PART 2: THE BLACK BOOK OF COMMUNISM CRIMES,TERROR AND REPRESSION

The Black Book of COMMUNISM CRIMES, TERROR, REPRESSION Stephane Courtois Nicolas Werth Jean-Louis Panne Andrzej Paczkowski Karel Bartosek Jean-Louis Margolin Translated by Jonathan Murphy

2

The Iron Fist of the 

Dictatorship of the Proletariat

The new Bolshevik power structure was quite complicated. Its public face, "the power of the Soviets," was formally represented by the Central Executive Committee, while the lawmaking apparatus of government was the Soviet Council of People's Commissars (S.N.K), which struggled to achieve some degree of domestic and international legitimacy and recognition. The government also had its revolutionary organization in the form of the Petrograd Revolutionary Military Committee (P.R.M.C), which had been so central in the actual seizure of power. Feliks Dzerzhinsky, who from the earliest days had played a decisive role in the P.R.M.C, characterized it as "a light, flexible structure that could swing into action at a moment's notice, without any bureaucratic interference. There were no restrictions when the time came for the iron fist of the dictatorship of the proletariat to smite its foe." 

How did this "iron fist of the dictatorship of the proletariat" (an expression later used to describe the Bolshevik secret police, the Cheka) work in practice ? Its organization was simple and extremely effective. The P.R.M.C was made up of some sixty officials, including forty-eight Bolsheviks, a few Socialist Revolutionaries of the far left, and a handful of anarchists; and it was officially under the direction of a chairman, the Socialist Revolutionary Aleksandr Lazimir, who was assisted in his operations by a group of four that included Aleksandr Antonov-Ovseenko and Dzerzhinsky. In fact during the fifty-three days of the P.R.M.C's existence, more than 6,000 orders were drawn up, most of them scribbled on old bits of paper, and some twenty different people signed their name as chairman or secretary. 

The same operational simplicity was to be found in the transmission of directives and the execution of orders: the P.R.M.C acted through the intermediary of a network of nearly one thousand "commissars," who operated in many different fields—in military units, Soviets, neighborhood committees, and administrations. Responsible only to the P.R.M.C, these commissars often made decisions independently of the government or of the Bolshevik Central Committee. Beginning on 26 October (8 November), 1 while the Bolshevik leaders were off forming the government, a few obscure, anonymous commissars decided to "strengthen the dictatorship of the proletariat" by the following measures: forbidding counterrevolutionary tracts, closing all seven of the capital's principal newspapers (bourgeois and moderate socialist), taking control of" radio and telegraph stations, and setting up a project for the requisitioning of apartments and privately owned cars. The closing of the newspapers was legalized by a government decree a few days later, and within another week, after some quite acrimonious discussions, it was approved by the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets. 2 

Unsure of their strength, and using the same tactic that had succeeded so well earlier, the Bolshevik leaders at first encouraged what they called the "revolutionary spontaneity of the masses." Replying to a delegation of representatives from rural Soviets, who had come from the province of Pskov to inquire what measures should be taken to avoid anarchy, Dzerhinsky explained that 

the task at hand is to break up the old order. We, the Bolsheviks, are not numerous enough to accomplish this task alone. We must allow the revolutionary spontaneity of the masses who are righting for their emancipation to take its course. After that, we Bolsheviks will show the masses which road to follow. Through the P.R.M.C it is the masses who speak, and who act against their class enemy, against the enemies of the people. We are here only to channel and direct the hate and the legitimate desire for revenge of the oppressed against their oppressors. 

A few days earlier, at the 29 October (11 November) meeting of the P.R.M.C, a few unidentified people had mentioned a need to combat the "enemies of the people" more vigorously. This formula would meet with great success in the months, years, and decades to follow. It was taken up again in the P.R.M.C proclamation dated 13 November (26 November):"High-ranking functionaries in state administration, banks, the treasury, the railways, and the post and telegraph offices are all sabotaging the measures of the Bolshevik government. Henceforth such individuals are to be described as 'enemies of the people.' Their names will be printed in all newspapers, and lists of the enemies of the people will be put up in public places." 3 A few days after these lists were published, a new proclamation was issued:"All individuals suspected of sabotage, speculation, and opportunism are now liable to be arrested immediately as enemies of the people and transferred to the Kronstadt prisons."4 In the space of a few days the P.R.M.C had introduced two new notions that were to have lasting consequences: the idea of the "enemy of the people" and the idea of the "suspect." 

On 28 November (11 December) the government institutionalized the notion of "enemy of the people." A decree signed by Lenin stipulated that "all leaders of the Constitutional Democratic Party, a party filled with enemies of the people, are hereby to be considered outlaws, and are to be arrested immediately and brought before a revolutionary court." 5 Such courts had just been set up in accordance with "Order Number One regarding the Courts," which effectively abolished all laws that "were in contradiction with the worker and peasant government, or with the political programs of the Social Democratic or Socialist Revolutionary parties." While waiting for the new penal code to be drawn up, judges were granted tremendous latitude to assess the validity of existing legislation "in accordance with revolutionary order and legality," a notion so vague that it encouraged all sorts of abuses. The courts of the old regime were immediately suppressed and replaced by people's courts and revolutionary courts to judge crimes and misdemeanors committed "against the proletarian state," "sabotage," "espionage," "abuse of one's position," and other "counterrevolutionary crimes." As Dmitry Kursky, the people's commissar of justice from 1918 to 1928, recognized, the revolutionary courts were not courts in the normal "bourgeois" sense of the term at all, but courts of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and weapons in the struggle against the counterrevolution, whose main concern was eradication rather than judgment.'6 Among the revolutionary courts was a "revolutionary press court," whose role was to judge all crimes committed by the press and to suspend any publication found to be "sowing discord in the minds of the people by deliberately publishing erroneous news."7 

While these new and previously unheard-of categories ("suspects," "enemies of the people") were appearing and the new means of dealing with them emerging, the Petrograd Revolutionary Military Committee continued its own process of restructuring. In a city in which stocks of flour were so low that rations were less than half a pound of bread per day per adult, the question of the food supply was naturally of great importance. 

On 11 (17) November a Food Commission was established, and its first proclamation stigmatized "the rich classes who profit from the misery of others," noting that "the time has come to requisition the surpluses of the rich, and all their goods as well." On 11 (24) November the Food Commission decided to send special detachments, made up of soldiers, sailors, workers, and Red Guards, to the provinces where cereals were produced "to procure food needed in Petrograd and at the front. "8This measure, taken by one of the P.R.M.C commissions, prefigured the forced requisitioning policy that was enforced for three years by detachments from the "food army,'' which was to be the essential factor in the conflicts between the new regime and the peasantry and was to provoke much violence and terror. 

The Military Investigation Commission, established on 10 (23) November, was in charge of the arrest of"counterrevolutionary" officers (who were usually denounced by their own soldiers), members of "bourgeois" parties, and functionaries accused of "sabotage." In a very short time this commission was in charge of a diffuse array of issues. In the troubled climate of a starving city, where detachments of Red Guards and ad hoc militia groups were constantly requisitioning, commandeering, and pillaging in the name of the revolution, or on the strength of an uncertain mandate signed by some commissar, hundreds of individuals every day were brought before the commission for a wide variety of so-called crimes, including looting, "speculation," "hoarding products of the utmost necessity," "drunkenness," and "belonging to a hostile class." 9 

The Bolshevik appeals to the revolutionary spontaneity of the masses were in practice a difficult tool to use. Violence and the settling of old scores were widespread, as were armed robberies and the looting of shops, particularly of the underground stocks of the Winter Palace and of shops selling alcohol. As time passed the phenomenon became so widespread that at Dzerzhinsky's suggestion the P.R.M.C established a commission to combat drunkenness and civil unrest. On 6 (19) December the commission declared a state of emergency in Petrograd and imposed a curfew to "put an end to the troubles and the unrest brought about by unsavory elements masquerading as revolutionaries." 10 

More than these sporadic troubles, what the revolutionary government feared was a widespread strike by state employees, which had started in the immediate aftermath of the coup d'etat of 25 October (7 November). This threat was the pretext for the creation on 7 (20) December of theIserossiiskaya Czrezvychainaya Atomissiya po bor'be skontr-revolyutsiei, spekulyatsiei i sabo- tazhem—the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission to Combat the Counterrevolution, Speculation, and Sabotage—which was to enter history under its initials as the VChK, abbreviated to the Cheka. 

A few days after the creation of the Cheka, the government decided, not without hesitation, to disband the P.R.M.C. As a provisional operating structure set up on the eve of the insurrection to direct operations on the ground, it had accomplished its task: it had facilitated the seizure of power and defended the new regime until it had time to create its own state apparatus. Henceforth, to avoid confusion about power structures and the danger of spreading responsibilities too widely, it was to transfer all its prerogatives to the legal government, the Council of People's Commissars. 

At a moment judged to be so critical by their leaders, how could the Bolsheviks do without this "iron fist of the dictatorship of the proletariat"? At a meeting on 6(19) December the government entrusted "Comrade Dzerzhinsky to establish a special commission to examine means to combat, with the most revolutionary energy possible, the general strike of state employees, and to investigate methods to combat sabotage." What Dzerzhinsky did gave rise to no discussion, as it seemed so clearly to be the correct response. A few days earlier, Lenin, always eager to draw parallels between the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution of 1917, had confided in his secretary Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich an urgent need to find "our own Fouquier-Tinville, to combat the counterrevolutionary rabble."11 On 6 December Lenin's choice of a "solid proletarian Jacobin"resulted in the unanimous election of Dzerzhinsky, who in a few weeks, thanks to his energetic actions as part of the P.R.M.C, had become the great specialist on questions of security. Besides, as Lenin explained to Bonch-Bruevich, "of all of us, it's Feliks who spent the most time behind bars of the Czarist prisons, and who had the most contact with the Okhrana [the tsarist political police]. He knows what he's doing!" 

Before the government meeting of 7 (20) December Lenin sent a note to Dzerzhinsky: 

With reference to your report of today, would it not be possible to write a decree with a preamble such as the following: The bourgeoisie are still persistently committing the most abominable crimes and recruiting the very dregs of society to organize riots. The accomplices of the bourgeoisie, notably high-ranking functionaries and bank cadres, are also involved in sabotage and organizing strikes to undermine the measures the government is taking with a view to the socialist transformation of society. The bourgeoisie is even going so far as to sabotage the food supply, thus condemning millions to death by starvation. Exceptional measures will have to be taken to combat these saboteurs and counterrevolutionaries. Consequently, the Soviet Council of People's Commissars decrees that . . , 12 

During the evening of 7 (20) December Dzerzhinsky presented his project to the S.N.K. He began his intervention with a speech on the dangers faced by the revolution "from within": 

To address this problem, the crudest and most dangerous of all the problems we face, we must make use of determined comrades—solid, hard men without pity—who are ready to sacrifice everything for the sake of the revolution. Do not imagine, comrades, that I am simply looking for a revolutionary form of justice. We have no concern about justice at this hour! We are at war, on the front where the enemy is advancing, and the fight is to the death. What I am proposing, what I am demanding, is the creation of a mechanism that, in a truly revolutionary and suitably Bolshevik fashion, will filter out the counterrevolutionaries once and for all! 

Dzerzhinsky then launched into the core of his speech, transcribed as it appears in the minutes of the meeting: 

The task of the Commission is as follows: (I) to suppress and liquidate any act or attempted act of counterrevolutionary activity or sabotage, whatever its origin, anywhere on Russian soil; (2) to bring all saboteurs and counterrevolutionaries before a revolutionary court. 

The Commission will proceed by a preliminary inquiry, wherever this is indispensable to its task. 

The Commission will be divided into three sections: (1) Information; (2) Organization; (3) Operation. 

The Commission will attach particular importance to questions regarding the press, sabotage, the K.D's [Constitutional Democrats], the right Socialist Revolutionaries, saboteurs, and strikers. 

The Commission is entitled to take the following repressive measures: to confiscate goods, expel people from their homes, remove ration cards, publish lists of enemies of the people, etc. 

Resolution: to approve this draft. To name the commission the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission to Combat the Counterrevolution, Speculation, and Sabotage. 

These resolutions are to be made public. 13

This text, which discusses the founding of the Soviet secret police, undoubtedly raises a few questions. How, for example, is the difference between Dzerzhinsky's fiery-sounding speech and the relative modesty of the powers accorded the Cheka to be interpreted? The Bolsheviks were on the point of concluding an agreement with the left Socialist Revolutionaries (six of whose leaders had been admitted to the government on 12 December) to break their political isolation, at the crucial moment when they had to face the question of calling the Constituent Assembly, in which they still held only a minority. Accordingly they decided to keep a low profile, and contrary to the resolution adopted by the government on 7 (20) December, no decree announcing the creation of the Cheka and outlining its role was actually published. 

As an "extraordinary commission," the Cheka was to prosper and act without the slightest basis in law. Dzerzhinsky, who like Lenin wanted nothing so much as a free hand, described it in the following astonishing fashion: "It is life itself that shows the Cheka the direction to follow." Life in this instance meant the"revolutionary terror of the masses," the street violence fervently encouraged by many of the Bolshevik leaders, who had momentarily forgotten their profound distrust of the spontaneous actions of the people. 

When Trotsky, a people's commissar during the war, was addressing the delegates of the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets on 1 (14) December, he warned that "in less than a month, this terror is going to take extremely violent forms, just as it did during the great French Revolution. Not only prison awaits our enemies, but the guillotine, that remarkable invention of the French Revolution which has the capacity to make a man a whole head shorter." 14 

A few weeks later, speaking at a workers  assembly, Lenin again called for terror, describing it as revolutionary class justice: 

The Soviet regime has acted in the way that all revolutionary proletariat's should act; it has made a clean break with bourgeois justice, which is an instrument of the oppressive classes . . . Soldiers and workers must understand that no one will help them unless they help themselves. If the masses do not rise up spontaneously, none of this will lead to anything . . . For as long as we fail to treat speculators the way they deserve—with a bullet in the head —we will not get anywhere at all. 15 

These calls for terror intensified the violence already unleashed in society by the Bolsheviks' rise to power. Since the autumn of 1917 thousands of the great agricultural properties had been attacked by brigades of angry peasants, and hundreds of the major landowners had been massacred. Violence had been omnipresent in Russia in the summer of 1917. The violence itself was nothing new, but the events of the year had allowed several different types of violence, already there in a latent state, to converge: an urban violence reacting against the brutality of capitalist relations at the heart of an industrial society; traditional peasant violence; and the modern violence of World War I, which had reintroduced extraordinary regression and brutality into human relations. The combination of these three forms of violence made for an explosive mix, whose effect was potentially devastating during the Russian Revolution, marked as it was by the failure of normal institutions of order and authority, by a rising sense of resentment and social frustrations accumulated over a long period, and by the political use of popular violence. Mutual suspicion had always been the norm between the townspeople and the peasants. For the peasants, more now than ever, the city was the seat of power and oppression; for the urban elite, and for professional revolutionaries who by a large majority were from the intelligentsia, the peasants were still, in Gorky'swords, "a mass of half-savage people" whose "cruel instincts" and"animal individualism" ought to be brought to book by the"organized reason of the city." At the same time, politicians and intellectuals were all perfectly conscious that it was the peasant revolts that had shaken the provisional government, allowing the Bolsheviks, who were really a tiny minority in the country, to seize the initiative in the power vacuum that had resulted. 

At the end of 1917 and the beginning of 1918, the new regime faced no serious opposition, and one month after the Bolshevik coup d'etat it effectively controlled most of the north and the center of Russia as far as the mid-Volga, as well as some of the bigger cities, such as Baku in the Caucasus and Tashkent in Central Asia. Ukraine and Finland had seceded but were not demonstrating any warlike intentions. The only organized anti-Bolshevik military force was a small army of about 3,000 volunteers, the embryonic form of the future "White Army" that was being formed in southern Russia by General Mikhail Alekseev and General Kornilov These Czarist generals were placing all their hopes in the Cossack's of the Don and the Kuban. The Cossack's were radically different from the other Russian peasants; their main privilege under the old regime had been to receive 30 hectares of land in exchange for military service up to the age of thirty-six. If they had no desire to acquire more land, they were zealous to keep the land they had already acquired. Desiring above all to retain their status and their independence, and worried by the Bolshevik proclamations that had proved so injurious to the kulaks, the Cossack's aligned themselves with the anti-Bolshevik forces in the spring of 1918. 

"Civil war" may not be the most appropriate term to describe the first clashes of the winter of 1917 and the spring of 1918 in southern Russia, which involved a few thousand men from the army of volunteers and General Rudolf" Sivers' Bolshevik troops, who numbered scarcely 6,000. What is immediately striking is the contrast between the relatively modest number of troops involved in these clashes and the extraordinary repressive violence exercised by the Bolsheviks, not simply against the soldiers they captured but also against civilians. Established in June 1919 by General Anton Denikin, commander in chief of the armed forces in the south of Russia, the Commission to Investigate Bolshevik Crimes tried to record, in the few months of its existence, the atrocities committed by the Bolsheviks in Ukraine, the Kuban, the Don region, and the Crimea. The statements gathered by this commission, which constitute the principal source of Sergei Melgunov's 1926 classic, The Red Terror in Russia, 1918-1924, demonstrate that innumerable atrocities were committed from January 1918 onward. In Taganrog units from Sivers' army had thrown fifty Junkers and "White" officers, their hands and feet bound, into a blast furnace. In Evpatoria several hundred officers and"bourgeois" were tied up, tortured, and thrown into the sea. Similar acts of violence occurred in most of the cities of the Crimea occupied by the Bolsheviks, including Sevastopol, Yalta, Alushta, and Simferopol. Similar atrocities are recorded from April and May 1918 in the big Cossack cities then in revolt. The extremely precise files of the Denikin commission record "corpses with the hands cut off, broken bones, heads ripped off, broken jaws, and genitals removed." 16 

As Melgunov notes, it is nonetheless difficult to distinguish the systematic practice of organized terror from what might otherwise be considered simply uncontrolled excesses. There is rarely mention of a local Cheka directing such massacres until August and September 1918; until that time the Cheka network was still quite sparse. These massacres, which targeted not only enemy combatants but also civilian "enemies of the people" (for instance, among the 240 people killed in Yalta at the beginning of March 1918, there were some 70 politicians, lawyers, journalists, and teachers, as well as 165 officers), were often carried out by "armed detachments," "Red Guards," and other, unspecified "Bolshevik elements." Exterminating the enemy of the people was simply the logical extension of a revolution that was both political and social. This conception of the world did not suddenly spring into being in the aftermath of October 1917, but the Bolshevik seizure of power, which was quite explicit on the issue, did play a role in its subsequent legitimization. 

In March 1917 a young captain wrote a perceptive letter assessing the revolution and its effects on his regiment: "Between the soldiers and ourselves, the gap cannot be bridged. For them, we are, and will always remain, the barini masters . To their way of thinking, what has just taken place isn't a political revolution but a social movement, in which they are the winners and we are the losers. They say to us: 'You were the barini before, but now it's our turn!' They think that they will now have their revenge, after all those centuries of servitude." 17 

The Bolshevik leaders encouraged anything that might promote this aspiration to "social revenge" among the masses, seeing it as a moral legitimization of the terror, or what Lenin called "the just civil war." On 15 (28) December 1917 Derzhinsky published an appeal in Izvestiya (News) inviting all Soviets to organize their own Chekas. The result was a swift flourishing of "commissions," "detachments," and other "extraordinary organizations" that the central authorities had great problems in controlling when they decided, a few months later, to end such "mass initiatives" and to organize a centralized, structured network of Chekas.18 

Summing up the first six months of the Cheka's existence in July 1918, Dzerzhinsky wrote: "This was a period of improvisation and hesitation, during which our organization was not always up to the complexities of the situation."19 Yet even by that date the Cheka's record as an instrument of repression was already enormous. And the organization, whose personnel had numbered no more than 100 in December 1917, had increased to 12,000 in a mere six months. 

Its beginnings had been modest. On 11 (24) January 1918Dzerzhinsky had sent a note to Lenin: "We find the present situation intolerable, despite the important services we have already rendered. We have no money whatever. We work night and day without bread, sugar, tea, butter, or cheese. Either take measures to authorize decent rations for us or give us the power to make our own requisitions from the bourgeoisie."20 Dzerzhinsky had recruited approximately 100 men, for the most part old comrades-in-arms, mostly Poles and people from the Baltic states, nearly all of whom had also worked for the P.R.M.C, and who became the future leaders of the GPU of the 1920's and the N.K.V.D of the 1930's: Martin Latsis, Viacheslav Menzhinsky, Stanislav Messing, Grigory Moroz, Jan Peters, Meir Trilisser, Josif Unshlikht, and Genrikh Yagoda. 

The first action of the Cheka was to break a strike by state employees in Petrograd. The method was swift and effective—all its leaders were arrested — and the justification simple:"Anyone who no longer wishes to work with the people has no place among them," declared Dzerzhinsky, who also arrested a number of the Menshevik and Socialist Revolutionary deputies elected to the Constituent Assembly. This arbitrary act was immediately condemned by Isaac Steinberg, the people's commissar of justice, who was himself a left Socialist Revolutionary and had been elected to the government a few days previously. This first clash between the Cheka and the judiciary raised the important issue of the legal position of the secret police. 

"What is the point of a 'People's Commissariat for Justice'?" Steinberg asked Lenin. "It would be more honest to have a People's Commissariat for Social Extermination. People would understand more clearly." 

"Excellent idea," Lenin countered. "That's exactly how I see it. Unfortunately, it wouldn't do to call it that!" 21 

Lenin arbitrated in the conflict between Steinberg, who argued for a strict subordination of the Cheka to the processes of justice, and Dzerzhinsky, who argued against what he called"the nitpicking legalism of the old school of the ancient regime" In Dzerzhinsky 's view, the Cheka should be responsible for its acts only to the government itself. 

The sixth (nineteenth) of January marked an important point in the consolidation of the Bolshevik dictatorship. Early in the morning the Constituent Assembly, which had been elected in November-December 1917 and in which the Bolsheviks were a minority (they had only 175 deputies out of 707 seats), was broken up by force, having met for a single day. This arbitrary act seemed to provoke no particular reaction anywhere in the country. A small  demonstration against the dissolution of the assembly was broken up by troops, causing some twenty deaths, a high price to pay for a democratic parliamentary experiment that lasted only a few hours. 22 

In the days and weeks that followed the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, the position of the Bolshevik government in Petrograd became increasingly uncomfortable, at the very moment when Trotsky, Kamenev, Adolf Yoffe, and Karl Radek were negotiating peace conditions with delegations from the Central Powers at Brest Litovsk. On 9 (22) January 1918 the government devoted all business to the question of its transfer to Moscow. 23 

What worried the Bolshevik leaders was not the German threat—the armistice had held good since 15 (28) December—but the possibility of a workers uprising. Discontent was growing rapidly in working class areas that just two months before had been solidly behind them. With demobilization and the consequent slump in large-scale orders from the military, businesses had laid off tens of thousands of workers, and increasing difficulties in supply had caused the daily bread ration to fall to a mere quarter of a pound. Unable to do anything to improve this situation, Lenin merely spoke out against "profiteers" and "speculators," whom he chose as scapegoats. "Every factory, every company must set up its own requisitioning detachments. Everyone must be mobilized in the search for bread, not simply volunteers, but absolutely everyone; anyone who fails to cooperate will have his ration card confiscated immediately" he wrote on 22 January (4 February) 1918.24 

Trotsky's nomination, on his return from Brest Litovsk on 31 January 1918, to head the Extraordinary Commission for Food and Transport was a clear sign from the government of the decisive importance it was giving to the "hunt for food," which was the first stage in the "dictatorship of food," Lenin turned to this commission in mid-February with a draft decree that the members of the commission—who besides Trotsky included Aleksandr Tsyurupa, the people's commissar of food—rejected. According to the text prepared by Lenin, all peasants were to be required to hand over any surplus food in exchange for a receipt. Any defaulters who failed to hand in supplies within the required time were to be executed. "When we read this proposal we were at a loss for words," Tsyuruparecalled in his memoirs. "To carry out a project like this would have led to executions on a massive scale. Lenin's project was simply abandoned."25 

The episode was nonetheless extremely revealing. Since the beginning of 1918, Lenin had found himself trapped in an impasse of  his own making, and he was worried about the catastrophic supply situation of the big industrial centers, which were seen as isolated Bolshevik strongholds among the great mass of peasants. He was prepared to do anything to get the grain he needed without altering his policies. Conflict was inevitable here, between a peasantry determined to keep for itself the fruits of its labors and to reject any external interference, and the new regime, which was attempting to place its stamp on the situation, refused to understand how economic supply actually functioned, and desired more than anything to bring under control what it saw as growing social anarchy. 

On 21 February 1918, in the face of a huge advance by the German army after the failure of the talks at Brest Litovsk, the government declared the socialist fatherland to be in danger. The call for resistance against the invaders was accompanied by a call for mass terror: "All enemy agents, speculators, hooligans, counterrevolutionary agitators, and German spies will be shot on sight." 26 This proclamation effectively installed martial law in all military zones. When peace was finally agreed at Brest Litovsk on 3 March 1918, it technically lost its legal force, and legally the death penalty was reestablished again only on 16 June 1918. Nevertheless, from February 1918 on the Cheka carried out numerous summary executions, even outside the military zones. 

On 10 March 1918 the government left Petrograd for Moscow, the new capital. The Cheka headquarters were set up near the Kremlin, in Bolshaya Lubyanka Street, in a building that had previously belonged to an insurance company. Under a series of names (including the G.P.U, O.G.P.U, N.K.V.D, M.V.D and K.G.B) the Cheka would occupy the building until the fall of the Soviet regime. From a mere 600 in March, the number of Cheka employees working at the central headquarters had risen to 2,000 in July 1918, excluding the special troops. At this same date the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs, whose task was to direct the immense apparatus of local Soviets throughout the country, had a staff of 400. 

The Cheka launched its first major operation on the night of 1 1-12 April 1918, when more than 1,000 men from its special troop detachments stormed some twenty anarchist strongholds in Moscow. After several hours of hard fighting, 520 anarchists were arrested; 25 were summarily executed as "bandits," a term that from then on would designate workers on strike, deserters fleeing conscription, or peasants resisting the forced requisitioning of grain.27 

After this first success, which was followed by other "pacification" operations in both Moscow and Petrograd, Dzcrzhinsky wrote a letter to the Central Executive Committee on 29 April 1918 requesting a considerable increase in Cheka resources.  "At this particular time," he wrote, "Cheka activity is almost bound to increase exponentially, in the face of the increase in counterrevolutionary activity on all sides." 28 

The "particular time" to which Dzerzhinsky was referring seemed indeed to be a decisive period for the installation of the political and economic dictatorship and the strengthening of repression against a population that appeared to regard the Bolsheviks with ever-increasing hostility. Since October 1917 the Bolsheviks had done nothing to improve the everyday lot of the average Russian, nor had they safeguarded the fundamental liberties that had accrued throughout 1917.Formerly regarded as the only political force that would allow peasants to seize the land they had so long desired, the Bolsheviks were now perceived as Communists, who wanted to steal the fruits of the peasants' labors. Could these really be the same people, the peasants wondered, the Bolsheviks who had finally given them the land, and the Communists who seemed to be holding them for ransom, and wanted even the shirts from their backs? 

The spring of 1918 was a crucial period, when everything was still up for grabs. The Soviets had not yet been muzzled and transformed into simple tools of the state apparatus; they were still a forum for real political debate between Bolsheviks and moderate socialists. Opposition newspapers, though attacked almost daily, continued to exist. Political life flourished as different institutions competed for popular support. And during this period, which was marked by a deterioration in living conditions and the total breakdown of economic relations between the town and the country, Socialist Revolutionaries and Mensheviks scored undeniable political victories. In elections to the new Soviets, despite a certain amount of intimidation and vote-rigging, they achieved outright victories in nineteen of the thirty main provincial seats where voting took place and the results were made public. 29 

The government responded by strengthening its dictatorship on both the political and the economic fronts. Networks of economic distribution had fallen apart as a result of the spectacular breakdown in communications, particularly in the railways, and all incentive for farmers seemed to have been lost, as the lack of manufacturing products provided no impetus for peasants to sell their goods. The fundamental problem was thus to assure the food supply to the army and to the cities, the seat of power and of the proletariat. The Bolsheviks had two choices: they could either attempt to resurrect some sort of market economy or use additional constraints. They chose the second option, convinced of the need to go ever further in the struggle to destroy the old order. 

Speaking before the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets on 29 April 1918, Lenin went straight to the point:"The smallholders, the people who owned only a parcel of land, fought side by side with the proletariat when the time came to overthrow the capitalists and the major landowners. But now our paths have diverged. Smallholders have always been afraid of discipline and organization. The time has come for us to have no mercy, and to turn against them." 30 A few days later the people's commissar of food told the same assembly: "I say it quite openly; we are now at war, and it is only with guns that we will get the grain we need." Trotsky himself added: "Our only choice now is civil war. Civil war is the struggle for bread . . . Long live civil war!"31 

A 1921 text by Karl Radek, one of the Bolshevik leaders, is revealing of Bolshevik policies in the spring of 1918, several months before the outbreak of the armed conflict that for two years would find Reds and Whites at war: 

The peasants had just received the land from the state, they had just returned home from the front, they had kept their guns, and their attitude to the state could be summed up as "Who needs it?" They couldn't have cared less about it. If we had decided to come up with some sort of food tax, it wouldn't have worked, for none of the state apparatus remained. The old order had disappeared, and the peasants wouldn't have handed over anything without actually being forced. Our task at the beginning of 1918 was quite simple: we had to make the peasants understand two quite simple things: that the state had some claim on what they produced, and that it had the means to exercise those rights.32 

In May and June 1918 the Bolshevik government took two decisive measures that inaugurated the period of civil war, which has come to be known as "War Communism." On 13 May 1918 a decree granted extraordinary powers to the People's Commissariat of Food, requiring it to requisition all foodstuffs and to establish what was in fact a "food army." By July nearly 12,000 people were involved in these"food detachments," which at their height in 1920 were to number more than 24,000 men, over half of whom were unemployed workers from Petrograd, attracted by the promise of a decent salary and a proportional share of the confiscated food. The second decisive measure was the decree of 11 June 1918, which established committees of poor peasants, ordering them to work in close collaboration with the food detachments and also to requisition, in exchange for a share of the profits, any agricultural surpluses that the better-off peasants might be keeping for themselves. These committees of poor peasants soon displaced the rural Soviets, which the government judged to be untrustworthy, as they were contaminated with Socialist Revolutionary ideology. Given the tasks they were ordered to carry out—to seize by force the results of other people's labor—and the motivations that were used to spur them on(power, a feeling of frustration toward and envy of the rich, and the promise of a share in the spoils), one can imagine what these first representatives of Bolshevik power in the countryside were really like. As Andrea Graziosi acutely notes: "For these people, devotion to the cause—or rather to the new state—and an undeniable operational capacity went hand in hand with a rather faltering social and political conscience, an interest in self-advancement, and traditional modes of behavior, including brutality to their subordinates, alcoholism, and nepotism . . . What we have here is a good example of the manner in which the 'spirit' of the plebeian revolution penetrated the new regime ".33  

Despite a few initial successes, the organization of the Committees for the Poor took a long time to get off the ground. The very idea of using the poorest section of the peasantry reflected the deep mistrust the Bolsheviks felt toward peasant society. In accordance with a rather simplistic Marxist schema, they imagined it to be divided into warring classes, whereas in fact it presented a fairly solid front to the world, and particularly when faced with strangers from the city. When the question arose of handing over surpluses, the egalitarian and community-minded reflex found in all the villages took over, and instead of persecuting a few rich peasants, by far the greater part of the requisitions were simply redistributed in the same village, in accordance with people's needs. This policy alienated the large central mass of the peasantry, and discontent was soon widespread, with troubles breaking out in numerous regions. Confronted by the brutality of the food detachments, who were often reinforced by the army or by Cheka units, a real guerrilla force began to take shape from June 1918 onward. In July and August 110 peasant insurrections, described by the Bolsheviks as kulak rebellions—which in their terminology meant uprisings involving whole villages, with insurgents from all classes -broke out in the zones they controlled. All the trust that the Bolsheviks had gained by not opposing the seizure of land in 1917 evaporated in a matter of weeks, and for more than three years the policy of requisitioning food was to provoke thousands of riots and uprisings, which were to degenerate into real peasant wars that were quelled with terrible violence. 

The political effects of the hardening of the dictatorship in the spring of 1918 included the complete shutdown of all non-Bolshevik newspapers, the forcible dissolution of all non-Bolshevik Soviets, thearrest of opposition leaders, and the brutal repression of many strikes. In May and June 1918, 205 of the opposition socialist newspapers were finally closed down. The mostly Menshevik or Socialist Revolutionary Soviets of Kaluga, Tver, Yaroslavl, Ryazan, Kostroma, Kazan, Saratov, Penza, Tambov, Voronezh, Orel, and Vologda were broken up by force. 34 Everywhere the scenario was almost identical: a few days after victory by the opposing party and the consequent formation of a new soviet, the Bolshevik detachment would call for an armed force, usually a detachment of the Cheka, which then proclaimed martial law and arrested the opposition leaders. 

Dzerhinsky, who had sent his principal collaborators into towns that had initially been won by the opposing parties, was an unabashed advocate of the use of force, as can be seen clearly from the directive he sent on 31 May 1918 to A. V. Fiduk, his plenipotentiary on a mission to Tver: 

The workers, under the influence of the Mensheviks, the Socialist Revolutionaries, and other counterrevolutionary bastards, have all gone on strike, and demonstrated in favor of a government made up of all the different socialist parties. Put big posters up all over the town saying that the Cheka will execute on the spot any bandit, thief, speculator, or counterrevolutionary found to be conspiring against the soviet. Levy an extraordinary tax on all bourgeois residents of the town, and make a list of them, as that will be very useful if things start happening. You ask how to form the local Cheka: just round up all the most resolute people you can, who understand that there is nothing more effective than a bullet in the head to shut people up. Experience has shown me that you only need a small number of people like that to turn a whole situation around.35 

The dissolution of the Soviets held by the opposition, and the expulsion on 14 June 1918 of all Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries from the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of Soviets, provoked protests and strikes in many working-class towns, where, to make matters worse, the food situation was still steadily deteriorating. In Kolpino, near Petrograd, the leader of a Cheka detachment ordered his troops to open fire on a hunger march organized by workers whose monthly ration of bread had fallen to two pounds. There were ten deaths. On the same day, in the Berezovsky factory, near Ekaterinburg, fifteen people were killed by a detachment of Red Guards at a meeting called to protest against Bolshevik commissars who were accused of confiscating the most impressive properties in the town and of keeping for themselves the 150-ruble tax they had levied on the bourgeoisie. The next day the local authorities declared a state of martial law, and fourteen people were immediately executed by the local Cheka, who refrained from mentioning this detail to headquarters in Moscow. 36 

In the latter half of May and in June 1918, numerous working-class demonstrations were put down bloodily in Sormovo, Yaroslavl, and Tula, as well as in the industrial cities of Uralsk, Nizhni-Tagil, Beloretsk, Zlatoust, and Ekaterinburg. The ever-increasing involvement of the local Chekas in these repressions is attested by the growing frequency in working-class environments of slogans directed against the "New Okhrana"(the tsarist secret police) who worked for what they termed the "commissarocracy." 37 

From 8 to 11 June 1918 Dzerzhinsky presided over the first All-Russian Conference of Chekas, attended by 100 delegates from forty-three local sections, which already employed more than 12,000 men. That figure would rise to 40,000 by the end of 1918, and to more than 280,000 by the beginning of 1921. Claiming to be above the Soviets and, according to certain Bolsheviks, even above the Party, the conference declared its intention to"take full responsibility for the struggle against the counterrevolution throughout the republic, in its role as supreme enforcer of administrative power in Soviet Russia." The role that it proclaimed for itself at the end of the conference revealed the extent of the huge field of activity in which the political police was already operating, before the great wave of counterrevolutionary actions that would mark the summer. Modeled on the organization of the Lubyanka headquarters, each provincial Cheka was to establish the following departments and offices: 

1.Information Department. Offices: Red Army, monarchists, cadets, right Socialist Revolutionaries and Mensheviks, anarchists, bourgeoisie and church people, unions and workers' committees, and foreigners. The appropriate offices were to draw up lists of suspects corresponding to all the above categories. 

2. Department for the Struggle against the Counterrevolution. Offices: Red Army, monarchists, cadets, right Socialist Revolutionaries and Mensheviks, anarchists, unionists, national minorities, foreigners, alcoholism, pogroms and public order, and press affairs. 

3. Department for the Struggle against Speculation and Abuses of Authority. 

4. Department of Transport, Communication, and Ports. 

5. Operational Department, including special Cheka units.38 

Two days after the All-Russian Conference of Chekas, the government reinstated the death penalty, which had been abolished after the revolution of February 1917. Though formally reinstated by Kerensky in July 1917, it had been applied only at the front, in areas under military control. One of the first measures taken by the Second Congress of Soviets on 26 October (8 November) 1917 had been to abolish capital punishment, a decision that elicited a furious reaction from Lenin: "It's an error, an unforgivable weakness, a pacifist delusion!"39 Lenin and Dzerzhinsky had been constantly trying to reinstate the penalty while knowing very well that in practice it could already be used whenever necessary, without any "nitpicking legalism," by organizations like the Cheka, which operated outside the law. The first legal death sentence was pronounced by a revolutionary court on 21 June 1918;Admiral A. Shchastnyi was the first "counterrevolutionary" to be shot "legally." 

On 20 June V. Volodarsky, a Bolshevik leader in Petrograd, was shot down by a militant Socialist Revolutionary. This event occurred at a time of extreme tension in the old capital. In the preceding weeks, relations between Bolsheviks and workers had gone from bad to worse, and in May and June the Petrograd Cheka recorded seventy "incidents" strikes, anti-Bolshevik meetings, demonstrations—led principally by metalworkers from labor strongholds, who had been the most ardent supporters of the Bolsheviks in the period leading up to the events of 1917. The authorities responded to strikes with lockouts at the large state-owned factories, a practice that became more and more widespread in the following months to break the workers' resistance. Volodarsky's assassination was followed by an unprecedented wave of arrests in the working-class areas of Petrograd. The Assembly of Workers' Representatives, a mainly Menshevik group that organized working-class opposition and was in fact a real opposition power to the Petrograd soviet, was dissolved. More than 800 leaders were arrested in two days. The workers' response to this huge wave of arrests was to call a general strike for 21 July 1918. 40 

From Moscow Lenin sent a letter to Grigori Zinoviev, president of the Petrograd Committee of the Bolshevik Party.The document is extremely revealing, both of Lenin's conception of terror and of an extraordinary political delusion. Lenin was in fact committing a huge political mistake when he claimed that the workers were protesting Volodarsky's death. 

Comrade Zinoviev! We have just learned that the workers of Petrograd wish to respond to Comrade Volodarsky's murder with mass terror, and that you (not you personally, but the members of the Party Committee in Petrograd) are trying to stop them: I want to protest most vehemently against this. We are compromising ourselves; we are calling for mass terror in the resolutions passed by the Soviet, but when the time comes for action, we obstruct the natural reactions of the masses. This cannot be! The terrorists will start to think we are being halfhearted. This is the hour of truth: It is of supreme importance that we encourage and make use of the energy of mass terror directed against the counterrevolutionaries, especially those of Petrograd, whose example is decisive. Regards. Lenin. 41 

3 

The Red Terror 

"The Bolsheviks are saying openly that their days are numbered,"Karl Helfferich, the German ambassador to Moscow, told his government on 3 August 1918. "A veritable panic has overtaken Moscow . . . The craziest rumors imaginable are rife, about so-called 'traitors' who are supposed to be in hiding around the city." 

The Bolsheviks certainly never felt as much under threat as they did in 1918. The territory they controlled amounted to little more than the traditional province of Muscovy, which now faced anti-Bolshevik opposition on three solidly established fronts: the first in the region of the Don, occupied by the Cossack troops of Ataman Krasnov and by General Denikin's White Army; the second in Ukraine, which was in the hands of the Germans and of the Rada, the national Ukrainian government; and a third front all along the Trans-Siberian Railway, where most of the big cities had fallen to the Czech Legion, whose offensive had been supported by the Socialist Revolutionary government in Samara. 

In the regions that were more or less under Bolshevik control, nearly 140 major revolts and insurrections broke out in the summer of 1918; most involved peasant communities resisting the enforced commandeering of food supplies, which was being carried out with such brutality by the food army; protests against the limitations on trade and exchange; or protests against the new compulsory conscription for the Red Army. 1 Typically the angry peasants would flock en mass to the nearest town, besiege the soviet, and sometimes even attempt to set fire to it. The incidents usually degenerated into violence, and either local militias or, more and more often, detachments from the local Cheka opened fire on the protesters. In these confrontations, which became more frequent as time passed, the Bolshevik leaders saw a vast counterrevolutionary conspiracy directed against their regime by"kulaks disguised as White Guards," 

"It is quite clear that preparations are being made for a White Guard uprising in Nizhni Novgorod" wrote Lenin in a telegram on 9 August 1918 to the president of the Executive Committee of the Nizhni Novgorod soviet, in response to a report about peasant protests against requisitioning. "Your first response must be to establish a dictatorial troika (i.e., you, Markin, and one other person) and introduce mass terror, shooting or deporting the hundreds of prostitutes who are causing all the soldiers to drink, all the ex-officers, etc. There is not a moment to lose; you must act resolutely, with massive reprisals. Immediate execution for anyone caught in possession of a firearm. Massive deportations of Mensheviks and other suspect elements." 2 The next day Lenin sent a similar telegram to the Central Executive Committee of the Penza soviet: 

Comrades! The kulak uprising in your five districts must be crushed without pity. The interests of the whole revolution demand such actions, for the final struggle with the kulaks has now begun. You must make an example of these people. (1) Hang (I mean hang publicly, so that people see it) at least 100 kulaks, rich bastards, and known bloodsuckers. (2) Publish their names. (3) Seize all their grain. (4) Single out the hostages per my instructions in yesterday's telegram. Do all this so that for miles around people see it all, understand it, tremble, and tell themselves that we are killing the bloodthirsty kulaks and that we will continue to do so. Reply saying you have received and carried out these instructions. Yours, Lenin. 

PS. Find tougher people.3 

In fact a close reading of Cheka reports on the revolts of the summer of 1918, reveals that the only uprisings planned in advance were those in Yaroslavl, Rybinsk, and Murom, which were organized by the Union for the Defense of the Fatherland, led by the Socialist Revolutionary Boris Savinkov; and that of workers in the arms factory of Evsk, at the instigation of Mensheviks and local Socialist Revolutionaries. All the other insurrections were a spontaneous, direct result of incidents involving local peasantry faced with requisitions or conscription. They were put down in a few days with great ferocity by trusted units from the Red Army or the Cheka. Only Yaroslavl, where Savinkov's detachments had ousted the local Bolsheviks from power, managed to hold out for a few weeks. After the town fell, Dzerzhinsky sent a "special investigative commission," which in five days, from 24 to 28 July 1918, executed 428 people.4 

In August 1918, before the official beginning of the period of Red Terror on 3 September, the Bolshevik leaders, and in particular Lenin and Dzerzhinsky, sent a great number of telegrams to local Cheka and Party leaders, instructing them to take "prophylactic measures" to prevent any attempted insurrection. Among these measures, explained Dzerzhinsky,"the most effective are the taking of hostages among the bourgeoisie, on the basis of the lists that you have drawn up for exceptional taxes levied on the bourgeoisie . . . the arrest and the incarceration of all hostages and suspects in concentration camps. "5 On 8 August Lenin asked Tsyurupa, the people's commissar of food, to draw up a decree stipulating that "in all grain-producing areas, twenty-five designated hostages drawn from the best-off of the local inhabitants will answer with their lives for any failure in the requisitioning plan." As Tsyurupa turned a deaf ear to this, on the pretext that it was too difficult to organize the taking of hostages, Lenin sent him a second, more explicit note: "I am not suggesting that these hostages actually be taken, but that they are to be named explicitly in all the relevant areas. The purpose of this is that the rich, just as they are responsible for their own contribution, will also have to answer with their lives for the immediate realization of the requisitioning plan in their whole district "6 

In addition to this new system for taking hostages, the Bolshevik leaders experimented in August 1918 with a tool of oppression that had made its first appearance in Russia during the war: the concentration camp. On 9 August Lenin sent a telegram to the Executive Committee of the province of Penza instructing them to intern "kulaks, priests, White Guards, and other doubtful elements in a concentration camp."7 

A few days earlier both Dzerzhinsky and Trotsky had also called for the confinement of hostages in concentration camps. These concentration camps were simple internment camps in which, as a simple interim administrative measure and independently of any judicial process, "doubtful elements" were to be kept. As in every other country at this time, numerous camps for prisoners of war already existed in Russia. 

First and foremost among the "doubtful elements" to be arrested were the leaders of opposition parties who were still at liberty. On 15 August 1918 Lenin and Dzerzhinsky jointly signed an order for the arrest of Yuri Martov, Fedor Dan, Aleksandr Potresov, and Mikhail Goldman, the principal leaders of theMenshevik Party, whose press had long been silenced and whose representatives had been hounded out of the Soviets.8 

For the Bolshevik leaders, distinctions among types of opponents no longer existed, because, as they explained, civil wars have their own laws. "Civil war has no written laws," wroteMartin Latsis, one of Dzerzhinsky's principal collaborators, in Izvestiya on 23 August 1918. 

Capitalist wars have a written constitution, but civil war has its own laws ... One must not only destroy the active forces of the enemy, but also demonstrate that anyone who raises a hand in protest against class war will die by the sword. These are the laws that the bourgeoisie itself drew up in the civil wars to oppress the proletariat ... We have yet to assimilate these rules sufficiently. Our own people are being killed by the hundreds of thousands, yet we carry out executions one by one after lengthy deliberations in commissions and courts. In a civil war, there should be no courts for the enemy. It is a fight to the death. If you don't kill, you will die. So kill, if you don't want to be killed! 9 

Two assassination attempts on 30 August—one against M. S. Uritsky, the head of the Petrograd Cheka, the other against Lenin—seemed to confirm the Bolshevik leaders' theory that a real conspiracy was threatening their existence. In fact it now appears that there was no link between the two events. The first was carried out in the well-established tradition of populist revolutionary terror, by a young student who wanted to avenge the death of an officer friend killed a few days earlier by the Petrograd Cheka. The second incident was long attributed to Fanny Kaplan, a militant socialist with anarchist and Socialist Revolutionary leanings. She was arrested immediately and shot three days later without trial, but it now appears that there may have been a larger conspiracy against Lenin, which escaped detection at the time, in the Cheka itself. 10 The Bolshevik government immediately blamed both assassination attempts on "right Socialist Revolutionaries, the servants of French and English imperialism." The response was immediate: the next day, articles in the press and official declarations called for more terror. "Workers," said an article inPravda (Truth) on 31 August, "the time has come for us to crush the bourgeoisie or be crushed by it. The corruption of the bourgeoisie must be cleansed from our towns immediately. Files will now be kept on all men concerned, and those who represent a danger to the revolutionary cause will be executed . . . The anthem of the working class will be a song of hatred and revenge!" 

On the same day Dzerzhinsky and his assistant Jan Peters drafted an "Appeal to the Working Classes" in a similar vein: 'The working classes must crush the hydra of the counterrevolution with massive terror! We must let the enemies of the working classes know that anyone caught in illegal possession of a firearm will be immediately executed, and that anyone who dares to spread the slightest rumor against the Soviet regime will be arrested immediately and sent to a concentration camp!" Printed in Izvestiyaon 3 September, this appeal was followed the next day by the publication of instructions sent by N. Petrovsky, the people's commissar of internal affairs, to all the Soviets. Petrovsky complained that despite the "massive repressions" organized by enemies of the state against the working masses, the "Red Terror" was too slow in its effects: 

The time has come to put a stop to all this weakness and sentimentality. All the right Socialist Revolutionaries must be arrested immediately. A great number of hostages must be taken among the officers and the bourgeoisie. The slightest resistance must be greeted with widespread executions. Provincial Executive Committees must lead the way here. The Chekas and the other organized militia must seek out and arrest suspects and immediately execute all those found to be involved with counterrevolutionary practices . . . Leaders of the Executive Committees must immediately report any weakness or indecision on the part of the local Soviets to the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs. No weakness or indecision can be tolerated during this period of mass terror. 11 

This telegram, which marked the official start of full-scale Red Terror, gives the lie to Dzerzhinsky's and Peter's later claims that the Red Terror "was a general and spontaneous reaction of indignation by the masses to the at- tempted assassinations of 30 August 1918, and began without any initiative from the central organizations." The truth was that the Red Terror was the natural outlet for the almost abstract hatred that most of the Bolshevik leaders felt toward their "oppressors," whom they wished to liquidate not on an individual basis, but as a class. In his memoirs the Menshevik leader Rafael Abramovichrecalled a revealing conversation that he had in August 1917 withDzerzhinsky, the future leader of the Cheka: 

"Abramovich: do you remember Lasalle's speech about the essence of a Constitution?" 

"Of course." 

"He said that any Constitution is always determined by the relation between the social forces at work in a given country at the time in question. wonder how this correlation between the political and the social might be changed?" 

"Well, by the various processes of change that are at work in the fields of politics and economics at any time, by the emergence of new forms of economic growth, the rise of different social classes, all those things that you know perfectly well already, Feliks ." 

"Yes, but couldn't one change things much more radically than that? By forcing certain classes into submission, or by exterminating them altogether?"12  

This cold, calculating, and cynical cruelty, the logical result of an implacable class war pushed to its extreme, was shared by many Bolsheviks. Grigory Zinoviev, one of the main leaders, declared in September 1918: "To dispose of our enemies, we will have to create our own socialist terror. For this we will have to train 90 million of the 100 million Russians and have them all on our side. We have nothing to say to the other 10 million; we'll have to get rid of them." 13 

On 5 September the Soviet government legalized terror with the famous decree "On Red Terror": "At this moment it is absolutely vital that the Chekas be reinforced ... to protect the Soviet Republic from its class enemies, who must all be locked up in concentration camps. Anyone found to have had any dealings with the White Guard organizations, plots, insurrections, or riots will be summarily executed, and the names of all these people, together with the reasons for their execution, will be announced publicly."14As Dzcrzhinsky was later to acknowledge, "The texts of 3 and 5 September finally gave us a legal right that even Party comrades had been campaigning against until then,the right immediately to dispose of the counterrevolutionary rabble, without having to defer to anyone else's authority at all." 

In an internal circular dated 17 September, Dzerzhinksy, invited all local Chekas to "accelerate procedures and terminate, that is, liquidate, any pending business." 15 In fact the "liquidations"had started as early as 31 August. On 3 September Izvestiyareported that in the previous few days more than 500 hostages had been executed by the local Cheka in Petrograd. According to Cheka sources, more than 800 people were executed in September in Petrograd alone. The actual figure must be considerably higher than that. An eyewitnessrelates the following details: "For Petrograd, even a conservative estimate must be 1,300 executions . . . The Bolsheviks didn't count, in their 'statistics,'  the hundreds of officers and civilians who were executed on the orders of the local authorities in Kronstadt. In Kronstadt alone, in one night, more than 400 people were shot. Three massive trenches were dug in the middle of the courtyard, 400 people were lined up in front of them and executed one after the other." 16In an interview given to the newspaper Utro Moshvy (Moscow morning) on 3 November 1918, Peters admitted that "those rather oversensitive Cheka members in Petrograd lost their heads and went a little too far. Before Uritsky's assassination, no one was executed at all —and believe me, despite anything that people might tell you, I am not as bloodthirsty as they say—but since then there have been too many killed, often quite indiscriminately. But then again, Moscow's only response to the attempt on Lenin's life was the execution of a few czarist ministers." 17 According to Izvestiyaagain, a "mere" 29 hostages from the concentration camp were shot in Moscow on 3 and 4 September. Among the dead were two former ministers from the regime of Czar Nicholas II, N. Khvostov (internal affairs) and I. Shchcglovitov (justice). Nonetheless, numerous eyewitness reports concur thathundreds of hostages were executed during the "September massacres" in the prisons of Moscow. 

In these times of Red Terror, Dzerzhinsky founded a new newspaper, Ezhenedetnik VChK (Cheka weekly), which was openly intended to vaunt the merits of the secret police and to encourage "the just desire of the masses for revenge." For the six weeks of its existence (it was closed down by an order from the Central Committee after the raison d'etre of the Cheka was called into question by a number of Bolshevik leaders), the paper candidly and unashamedly described the taking of hostages, their internment in concentration camps, and their execution. It thus constituted an official basic minimum of information of the Red Terror for September and October 1918. For instance, the newspaper reported that in the medium-sized city of Nizhni Novgorod the Cheka, who were particularly zealous under the leadership of Nikolai Bulganin (later the head of the Soviet state from 1954 to 1957), executed 141 hostages after 31 August, and once took more than 700 hostages in a mere three days. In Vyatka the Cheka for the Ural region reported the execution of 23 "ex- policemen," 154 "counterrevolutionaries," 8 "monarchists," 28 "members of the Constitutional Democratic party," 186 "officers," and 10 "Mensheviks and right Socialist Revolutionaries," all in the space of a week. The Ivanovo Voznesensk Cheka reported taking 181 hostages, executing 25 "counterrevolutionaries," and setting up a concentration camp with space for 1,000 people. The Cheka of the small town of Sebezhsk reported shooting  "17 kulaks and one priest, who had celebrated a mass for the bloody tyrant Nicholas II"; the Tver Cheka reported 130 hostages and 39 executions; the Perm Cheka reported 50 executions. This macabre catalog could be extended considerably; these are merely a few extracts from the six issues of the Cheka Weekly 18 

Other provincial journals also reported thousands of arrests and executions in the autumn of 1918. To take but two examples, the single published issue of Izvestiya Isanlsymkot Gubcheha (News of the Tsaritsyn Province Cheka) reported the execution of 103 people for the week of 3-10 September. From 1 to 8 November 371 people appeared in the local Cheka court; 50 were condemned to death, the rest "to a concentration camp as a measure of hygiene, as hostages, until the complete liquidation of all counterrevolutionary insurrections." The only issue of Izvestiya Penzenskm Gubcheka (News of the Penza Province Cheka) reported, without commentary, that "in response to the assassination of Comrade Fgorov, a Petrograd worker on a mission in one of the detachments of the Food Army, 150 White Guards have been executed by the Cheka. In the future, other, more rigorous measures will be taken against anyone who raises a hand in protest against the iron fist of the proletariat."

The svodki, or confidential reports that the local Chekas sent to Moscow, which have only recently become public, also confirm the brutality of responses to the slightest incidents between the peasant community and the local authorities. These incidents almost invariably concerned a refusal to accept the requisitioning process or conscription, and they were systematically cataloged in the files as "counterrevolutionary kulak riots" and suppressed without mercy.

It is impossible to come up with an exact figure for the number of people who fell victim to this first great wave of the Red Terror. Latsis, who was one of the main leaders of the Cheka, claimed that in the second half of 1918 the Cheka executed 4,500 people, adding with some cynicism: "If the Cheka can be accused of anything, it isn't of being overzealous in its executions, but rather of failure in the need to apply the supreme punishment. An iron hand will always mean a smaller number of victims in the long term." 19 At the end of October 1918 the Menshevik leader Yuri Martov estimated the number of direct victims of the Cheka since the start of September to be "in excess of 10,000."20

Whatever the exact number of victims may have been that autumn—and the total reported in the official press alone suggests that at the very least it must be between 10,000 and 15,000—the Red Terror marked the definitive beginning of the Bolshevik practice of treating any form of real or potential opposition as an act of civil war, which, as Latsis put it, had "its own laws."When workers went on strike to protest the Bolshevik practice of rationing "according to social origin" and abuses of power by the local Cheka, as at the armaments factory at Motovilikha, the authorities declared the whole factory to be "in a state of insurrection." The Cheka did not negotiate with the strikers, but enforced a lockout and fired the workers. The leaders were arrested, and all the "Menshevik counter revolutionaries," who were suspected of having incited the strike, were hunted down. 21 Such practices were normal in the summer of 1918. By autumn the local Chekas, now better organized and more motivated by calls from Moscow for bloodier repressions, went considerably further and executed more than 100 of the strikers without any trial.

The size of these numbers alone—between 10,000 and 15,000 summary executions in two months—marked a radical break with the practices of the czarist regime. For the whole period 1825-1917 the number of death sentences passed by the tsarist courts (including courts-martial) "relating to political matters" came to only 6,323, with the highest figure of 1,310 recorded in 1906, the year of the reaction against the 1905 revolution. Moreover, not all death sentences were carried out; a good number were converted to forced labor. 22 In the space of a few weeks the Cheka alone had executed two to three times the total number of people condemned to death by the czarist regime over ninety two years. 

The change of scale went well beyond the figures. The introduction of new categories such as "suspect," "enemy of the people," "hostage," "concentration camp," and "revolutionary court,"and of previously unknown practices such as "prophylactic measures, " summary execution without judicial process of hundreds and thousands of people, and arrest by a new kind of political police who were above the law, might all be said to have constituted a sort of Copernican revolution. 

The change was so powerful that it took even some of the Bolshevik leaders by surprise, as can be judged from the arguments that broke out within the Party hierarchy from October to December 1918 regarding the role of the Cheka. On 25 October in the absence of Dzerzhinsky—who had been sent away incognito for a month to rebuild his mental and physical health in Switzerland —the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Partydiscussed a new status for the Cheka. Criticizing the "full powers given to an organization that seems to be acting above the Soviets and above even the party itself," Nikolai Bukharin, Aleksandr Olminsky, who was one of the oldest members of the Party, and Petrovsky, the people's commissar of internal affairs,demanded that measures be taken to curb the "excessive zeal of an organization filled with criminals, sadists, and degenerate elements from the lumpenproletariat." A commission for political control was established. Lev Kamenev, who was part of it, went so far as to propose the abolition of the Cheka.23 

But the diehard proponents of the Cheka soon regained the upper hand. Among their number, besides Dzerzhinsky, were the major names in the Party: Yakov Sverdlov, Stalin, Trotsky, and of course Lenin himself Me resolutely came to the defense of an institution "unjustly accused of excesses by a few unrealistic intellectuals,incapable of considering the problem of terror in a wider perspective." 24 On 19 December 1918, at Lenin's instigation, the Central Committee adopted a resolution forbidding the Bolshevik press to publish "defamatory articles about institutions, notably the Cheka, which goes about its business under particularly difficult circumstances." And that was the end of the debate. The "iron fist of the dictatorship of the proletariat" was thus accorded its infallibility. In Lenin's words,"A good Communist is also a good Chekist." 

At the beginning of 1919 Dzerzhinsky received authorization from the Central Committee to establish the Cheka special departments, which thereafter were to be responsible for military security. On 16 March he was made people's commissar of internal affairs and set about a reorganization, under the aegis of the Cheka, of all militias, troops, detachments, and auxiliary units, which until then had been attached to different administrations. In May all these units — railway militias, food detachments, frontier guards, and Cheka battalions—were combined into a single body, the Troops for the Internal Defense of the Republic, which by 1921 numbered 200,000. These troops' various duties included policing the camps, stations, and other points of strategic importance; controlling requisitioning operations; and, most important, putting down peasant rebellions, riots by workers, and mutinies in the Red Army. The Troops for the Internal Defense of the Republic represented a formidable force for control and oppression. It was a loyal army within the larger Red Army, which was constantly plagued by desertions and which never managed, despite a theoretical enrollment of between 3 million and 5 million, to muster a fighting force in excess of 500,000 well-equipped soldiers. 25 

One of the first decrees of the new people's commissar of internal affairs concerned the organization of the camps that had existed since the summer of 1918 without any legal basis or systematic organization. The decree of 15 April 1919 drew a distinction between "coercive work camps," where, in principle, all the prisoners had been condemned by a court, and"concentration camps," where people were held, often as hostages, as a result of administrative measures. That this distinction was somewhat artificial in practice is evidenced in the complementary instruction of 17 May 1919, which directed the creation of "at least one camp in each province, with room for a minimum of 300 people" and listed the sixteen categories of prisoners to be interned. The categories were as diverse as"hostages from the haute bourgeoisie"; "functionaries from the ancient regime, up to the rank of college assessor, procurator, and their assistants, mayors and assistant mayors of cities, including district capitals" ; "people condemned, under the Soviet regime, for any crime of parasitism, prostitution, or procuring"; and "ordinary deserters (not repeat offenders) and soldiers who are prisoners in the civil war." 26

The number of people imprisoned in work camps and concentration camps increased steadily from around 16,000 in May 1919 to more than 70,000 in September 1921 27 These figures do not include several camps that had been established in regions that were in revolt against Soviet power. In Tambov Province, for example, in the summer of 1921 there were at least 50,000 "bandits" and "members of the families of bandits taken as hostages" in the seven concentration camps opened by the authorities as part of the measures to put down the peasant revolt. 28

next...The Dirty War 51S

notes
2. The Iron Fist of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat 
1. Until 1 February 1918 Russia used the Julian calendar, which was thirteen days behind the Gregorian system. Thus what for Russia was 25 October 1917 was 7 November 1917 in the rest of Europe. 
2. A. Z. Okorokov, Oklyabr' i krakh russkoi burzhuaznoi pressy (October and the destruction of the Russian bourgeois press) (Moscow: MysP, 1971); Vladimir N.Brovkin, The Mensheviks after October: Socialist Opposition and the Rise of the Bolshevik Dictatorship (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987). 
3. G. A. Belov, Iz istorii Vserossnskot Chrezvychainoi Komtsstt, 1917-1921: Sbornik dokumentov (From the history of the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission, 1917- 1921: A collection of documents) (Moscow: Gos. izd-vo polit. lit-ry, 1958), p. 66; George Leggett, The Cheka: Lenin s Political Police (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), pp. 13-15. 
4. Belov, Iz istorii VChK, pp. 54-55. 
5. Ibid., p. 67. 
6. D. I. Kurskii, Izbrannye stat't i rechi (Selected articles and speeches) (Moscow: Gos. izd-vo iurid. lit-ry, 1958), p. 67. 
7. E. A. Finn, "Antisovetskaya pechat' na skam'e podsudimykh" (Anti-Soviet press in the dock of the accused), Sovetskoe gosudarstvo i pravo, no. 2 (1967), 71-72. 
8. S. A. Pavlyuchenkov, Krestyanskii Brest (The peasants' Brest) (Moscow: Russkoe knigoizd. tov., 1996), pp. 25-26, 
9. Leggett, The Cheka, p. 7. 
10. V. D. Bonch-Bruevich, Na boevykh postakh fevralskoi i oktyabrskoi revolyutsii (At combat posts in the February and October Revolutions) (Moscow: "Federatsiia,' 1 1930), p. 191. 
11. Ibid., p. 197. 
12. Leggett, The Cheka, p. 16. 
13. Lenin t VChK: Sbornik dokumentov 1917-1922 (Lenin and the Cheka: A collec- tion of documents, 1917-1922) (Moscow: Politizlat, 1975), pp. 36-7; full text in the State Archives of the Russian Federation, Moscow (hereafter GARF), 130/2/134/26- 27. 
14. Delo naroda, 3 December 1917. 
15. V. I. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Complete collected works) (Moscow: Gos. izd-vo polit. lit-ry, 1958-1966), 35: 311. 
16. GARF, "Prague Archives," files 1-195. For the period in question see files 1, 2, and 27. 
17. Quoted in Orlando Figes, A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1996), p. 379. 
18. uPolozhenie o ChK na mestakh" (The state of the Cheka in localities), 1 1 June 1918, B. I. Nikolaevsky Archives, Hoover Institution, Stanford, Calif. 
19. Leggett, The Cheka, p. 29-40. 
20. M. I. Latsis, Dva goda borby na vnutrennom fronte (Two years of struggle on the internal front) (Moscow: Gos. izd-vo, 1920), p. 6. 
21. Isaac Steinberg, In the Workshop of the Revolution (New York: Rinehart, 1953), p. 155. 
22. Leonard Schapiro, The Origin of the Communist Autocracy: Political Opposition in the Soviet State, First Phase, 1917-1922 (London: London School of Economics and Political Science, 1955), pp. 84-86; Brovkin, The Mensheviks after October, pp. 46-47 and 59-63. Notes to Pages 63-73 763 23. E. Berard, "Pourquoi les bolcheviks ont-ils quitte Petrograd?" Cahiers du monde russe et sovietique, 34 (October-December 1993), 507-528. 
24. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 35: 31 1. 
25. Russian Center for the Conservation and Study of Historic Documents, Moscow (henceforth RTsKhlDNI), J58\l\l\10; Pavlyuchenkov, Krestyanskii Brest, p. 29. 
26. Dekrety sovetskot vlasti (Decrees of the Soviet regime) (Moscow: Gos izd-vo polit. lit-ry, 1957-), 1:490-491. 
27. P. G. Sofinov, Ocherki Istorii vserossiiskot chrezvychainoi komissii (Outline of the history of the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission) (Moscow: Gos. izd-vo polit. lit-ry, 1960), pp. 43-44; Leggett, The Cheka, p. 35. 
28. Belov, Iz istorii VChK, pp. 1 12-113. 
29. Brovkin, The Mensheviks after October, p. 159. 
30. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii^ 36: 265. 
31. Protokoly zasedan'u VSIK 4-sozyva, Stenograficheskii otchet (Protocols of the sessions of the CEC in the fourth phase: Stenographic account) (Moscow, 1918), pp. 250, 389. 
32. Karl Radek, u Puti russkoi revoyiutsii" (The paths of the Russian Revolution), Krasnaya, no. 4 (November 1921), 188. 
33. Andrea Graziosi, The Great Soviet Peasant War: Bolsheviks and Peasants, 1917- 1933 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University, Ukrainian Research Institute, 1996), p. 18.
34. Brovkin, The Mensheviks after October, pp. 220-225. 
35. RTsKhlDNI, 17\6\384\97-98. 
36. Novaya zhizn\ 1 June 1918, p. 4. 
37. N. Bernstam, Ural i Prikamie, noyabr* 1917-yanvar' 1919 (The Ural and Kama regions, November 1917-January 1919) (Paris: YMCA Press, 1982). 
38. "Instruktsii-Chrezvychainym Komissiyam" (Instructions to local Chekas), 1 December 1918, Nikolaevsky Archives, Hoover Institution, quoted in Leggett, The Cheka, pp. 39-40. 
39. L. Trotsky, O Lemne (On Lenin) (Moscow: 1924), p. 101. 
40. Novaya zhizn\ 16, 26, 27, 28 June 1918; Brovkin, The Mensheviks after October, pp. 243-249; S. Rosenberg, "Russian Labor and Bolshevik Power," Slavic Review 44 (Summer 1985), 233 ff. 
41. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 50: 106. 

3. The Red Terror 
1. L. M. Spirin, Klassy i Partii v grazhdanskoy voine v Rossti (Classes and parties in the civil war in Russia) (Moscow: MysP, 1968), pp. 180 ^. 
2. V. I. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Complete collected works) (Moscow: Gos. izd-vo polit. lit-ry, 1958-1966), 50: 142. 
3. RTsKhlDNI, 2/1/6/898. 
4. GARF, 130/2/98a/26~32.
5. RTsKhlDNI, 76/3/22. 
6. Leninsky sbornik (A Lenin collection), vol. 18 (1931), pp. 145-146, quoted in Dmitry Volkogonov, Lenin, politicheskii poriret: v dvukh knigakh (Lenin, a political portrait) (Moscow: Novosti, 1994), p. 248. 
7. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochtnenii, 50: 143. 
8. RTsKhlDNI, 76/3/22/3. 
9. Izvestiya, 23 August 1918; George Leggett, The Cheka: Lenm's Political Police (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), p. 104. 
10. S. Lyandres, "The 1918 Attempt on the Life of Lenin: A New Look at the Evidence," Slavic Review 48 (1989), 432-448. 
11. Izvestiya, 4 September 1918. 
12. Raphael Abramovich, The Soviet Revolution, 1917-1939 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1962), p. 312, 
13. Severnaya Kommuna, no. 109 (19 September 1918), 2, quoted in Leggett, The Cheka, p. 114. 
14. Izvestiya, 10 September 1918. 
15. G. A. Belov, Iz istorn Vserossnskoi Chrezvchamot Komtssu, 1917-1921: Sborntk dokumentov (From the history of the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission, 1917- 1921: A collection of documents) (Moscow: Gos. izd-vo polit. lit-ry, 1958), pp. 197- 198. 
16. Leggett, The Cheka, p. 111. 
17. Utro Moskvy, no. 21, 4 November 1918. 
18. Ezhenedeimk VChK, 22 September-27 October 1918. 
19. M. I. Latsis, Dva goda borby na vnut rennom fronte (Two years of struggle on the internal front) (Moscow: Gos. izd-vo, 1920), p. 25. 
20. Yu. Martov to A. Stein, 25 October 1918, quoted in V. I. Brovkin, Behind the Front Lines of the Civil War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 283. 
21. N. Bernstam, Ural t Prikamie, noyabr' 1917-yanuar 7 1919 (The Ural and Kama regions, November 1917-January 1919) (Paris: YMCA Press, 1982), p. 129. 
22. M. N. Gernet, Protiv smertnot kazni (Against the death penalty) (Moscow: Tip. I. D. Sufina, 1907), pp. 385^23; N. S. Tagantsev, Smertnaya kazn (The death penalty) (St. Petersburg: Gos. tip., 1913). Similar figures are arrived at by K. Liebnecht (5,735 condemned to death, 3,741 executed between 1906 and 1910; 625 condemned to death and 191 executed between 1825 and 1905), in Marc Ferro, The Russian Revolution of February /977(Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1972), p. 483. 
23. RTsKhlDNI, 5/1/2558. 
24. Lenm i VChK: Sborntk dokumentov 1917-1922 (Lenin and the Cheka: A collection of documents, 1917-1922) (Moscow: Politizlat, 1975), p. 122. 
25. Leggett, The Cheka, pp. 204-237. 
26. GARF, 393/89/ 10a. 
27. VlasF Sovetov, nos. 1-2 (1922), 41; L. D. Gerson, The Secret Police in Lenin's Russia (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1976), pp. 149 fl; Leggett, The Cheka, p. 178; GARF, 393/89/182; 393/89/295. 
28. GARF, 393/89/182; 393/89/231; 393/89/295.