of the liberation of Tartu from the Bolsheviks.

[10] Priests Platon Kulbush, Nikolai Bezhanitsky, and Mikhail Bleive were canonized as hieromartyrs in the Eastern Orthodox Church.