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
4
The Dirty War
The civil war in Russia has generally been analyzed as a conflict between the Red Bolsheviks and the White monarchists; but in fact the events
that took place behind the lines of military confrontation are considerably more important. This was the interior front of the civil war. It was characterized
above all by multifarious forms of repression carried out by each side
—
the Red repressions being much more general and systematic—against militant
politicians of opposing parties or opposition groups, against workers striking
for any grievance, against deserters fleeing either their units or the conscription
process, or quite simply against citizens who happened to belong to a "suspect"
or "hostile" social class, whose only crime often was simply to have been living
in a town that fell to the enemy. The struggle on the interior front of the civil war included all acts of resistance carried out by millions of peasants, rebels,
and deserters, and the group that both the Reds and the Whites called the Greens often played a decisive role in the advance or retreat of one or other
side.
In 1919, for instance, massive peasant revolts against the Bolshevik powers
in the mid-Volga region and in Ukraine allowed Admiral Kolchak[L] and General
Denikin[R] to advance hundreds of miles behind Bolshevik lines. Similarly, several months later, the uprising of Siberian peasants who were incensed at the
re-establishment of the ancient rights of the landowners precipitated the retreat of Kolchak's White Army before the advancing Reds.
Although large-scale military operations between the Whites and Reds
lasted little more than a year, from the end of 1918 to the beginning of 1920, the greater part of what is normally termed the civil war was actually a dirty war, an attempt by all the different authorities, Red and White, civil and
military, to stamp out all real or potential opponents in the zones that often changed hands several times. In regions held by the Bolsheviks it was the "class struggle" against the "aristocrats", the bourgeoisie, and socially undesirable
elements, the hunt for all non-Bolshevik militants from opposing parties, and
the putting down of workers strikes, of mutinies in the less secure elements
of the Red Army, and of peasant revolts. In the zones held by the Whites, it was open season on anyone suspected of having possible "Judeo-Bolshevik" sympathies.
The Bolsheviks certainly did not have a monopoly on terror. There was
also a White Terror, whose worst moment was the terrible wave of pogroms
carried out in Ukraine in the summer and autumn of 1919 by Simon Petlyura's
detachments from Denikin's armies, which accounted for more than 150,000
victims. But as most historians of the Red Terror and White Terror have
already pointed out, the two types of terror were not on the same plane. The
Bolshevik policy of terror was more systematic, better organized, and targeted
at whole social classes. Moreover, it had been thought out and put into practice before the outbreak of the civil war. The White Terror was never systematized
in such a fashion. It was almost invariably the work of detachments that were
out of control, taking measures not officially authorized by the military command that was attempting, without much success, to act as a government. If one discounts the pogroms, which Denikin himself condemned, the White
Terror most often was a series of reprisals by the police acting as a sort of military counterespionage force. The Cheka and the Troops for the Internal Defense of the Republic were a structured and powerful instrument of repression
of a completely different order, which had support at the highest level from the Bolshevik regime.
As in all civil wars, it is extremely difficult to derive a complete picture of
all the forms of terror employed by the two warring parties. The Bolshevik
Terror, with its clear methodology, its specificity, and its carefully chosen aims,
easily predated the civil war, which developed into a full-scale conflict only at the end of the summer of 1918. The following list indicates in chronological
order the evolution of different types of terror and its different targets from
the early months of the regime;
Non-Bolshevik political militants, from anarchists to monarchists.
Workers fighting for the most basic rights, including bread, work, and a minimum of liberty and dignity.
Peasants—often deserters—implicated in any of the innumerable peasant
revolts or Red Army mutinies.
Cossack's, who were deported en mass as a social and ethnic group supposedly
hostile to the Soviet regime. "De-Cossackization" prefigured
the massive deportations of the 1930s called "dekulakization" (another
example of the deportation of ethnic groups) and underlines the fundamental
continuity between the Leninist and Stalinist policies of political
repression.
"Socially undesirable elements" and other "enemies of the people," "suspects," and "hostages" liquidated "as a preventive measure," particularly
when the Bolsheviks were enforcing the evacuation of villages or when they took back territory or towns that had been in the hands of
the Whites.
The best-known repressions are those that concerned political militants from
the various parries opposed to the Bolsheviks. Numerous statements were made by the main leaders of the opposition parties, who were often imprisoned
and exiled, but whose lives were generally spared, unlike militant workers and
peasants, who were shot without trial or massacred during punitive Cheka
operations.
One of the first acts of terror was the attack launched on 11 April 1918
against the Moscow anarchists, dozens of whom were immediately executed. The struggle against the anarchists intensified over the following years, although a certain number did transfer their allegiance to the Bolshevik Party, even becoming high-ranking Cheka officials, such as Aleksandr Goldberg,
Mikhail Brener, and Timofei Samsonov. The dilemma faced by most anarchists
in their opposition to both the new Bolshevik dictatorship and the return of
the old regime is well illustrated by the U-turns of the great peasant anarchist
leader Nestor Makhno, who for a while allied himself with the Red Army in the struggle against the Whites, then turned against the Bolsheviks after the White threat had been eliminated. Thousands of anonymous militant anarchists
were executed as bandits as part of the repression against the peasant
army of Makhno and his partisans. It would appear that these peasants constituted the immense majority of anarchist victims, at least according to the
figures presented by the Russian anarchists in exile in Berlin in 1922. These
incomplete figures note 138 militant anarchists executed in the years 1919-
1921, 281 sent into exile, and 608 still in prison as of 1 January 1922. 1
The left Socialist Revolutionaries, who were allies of the Bolsheviks until the summer of 1918, were treated with relative leniency until February 1919. As late as December 1918 their most famous leader, Maria Spiridonova, presided over a party congress that was tolerated by the Bolsheviks. However, on 10 February 1919, after she condemned the terror that was being carried out on a daily basis by the Cheka, she was arrested with 210 other militants and
sentenced by a revolutionary court to "detention in a sanatorium on account of her hysterical state." This action seems to be the first example under the Soviet regime of the sentencing of a political opponent to detention in a psychiatric hospital. Spiridonova managed to escape and continued secretly to lead the left Socialist Revolutionary Party, which by then had been banned by
the Soviet government. According to Cheka sources, fifty-eight left Socialist Revolutionary organizations were disbanded in 1919, and another forty-five in 1920. In these two years 1,875 militants were imprisoned as hostages, in response to Dzerzhinsky's instructions. He had declared, on 18 March 1919: "Henceforth the Cheka is to make no distinction between White Guards of the Krasnov variety and White Guards from the socialist camp.The Socialist Revolutionaries and the Mensheviks arrested are to be considered as hostages,
and their fate will depend on the subsequent behavior of the parties they belong
to."2
To the Bolsheviks, the right Socialist Revolutionaries had always seemed
the most dangerous political rivals. No one had forgotten that they had registered a large majority in the free and democratic elections of November and
December 1917. After the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, in which
they held a clear majority of seats, the Socialist Revolutionaries had continued
to serve in the Soviets and on the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets,
from which they were then expelled together with the Mensheviks in June 1918. Some Socialist Revolutionaries, together with Mensheviks and Constitutional
Democrats, then established temporary and short-lived governments in Samara
and Omsk, which were soon overturned by the White Admiral Kolchak.
Caught between the Bolsheviks and the Whites, the Socialist Revolutionaries
and the Mensheviks encountered considerable difficulties in defining a coherent
set of policies with which to oppose the Bolshevik regime. The Bolsheviks, in turn, were extremely able politicians who used measures of appeasement,
infiltration, and outright oppression to second-guess the more moderate socialist
opposition.
After authorizing the reappearance of the Socialist Revolutionary newspaper
Deio naroda (The people's cause) from 20 to 30 March, when Admiral
Kolchak's offensive was at its height, the Cheka rounded up all the Socialist Revolutionaries and Mensheviks that it could on 31 March 1919, at a time when
there was no legal restriction on membership of either of the two parties. More
than 1,900 militants were arrested in Moscow, Tula, Smolensk, Voronezh,
Penza, Samara, and Kostroma.3 No one can say how many were summarily
executed in the putting down of strikes and peasant revolts organized by
Socialist Revolutionaries and Mensheviks. Very few statistics are available, and even if we know approximately the number of victims in particular incidents, we have no idea of the proportion of political activists who were caught up in the massacres.
A second wave of arrests followed an article published by Lenin in Pravda
on 28 August 1919, in which he again berated the Socialist Revolutionaries and
the Mensheviks, accusing them of being ''accomplices and foot servants of the Whites, the landlords, and the capitalists." According to the Cheka records,
2,380 Socialist Revolutionaries and Mensheviks were arrested in the last four months of 1919. 4 The repressions against socialist activists intensified after a meeting of a typography union, called in honor of a visiting delegation of English workers on 23 May 1920. At that meeting, under an assumed name
and in disguise, the Socialist Revolutionary leader Viktor Chernov, who had
been president of the Constituent Assembly for the single day of its existence and was in hiding from the secret police, publicly ridiculed the Cheka and the government, The whole of Chernov's family were taken as hostages, and all the Socialist Revolutionary leaders still at liberty were thrown into prison. 5 In the summer of 1920 more than 2,000 Socialist Revolutionary and Menshevik
activists were registered, arrested, and kept as hostages. A Cheka internal memo
dated 1 July 1919 laid out with extraordinary cynicism the outlines of the plan
to deal with the opposing socialists:
Instead of merely outlawing these parties, which would simply force them underground and make them even more difficult to control, it seems preferable to grant them a sort of semi legal status. In this way we
can have them at hand, and whenever we need to we can simply pluck
out troublemakers, renegades, or the informers that we need ... As far as these anti-Soviet parties are concerned, we must make use of the present war situation to blame crimes on their members, such as "counterrevolutionary
activities," "high treason," "illegal action behind the
lines," "spying for interventionist foreign powers," etc.
Of all the repressive episodes, the one most carefully hidden by the new regime was the violence used against workers, in whose name the Bolsheviks had first come to power. Beginning in 1918, the repressions increased over the following
two years, culminating in 1921 with the well-known episode in Kronstadt. From early 1918 the workers of Petrograd had shown their defiance of the
Bolsheviks. After the collapse of the general strike on 2 July 1918, trouble broke out again among the workers in the former capital in March 1919, after the Bolsheviks had arrested a number of Socialist Revolutionary leaders, including Maria Spiridonova, who had just carried out a memorable tour of the Petrograd factories, where she had been greeted with tremendous popular
acclaim. The moment was already one of extreme delicacy because of dire shortages of food, and these arrests led to strikes and a vast protest movement.
On 10 March the general assembly of workers of the Putilov factories, at a meeting of more than ten thousand members, adopted a resolution that solemnly condemned the Bolshevik actions: "This government is nothing less than the dictatorship of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, kept
in place thanks to the Cheka and the revolutionary courts."7
The proclamation called for power to be handed over to the Soviets, free elections for the Soviets and for the factory committees, an end to limitations on the quantity of food that workers could bring into the city from the countryside
(1.5 pudy, or about 55 pounds), the release of political prisoners from
the ''authentic revolutionary parties," and above all the release of Maria Spiridonova. To try to put a brake on this movement, which seemed to get more
powerful by the day, Lenin came to Petrograd in person on 12 and 13 March
1919. But when he tried to address the workers who were striking in the
factories, he was booed off the stage, along with Zinoviev, to cries of ''Down
with Jews and commissars!"8 Deep-rooted popular antisemitism, which was
never far below the surface, had been quick to associate Bolsheviks and Jews,
so that the Bolsheviks quickly lost much of the credibility they had been
accorded in the aftermath of the October Revolution in 1917. The fact that
several of the best-known Bolshevik leaders (Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Aleksei
Rykov, Karl Radek) were Jewish served to justify, in the mind of the masses,
this amalgamation of the labels "Jew" and "Bolshevik."
On 16 March 1919 Cheka detachments stormed the Putilov factor), which
was defended by armed workers. Approximately 900 workers were arrested. In the next few days more than 200 strikers were executed without trial in the Schlusselburg fortress, about thirty-rive miles from Petrograd. A new working
practice was set in place whereby all the strikers were fired and were rehired
only after they had signed a declaration stating that they had been deceived and
"led into crime" by counterrevolutionary leaders. 9 Henceforth all workers were
to be kept under close surveillance. After the spring of 1919, in several working-class
centers a secret Cheka department set up a network of spies and
informers who were to submit regular reports about the "state of mind" in the
factory in question. The working classes were clearly considered to be dangerous.
The
spring of 1919 was marked by numerous strikes, which were savagely
put down, in some of the great working-class centers in Russia, such as Tula,
Sormovo, Orel, Bryansk, Tver, Ivanovo Voznesensk, and Astrakhan. 10 The
workers' grievances were identical almost everywhere. Reduced to starvation by minuscule salaries that barely covered the price of a ration card for a half-pound of bread a day, the strikers sought first to obtain rations matching
those of soldiers in the Red Army. But the more urgent demands were all political: the elimination of special privileges for Communists, the release of
political prisoners, free elections for Soviets and factory committees, the end of
conscription into the Red Army, freedom of association, freedom of expression,
freedom of the press, and so forth.
What made these movements even more dangerous in the eyes of the Bolshevik authorities was their frequent success in rallying to their cause the
military units stationed in the town in question. In Orel, Bryansk, Gomel, and
Astrakhan mutinying soldiers joined forces with the strikers, shouting "Death
to Jews! Down with the Bolshevik commissars!," taking over and looting parts
of the city, which were retaken by Cheka detachments and troops faithful to the regime only after several days of fighting.11 The repressions in response to such strikes and mutinies ranged from massive lockouts of whole factories and
the confiscation of ration cards—the threat of hunger was one of the most
useful weapons the Bolsheviks had—to the execution of strikers and rebel soldiers by the hundreds.
Among the most significant of the repressions were those in Tula and
Astrakhan in March and April 1919. Dzer/hinsky came to Tula, the historical capital of the Russian army, on 3 April 1919 to put down a strike by workers
in the munitions factories. In the winter of 1918-19 these factories had already
been the scene of strikes and industrial action, and they were vital to the Red
Army, turning out more than 80 percent of all the rifles made in Russia. Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries were very much in the majority
among the political activists in the highly skilled workforce there. The arrest, in early March 1919, of hundreds of socialist activists provoked a wave of
protests that culminated on 27 March in a huge "March for Freedom and
against Hunger," which brought together thousands of industrial and railway workers. On 4 April Dzerzhinsky had another 800 "leaders" arrested and
forcibly emptied the factories, which had been occupied for several weeks by
the strikers. All the workers were fired. Their resistance was broken by hunger;
for several weeks their ration cards had not been honored. To receive replacement
cards, giving the right to a half-pound of bread and the right to work
again after the general lockout, workers had to sign a job application form
stipulating, in particular, that any stoppage in the future would be considered an act of desertion and would thus be punishable by death. Production resumed on 10 April. The night before that, 26 "leaders" had been executed. 12
The town of Astrakhan, near the mouth of the Volga, had major strategic
importance in the spring of 1919, as it was the last Bolshevik stronghold
preventing Admiral Kolchak's troops in the northwest from joining up with
those of General Denikin in the southwest. This circumstance alone probably
explains the extraordinary violence with which the workers' strike in the town
was suppressed in March. Having begun for both economic reasons (the paltry
A State against Its People
rations) and political reasons (the arrest of socialist activists), the strike intensified
on 10 March when the 45th Infantry Regiment refused to open fire on
workers marching through the city. Joining forces with the strikers, the soldiers stormed the Bolshevik Party headquarters and killed several members of the
staff. Sergei Kirov, the president of the regional Revolutionary Military Committee,
immediately ordered "the merciless extermination of these White
Guard lice by any means possible." Troops who had remained faithful to the regime and to the Cheka blocked all entrances to the town and methodically set about retaking it. When the prisons were full, the soldiers and strikers were
loaded onto barges and then thrown by the hundreds into the Volga with stones around their necks. From 12 to 14 March between 2,000 and 4,000 strikers were
shot or drowned. After 15 March the repressions were concentrated on the bourgeoisie of the town, on the pretext that they had been behind this "White
Guard conspiracy" for which the workers and soldiers were merely cannon
fodder. For two days all the merchants' houses were systematically looted and
their owners arrested and shot. Estimates of the number of bourgeois victims of the massacres in Astrakhan range from 600 to 1,000. In one week between
3,000 and 5,000 people were either shot or drowned. By contrast, the number
of Communists buried with great pomp and circumstance on 18 March—the anniversary of the Paris Commune, as the authorities were at pains to point out—was a mere 47. Long remembered as a small incident in the war between
the Whites and the Reds, the true scale of the killing in Astrakhan is now
known, thanks to recently published archival documents.13 These documents
reveal that it was the largest massacre of workers by Bolsheviks before the events at Kronstadt.
At the end of 1919 and the beginning of 1920 relations between the Bolsheviks and the workers deteriorated even further, following the militarization of more than 2,000 businesses. As the principal architect of the militarization of the workplace, Trotsky laid out his ideas on the issue at the Ninth
Party Congress in March 1920. Trotsky explained that humans are naturally
lazy. Under capitalism, people were forced to search for work to survive. The
capitalist market acted as a stimulus to man, but under socialism "the utilization of work resources replaces the market." It was thus the job of the state to direct,
assign, and place the workers, who were to obey the state as soldiers obey orders
in the army, because the state was working in the interests of the proletariat.
Such was the basis of the militarization of the workplace, which was vigorously
criticized by a minority of syndicalists, union leaders, and Bolshevik directors. In practice this meant the outlawing of strikes, which were compared to desertion
in times of war; an increase in the disciplinary powers of employers; the
total subordination of all unions and factory committees, whose role henceforth was to be simply one of support for the producers' policies; a ban on workers' leaving their posts; and punishments for absenteeism and lateness, both of
which were exceedingly widespread because workers were often out searching
for food.
The general discontent in the workplace brought about by militarization was compounded by the difficulties of everyday life. As was noted in a report
submitted by the Cheka to the government on 16 December 1919:
Of late the food crisis has gone from bad to worse, and the working
masses arc starving. They no longer have the physical strength necessary
to continue working, and more and more often they are absent simply as
a result of the combined effects of cold and hunger. In many of the metallurgical companies in Moscow, the workers are desperate and
ready to take to take any measures necessary—strikes, riots, insurrections—unless some sort of solution to these problems is found immediately.
14
At the beginning of 1920 the monthly salary for a worker in Petrograd was between 7,000 and 12,000 rubles. On the free market a pound of butter
cost 5,000 rubles, a pound of meat cost 3,000, and a pint of milk 500. Each
worker was also entitled to a certain number of products according to the category in which he was classed. In Petrograd at the end of 1919, a worker in heavy industry was entitled to a half-pound of bread a day, a pound of sugar a month, half a pound of fat, and four pounds of sour herring.
In theory citizens were divided into five categories of "stomach," from the workers in heavy industry and Red Army soldiers to the "sedentary"—a particularly
harsh classification that included any intellectual—and were given
rations accordingly. Because the "sedentary"—the intellectuals and aristocrats—were served last, they often received nothing at all, since often there was
nothing left. The "workers" were divided into an array of categories that favored the sectors vital to the survival of the regime. In Petrograd in the winter
of 1919-20 there were thirty-three categories of ration cards, which were never
valid for more than one month. In the centralized food distribution system that the Bolsheviks had put in place, the food weapon played a major role in rewarding or punishing different categories of citizens. "The bread ration should be reduced for anyone who doesn't work in the transport sector, as it is now of such capital importance, and it should be increased for people who do
work in this sector," wrote Lenin to Trotsky on 1 February 1920. 'if it must
be so, then let thousands die as a result, but the country must be saved." 15 [What a piece shit Lenin was D.C]
When this policy came into force, all those who had links with the country,
and that meant a considerable number of people, tried desperately to go back
to their villages as often as possible to bring back some food.
The militarization measures, designed to "restore order" in the factories,had the opposite effect, and led to numerous stoppages, strikes, and riots, all of which were ruthlessly crushed. "The best place for strikers, those noxious
yellow parasites," said Pravda on 12 February 1920, "is the concentration
camp!" According to the records kept at the People's Commissariat of Labor,
77 percent of all large and medium-sized companies in Russia were affected by
strikes in the first half of 1920. Significantly, the areas worst affected,metallurgy,
the mines, and the transport sector,were also the areas in which militarization was most advanced. Reports from the secret Cheka department
addressed to the Bolshevik leaders throw a harsh and revealing light on the repression used against factories and workers who resisted the militarization
process. Once arrested, they were usually sentenced by revolutionary courts for crimes of "sabotage" and "desertion." At Simbirsk (formerly Ulyanovsk), to take but one example, twelve workers from the armaments factory were sent to camps in April 1920 for having "carried out acts of sabotage by striking in the
Italian manner, spreading anti-Soviet propaganda, playing on the religious
superstitions and the weak political convictions of the masses,and spreading erroneous information about Soviet policies regarding salaries."16 Behind this obfuscate language lay the likelihood that the accused had done little more
than take breaks that were not authorized by their bosses, protested against
having to work on Sundays, criticized the Communists, and complained about
their own miserable salaries.
The top leaders of the Party, including Lenin, called for an example to be made of the strikers. On 29 January 1920, worried by the tense situation regarding workers in the Ural region, Lenin sent a telegram to Vladimir
Smirnov, head of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Fifth Army: "P. has informed me that the railway workers are clearly involved in acts of sabotage
... I am told that workers from Izhevsk are also involved in this. I am
surprised that you are taking the matter so lightly, and are not immediately
executing large numbers of strikers for the crime of sabotage." 17 Many strikes started up in 1920 as a direct result of militarization: in Ekaterinburg in March
1920, 80 workers were arrested and sent to camps; on the Ryazan-Ural Railway
in April 1920, 100 railway workers were given the same punishment; on the Moscow-Kursk line in May 1920, 160 workers met the same fate, as did 152 workers in a metallurgy factory in Bryansk in June 1920. Many other strikes protesting militarization were suppressed in a similarly brutal fashion. 18 [workers? how about human beings? DC]
One of the most remarkable strikes took place in the Tula arms factory, a crucial center of protest against the Bolshevik regime, which had already been
severely punished for its actions in April 1919. On Sunday, 6 June 1920, a number of metallurgy workers refused to work the extra hours that the bosses demanded. Female workers then refused to work on that Sunday and on Sundays thereafter in general, explaining that Sunday was the only day they could go out looking for food in the surrounding countryside. In response to a
call from the factory bosses, a large detachment from the Cheka arrived to arrest the strikers. Martial law was decreed, and a troika made up of Party representatives
and representatives of the Cheka was instructed to denounce a "counterrevolutionary conspiracy fomented by Polish spies and the Black Hundreds
to weaken the combat strength of the Red Army."
While the strike spread and arrests of the "leaders" multiplied, a new
development changed the usual course of developments; in hundreds, and then
in thousands, female workers and simple housewives presented themselves to the Cheka asking to be arrested too. The movement spread, and the men
demanded to be arrested en mass as well in order to make the idea of a Polish conspiracy appear even more ridiculous. In four days more than 10,000 people were detained in a huge open-air space guarded by the Cheka. Temporarily
overwhelmed by the numbers, and at a loss about how to present the information
to Moscow, the local Party organizations and the Cheka finally persuaded
the central authorities that there was indeed an enormous conspiracy afoot. A
Committee for the Liquidation of the Tula Conspiracy interrogated thousands
of prisoners in the hope of finding a few guilty conspirators. To be set free, hired again, and given a new ration book, all the workers who had been arrested had to sign the following statement: "I, the undersigned, a filthy criminal dog,
repent before the revolutionary court and the Red Army, confess my sins, and
promise to work conscientiously in the future."
In contrast to other protest strikes, the Tula confrontation in the summer
of 1920 was treated with comparative leniency: only 28 people were sentenced
to camps, and 200 were sent into exile. 19 At a time when a highly skilled workforce was comparatively rare, the Bolsheviks could hardly do without the
best armaments workers in the country. Terror, like food, had to take into account the importance of the sector in question and the higher interests of
the regime.
However important the workers front was strategically and symbolically, it was
only one of the many internal fronts of the civil war. The struggle against the Greens, the peasants who were resisting requisitioning and conscription, was
often far more important. Reports now available for the first time from the
special departments of the Cheka and from the Troops for the Internal Defense
of the Republic, whose task was to deal with deserters and to put down
mutinies and peasant riots, reveal the full horror of the extraordinary violence of this "dirty war," which went on beyond the more obvious conflicts between
the Reds and the Whites. It was in this crucial struggle between Bolshevik
power and the peasantry that the policy of terror, based on an extremely
pessimistic view of the masses, was really forged: "They are so ignorant,"wrote Dzerzhinsky, "that they have no idea what is really in their own interest." The brute masses, it was felt, could be tamed only by force, by the "iron broom" that Trotsky mentioned in a characteristic image when describing the repressions he had used "to clean" Ukraine and "sweep away" the "bandit
hordes" led by Nestor Makhno and other peasant chiefs. 20
The peasant revolts had started in the summer of 1918. They became
much more widespread in 1919 and 1920 and culminated in 1920-21, when
they momentarily obliged the Bolshevik forces to retreat slightly.
There were two obvious reasons for these peasant revolts: the constant
requisitioning of goods and the enforced conscription into the Red Army. In January 1919 the rather disorganized foraging for agricultural surpluses that had characterized the first operations of the summer of 1918 was replaced by
a centralized and more carefully planned requisitioning system. Every province,
district, canton (volost), and village community had to hand over to the
state a quota that was fixed in advance in accordance with estimates about the
size of the harvest. In addition to grains, the quotas included some twenty-odd
products such as potatoes, honey, eggs, butter, cooking oil, meat, cream, and
milk. Each community was responsible for the collection itself. Only when the whole village had filled its quota did the authorities distribute receipts allowing
people to buy manufactured goods, and even then only about 15 percent of the people's needs in that department were actually met. Payment for the agricultural
harvest was more or less symbolic by this stage. By the end of 1920 the ruble had lost 96 percent of its previous value relative to the prewar gold standard
ruble. From 1918 to 1920 agricultural requisitioning increased threefold,
and peasant revolts, though difficult to calculate exactly, seem to have
increased at approximately the same rate. 21
Opposition to conscription, after three years in the trenches in "the imperialist
war," was the second most frequent reason for the peasant revolts, often led by the Greens. It also accounted for the groups of deserters hiding in the woods. It is now believed that in 1919 and 1920 there were more than
3 million deserters. In 1919 around 500,000 deserters were arrested by various departments of the Cheka and the special divisions created to combat desertion;
in the following year the figure rose to between 700,000 and 800,000. Even so, somewhere between 1.5 and 2 million deserters, most of them peasants who
knew the territory extremely well, managed to elude the authorities. 22
Faced with the scale of the problem, the government took ever more
repressive measures. Not only were thousands of deserters shot, but the families
of deserters were often treated as hostages. After the summer of 1918 the hostage principle was applied in more and more ordinary situations. For example,
a government decree of 15 February 1919 signed by Lenin encouraged
local Chekas to take hostages from among the peasants in regions where the railway lines had not yet been cleared of snow to a satisfactory standard: "And
if the lines aren't swept properly, the hostages are to be shot." 23 On 12 May
1920 Lenin sent the following instructions to all the provincial commissions
and detachments responsible for tracing deserters: "After the expiration of the seven-day deadline for deserters to turn themselves in, punishments must be
increased for these incorrigible traitors to the cause of the people. Families and
anyone found to be assisting them in any way whatsoever are to be considered
as hostages and treated accordingly." 24 In practice this decree did nothing more
than legally sanction what was already common practice. The tidal wave of desertions nonetheless rolled on. In 1920 and 1921, as in 1919, deserters accounted for most of the Green partisans, against whom, for three years (or
in some regions four or even five), the Bolsheviks waged a relentless war of unimaginable cruelty.
Besides their resistance to requisitioning and conscription, the peasants
generally rejected any intervention by what they considered to be a foreign power, in this case the Communists from the cities. As far as many of the peasants were concerned, the Communists responsible for the requisitioning were simply not the same people as the Bolsheviks who had encouraged the agricultural revolution in 1917. In the regions that were constantly changing
hands between the Reds and the Whites, confusion and violence were at their height.
The reports from different departments of the Cheka responsible for suppressing the insurrections are an exceptionally good source of information,
and allow us to see many different sides of this guerrilla war. They often draw
a distinction between two types of peasant movement: the bunt, a spontaneous
revolt and brief flare-up of violence with a relatively limited number of participants,
typically between a few dozen to a hundred or so rebels; and the
vosstatiie, a large-scale insurrection involving thousands or even tens of thousands of peasants, organized into veritable armies capable of storming towns and cities, and held together by a coherent political program, usually with
anarchist or Socialist Revolutionary tendencies. Excerpts from these reports
give some idea of what went on:
30 April 1919. Tambov Province. At the beginning of April, in the Lebyadinsky district, a riot broke out among kulaks and deserters protesting
the mobilization of men and horses and the requisitioning of
grain. With cries of "Down with the Communists! Down with the Soviets!" the rebels stormed and burned several of the Executive Committees
in the canton and killed seven Communists in a barbaric fashion,
sawing them in half while they were still alive. Summoned by members
of the requisitioning detachment, the 212th Battalion of the Cheka
arrived and put down the kulak revolt. Sixty people were arrested, and fifty were executed immediately; the village where the rebellion started was razed.
Voronezh Province, 11 June 1919, 16:15. Telegram. The situation is improving. The revolt in the Novokhopersk region is nearly over. Our
planes bombed and set fire to the town of Tretyaki, one of the principal bandit strongholds. Mopping-up operations are continuing.
Yaroslavl Province, 23 June 1919. The uprising of the deserters in the Petropavlovskaya volost has been put down. The families of the deserters
have been taken as hostages. When we started to shoot one person from each family, the Greens began to come out of the woods and
surrender. Thirty-four deserters were shot as an example. 25
Thousands of similar reports bear witness to the great violence of this war between the authorities and peasant guerrillas, often caused by desertion but described in the reports as kulak revolts or bandit uprisings. 26 The three excerpts above demonstrate the varieties of repression used most often by the
authorities: the arrest and execution of hostages taken from the families of
deserters or "bandits," and the bombing and burning of villages. These blind and disproportionate reprisals were based on the idea of the collective responsibility
of the whole village community. The authorities generally laid down a deadline for the return of deserters, and once the deadline had expired, the
deserters were considered to be "forest bandits" who were liable to be shot on
sight. Moreover, it was made clear in the tracts of both the civil and the military
authorities that "if the inhabitants of a village help the bandits in the forests
in any way whatever, the whole village will be burned down."
Some of the more general Cheka reports give a clearer idea of the scale of this war in the countryside. In the period 15 October-30 November 1918,
in twelve provinces of Russia alone, there were 44 bunt riots, in which 2,320
people were arrested, 620 were killed in the fighting, and 982 subsequently
executed. During these disorders 480 Soviet functionaries were killed, as were
112 men from the food detachments, the Red Army, and the Cheka. In September
1919, for the ten Russian provinces for which reports are available,
48,735 deserters and 7,325 "bandits" were arrested, 1,826 were killed, 2,230 were executed, and there were 430 victims among the functionaries and the Soviet military. These very fragmentary reports do not include the much
greater losses during the larger-scale peasant uprisings.
The uprisings can be grouped around several periods of greater intensity:
March and April 1919 for the regions of the mid-Volga and Ukraine; February-August
1920 for the provinces of Samara, Ufa, Kazan, Tambov, and again
Ukraine, which was retaken from the Whites by the Bolsheviks but whose
heartlands were still controlled by the guerrilla peasants. From late 1920 through the first half of 1921 the peasant movement, very much on the defensive
in Ukraine, the Don, and the Kuban, culminated in huge resistance in the
central provinces of Tambov, Penza, Samara, Saratov, Simbirsk, and Tsaritsyn.
27 The only factor that diminished the intensity of the peasant war here was
the arrival of one of the worst famines of the twentieth century.
It was in the rich provinces of Samara and Simbirsk, which in 1919 were
required to provide more than one-fifth of the grain requisitions for the whole
of Russia, that spontaneous peasant riots were transformed for the first time in March 1919 into a genuine insurrection. Dozens of towns were taken by the
insurrectionist peasant army, which by then numbered more than 30,000 armed
soldiers. The Bolshevik central powers lost all control of Samara for more than
a month. The rebellion facilitated the advance Toward the Volga of units from
Admiral Kolchak's White Army, as the Bolsheviks were forced to send tens of
thousands of men to deal with this extremely well-organized peasant army with
a clear political program calling for free trade, free elections to the Soviets, and
an end to requisitioning and the "Bolshevik commissariat." Summing up
the situation in April 1919, after the end of the uprising, the head of the Cheka
in Samara noted that 4,240 of the rebels had been killed in the fighting, 625
had been subsequently shot, and 6,210 deserters and "bandits" had been arrested.
Just
when the fire seemed to have been damped in Samara, it flared up
again with unparalleled intensity in Ukraine. After the Germans and the Austro-Hungarians had left at the end of 1918, the Bolshevik government had
decided to recapture Ukraine. The breadbasket of the old czarist empire,
Ukraine was now to feed the proletariat of Moscow and Petrograd. Requisitioning
quotas were higher there than anywhere else in the Soviet empire. To
meet them would have been to condemn thousands of villages, already badly
damaged by the German and Austro-Hungarian occupations, to certain starvation. In addition, unlike the policy in Russia at the end of 1917 for the sharing
of land among the peasant communities, the Bolshevik intention for Ukraine
was a straightforward nationalization of all the great properties, which were the most modern in the old empire. This policy, which aimed to transform the great
sugar- and grain-producing areas into huge collective farms with the peasants
as nothing more than agricultural laborers, was bound to provoke resistance. The peasants had become militarized in the fight against the German and
Austria-Hungarian occupying forces. By 1919 there existed real armies of tens
of thousands of peasants, commanded by military chiefs and Ukrainian politicians such as Simon Pctlvura, Nestor Makhno, Mykola Hrvhorviv, and Zeleny. The peasant armies were determined to implement their version of an agrarian
revolution: land for the peasants, free trade, and free elections to the Soviets,
"without Muscovites or Jews" For many of the Ukrainian peasants, who had been born into a long tradition of antagonism between the countryside and the mostly Russian and Jewish towns, it was temptingly simple to make the equation
Muscovites = Bolsheviks = Jews. They were all to be expelled from
Ukraine.
These particularities of Ukraine explain the brutality and the length of
the confrontations between the Bolsheviks and a large part of the Ukrainian
peasantry. The presence of another party, the Whites, who were under assault
at once by the Bolsheviks and by various peasant Ukrainian armies who opposed
the return of the great landowners, rendered the political and military
situation even more complex; some cities, such as Kyiv, were to change hands
fourteen times in the space of two years.
The first great revolts against the Bolsheviks and their food-requisitioning
detachments took place in April 1919. In that month alone, 93 peasant revolts took place in the provinces of Kyiv, Chernihiv, Poltava, and Odessa. For the
first twenty days of July 1919 the Cheka's own statistics note 210 revolts,
involving more than 100,000 armed combatants and several hundred thousand
peasants. The peasant armies of Hryhoryiv, numbering more than 20,000,
including several mutinying units from the Red Army, with 50 cannon and more than 700 heavy machine guns, took a whole series of towns in southern
Ukraine in April and May 1919, including Cherkassy, Kherson, Nikolaev, and
Odessa. They set up an independent interim government whose slogans stated
their intentions quite clearly: "All power to the Soviets of the Ukrainian people,"
"Ukraine for the Ukrainians, down with the Bolsheviks and the Jews,"
1 "Share out the land," "Free enterprise, free trade." 2 * Zeleny's partisans, nearly
20,000 armed men, held the entire province of Kyiv except for a few big cities. Under the slogan "Long live Soviet power, down with the Bolsheviks and the Jews!" they organized dozens of bloody pogroms against the Jewish communities
in the towns and villages of Kyiv and Chernihiv. The best known, thanks
to numerous studies, are the actions of Nestor Makhno. At the head of a peasant army numbering tens of thousands, he espoused a simultaneously
nationalist and social anarchist program that had been elaborated in several peasant congresses, including the Congress of Delegate Peasants, Workers, and
Rebels of Gulyai-Pole, held in April 1919 in the midst of the Makhno uprising.
The Makhnovists voiced their rejection of all interference by the state in peasant affairs and a desire for peasant self-government on the basis of freely elected Soviets. Along with these basic demands came another series of claims,
shared by other peasant movements, such as calls for the end of requisitioning, the elimination of taxes, freedom for socialist and anarchist parties, the redistribution of land, the end of the "Bolshevik commissarocracy," and the expulsion
of the special troops and the Cheka. 29
The hundreds of peasant uprisings in the spring and summer of 1919 behind the lines of the Red Army played a key role in the short-lived victories by General Denikin's troops. Moving out of southern Ukraine on 19 May 1919,
the White Army advanced rapidly while the Red Army was busy putting down
the peasant rebellions. Denikin's troops took Kharkiv on 12 June, Kyiv on 28
August, and Voronezh on 30 September. The retreat of the Bolsheviks, who
had established a power base only in the big cities and left the countryside in the hands of the peasants, was greeted by large-scale executions of prisoners
and hostages. In a hasty retreat through the countryside held by the peasant
guerrillas, the Red Army detachments and the Cheka gave no quarter. They
burned villages by the hundreds and carried out massive executions of bandits,
deserters, and hostages. The retreat and the subsequent reconquest of Ukraine
at the end of 1919 and the beginning of 1920 were the settings for scenes of
extraordinary violence against the civilian population, as recounted in Isaac Babel's masterpiece, The Red Cavalry.30
By early 1920 the White armies, with the exception of a few straggling
units that had taken refuge in the Crimea under the command of Baron Pyotr
Wrangel, Denikin's successor, had been defeated. The Bolshevik forces and the peasants were thus left face to face. From then until 1922, the conflict with the Bolshevik authorities precipitated extremely bloody repression. In February
and March 1920 a huge new uprising, known as the "Pitchfork Rebellion," stretched from the Volga to the Urals, in the provinces of Kazan, Simbirsk,
and Ufa. Populated by Russians, but also by Tatars and Bashkirs, the regions
in question had been subject to particularly heavy requisitioning. Within weeks
the rebellion had taken root in almost a dozen districts. The peasant army
known as "The Black Eagle" counted more than 50,000 soldiers at its height.
Armed with cannons and heavy machine guns, the Troops for the Internal Defense of the Republic overwhelmed the rebels, who were armed with only
pitchforks and axes. In a few days thousands of rebels were massacred and
hundreds of villages burned. 31
Despite the rapid crushing of the Pitchfork Rebellion, the peasant revolts continued to spread, flaring up next in the provinces of the mid-Volga region,
in Tambov, Penza, Samara, Saratov, and Tsaritsyn, all of which had suffered
heavily from requisitioning. The Bolshevik leader Antonov-Ovseenko, who led the repressions against the rebel peasants in Tambov, later acknowledged that the requisitioning plans of 1920 and 1921, if carried out as instructed, would
have meant the certain death of the peasants. On average, they were left with
1 pud (35 pounds) of grain and 1.5 pudy (about 55 pounds) of potatoes per person each year—approximately one-tenth of the minimum requirements for
life. These peasants in the provinces were thus engaged in a straightforward
fight for survival in the summer of 1920. It was to continue for two years, until the rebels were finally defeated by hunger.
The third great center of conflict between peasants and Bolsheviks in 1920 was Ukraine itself, most of which had been reconquered from the White armies between December 1919 and February 1920; but the countryside had remained under the control of hundreds of detachments of free Greens of various allegiances, many of them affiliated with Makhno's command. Unlike the Black Eagles, the Ukrainian detachments were well armed, since they were made up largely of deserters. In the summer of 1920 Makhno's army numbered 15,000 men, 2,500 cavalry, approximately 100 heavy machine guns, twenty artillery pieces, and two armored vehicles. Hundreds of smaller groups, numbering from a dozen to several hundred, also put up stout resistance against the Bolshevik incursions. To fight these peasant guerrillas, the government in May 1920 called on the services of Feliks Dzerzhinsky, naming him "Commander in Chief of the Rear Front of the Southwest." Dzerzhinsky remained in Kharkiv for more than two months, setting up twenty-four special units of the Troops for the Internal Defense of the Republic, elite units with special cavalry detachments trained to pursue retreating rebels, as well as airplanes to bomb bandit strongholds. 32 Their task was to eradicate all peasant guerrillas within three months. In fact the operation took more than two years, lasting from the summer of 1920 until the autumn of 1922, and cost tens of thousands of lives.
Among the episodes in the struggle between peasants and the Bolshevik authorities, "de-Cossackization"—the systematic elimination of the Cossacks of the Don and the Kuban as social groups—occupies a special place. For the first time, on the principle of collective responsibility, a new regime took a series of measures specially designed to eliminate, exterminate, and deport the population of a whole territory, which Soviet leaders had taken to calling the "Soviet Vendee."33 These operations were plainly not the result of military excesses in the heat of battle, but were carefully planned in advance in response to decrees from the highest levels of state authority, directly implicating numerous top-ranking politicians, including Lenin, Sergo Ordzhonikidze, Sergei Syrtsov, Grigory Sokolnikov, and Isaac Reingold. Momentarily halted in the spring of 1919 because of military setbacks, the process of dc-Cossackization resumed with even greater cruelty in 1920, after Bolshevik victories in the Don and the Kuban.
The Cossack's, who since December 1917 had been deprived of the status they had enjoyed under the old regime, were classified by the Bolsheviks as "kulaks" and "class enemies"; and as a result they joined forces with the White armies that had united in southern Russia in the spring of 1918 under the banner of Ataman Krasnov. In February 1919, after the general advance of the Bolsheviks into Ukraine and southern Russia, the first detachment of the Red Army penetrated the Cossack territories along the Don. At the outset the Bolsheviks took measures to destroy everything that made the Cossack's a separate group: their land was confiscated and redistributed among Russian colonizers or local peasants who did not have Cossack status; they were ordered, on pain of death, to surrender all their arms (historically, as the traditional frontier soldiers of the Russian empire, all Cossack's had a right to bear arms); and all Cossack administrative assemblies were immediately dissolved.
All these measures were part of the pre-established de-Cossackization plan approved in a secret resolution of the Bolshevik Party's Central Committee on 24 January 1919: "In view of the experiences of the civil war against the Cossack's, we must recognize as the only politically correct measure massive terror and a merciless fight against the rich Cossack's, who must be exterminated and physically disposed of, down to the last man."34
In practice, as acknowledged by Reingold, the president of the Revolutionary Committee of the Don, who was entrusted with imposing Bolshevik rule in the Cossack territories, "what was carried out instead against the Cossacks was an indiscriminate policy of massive extermination."35 From mid February to mid-March 1919, Bolshevik detachments executed more than 8,000 Cossack's. 36 In each stamina (Cossack village) revolutionary courts passed summary judgments in a matter of minutes, and whole lists of suspects were condemned to death, generally for "counterrevolutionary behavior." In the face of this relentless destruction, the Cossack's had no choice but to revolt.
The revolt began in the district of Veshenskaya on 11 March 1919. The well-organized rebels decreed the general mobilization of all males aged sixteen to fifty-five and sent out telegrams urging the whole population to rise up against the Bolsheviks throughout the Don region and as far as the remote province of Voronezh.
"We, the Cossack's," they explained, "are not anti-Soviet. We are in favor of free elections. We are against the Communists, collective farming, and the Jews. We are against requisitioning, theft, and the endless round of executions practiced by the Chekas." 17 At the beginning of April the Cossack rebels represented a well-armed force of nearly 30,000 men, all hardened by battle. Operating behind the lines of the Red Army, which, farther south, was fighting Denikin's troops together with the Kuban Cossacks, these rebels of the Don, like their Ukrainian counterparts, contributed in no small measure to the huge advance of the White Army in May and June 1919. At the beginning of June the Cossacks of the Don and the Kuban joined up with the greater part of the White armies. The whole of the "Cossack Vendee" was freed from the dreaded power of the "Muscovites, Jews, and Bolsheviks."
But the Bolsheviks were back in February 1920. The second military occupation of the Cossack lands was even more murderous than the first. The whole Don region was forced to make a grain contribution of 36 million pudy, a quantity that easily surpassed the total annual production of the area; and the whole local population was robbed not only of its meager food and grain reserves but also of all its goods, including "shoes, clothes, bedding, and samovars," according to a Cheka report. 38 Every man who was still fit to fight responded to this institutionalized pillaging by joining groups of rebel Greens, which by July 1920 numbered at least 35,000 in the Kuban and Don regions. Trapped in the Crimea since February, General Wrangel decided in a last desperate attempt to free himself from the Bolsheviks 1 grip on the region by joining forces with the Cossacks and the Greens of Kuban. On 17 August 1920, 5,000 men landed near Novorossiisk. Faced with the combined forces of the Whites, Cossacks, and Greens, the Bolsheviks were forced to abandon Ekaterinodar, the main city of the Kuban region, and then to retreat from the region altogether. Although Wrangel made progress in the south of Ukraine, the Whites' successes were short-lived. Overcome by the numerically superior Bolshevik forces, Wrangel's troops, hampered by the large number of civilians that accompanied them, retreated in total disarray toward the Crimea at the end of October. The retaking of the Crimea by the Bolsheviks, the last confrontation between the Red and White forces, was the occasion of one of the largest massacres in the civil war. At least 50,000 civilians were killed by the Bolsheviks in November and December 1920.-39
Finding themselves again on the losing side, the Cossack's were again
devastated by the Red Terror. One of the principal leaders of the Cheka, the Latvian Karl Lander, was named ''Plenipotentiary of the Northern Caucasus
and the Don" One of his first actions was to establish troiki, special commissions
in charge of de-Cossackization. In October 1920 alone these troiki condemned more than 6,000 people to death, all of whom were executed
immediately.40 The families, and sometimes even the neighbors, of Green partisans
or of Cossacks who had taken up arms against the regime and had
escaped capture, were systematically arrested as hostages and thrown into concentration camps, which Martin Latsis, the head of the Ukrainian Cheka,
acknowledged in a report as being genuine death camps: "Gathered together
in a camp near Maikop, the hostages, women, children, and old men survive in the most appalling conditions, in the cold and the mud of October . . . They
are dying like flies. The women will do anything to escape death. The soldiers guarding the camp take advantage of this and treat them as prostitutes."41
All resistance was mercilessly punished. When its chief fell into an ambush, the Pyatigorsk Cheka organized a "day of Red Terror" that went well beyond instructions from Lander, who had recommended that "this act of terrorism should be turned to our advantage to take important hostages with a view to executing them, and as a reason to speed up the executions of White spies and counterrevolutionaries in general." In Lander's words, "The Pyatigorsk Cheka decided straight out to execute 300 people in one day. They divided up the town into various boroughs and took a quota of people from each, and ordered the Party to draw up execution lists . . . This rather unsatisfactory method led to a great deal of private settling of old scores ... In Kislovodsk, for lack of a better idea, it was decided to kill people who were in the hospital."42
One of the most effective means of de-Cossackization was the destruction of Cossack towns and the deportation of all survivors. The files of Sergo Ordzhonikidze, who was president of the Revolutionary Committee of the Northern Caucasus at the time, contain documents detailing one such operation in late October and early November 1920. On 23 October Ordzhonikidze ordered:
1. The town of Kalinovskaya to be burned
2. The inhabitants of Ermolovskaya, Romanovskaya, Samachinskava, and Mikhailovskaya to be driven out of their homes, and the houses and land redistributed among the poor peasants, particularly among the Chechen's, who have always shown great respect for Soviet power
3. All males aged eighteen to fifty from the above-mentioned towns to be gathered into convoys and deported under armed escort to the north, where they will be forced into heavy labor
4. Women, children, and old people to be driven from their homes, although they are to be allowed to resettle farther north
5. All the cattle and goods of the above-mentioned towns to be seized 43
Three weeks later Ordzhonikidze received a report outlining how the operation had progressed:
Kalinovskaya: town razed and the whole population (4,220) deported or expelled
Ermolovskaya: emptied of all inhabitants (3,218)
Romanovskaya: 1,600 deported, 1,661 awaiting deportation
Samaehinskaya: 1,018 deported, 1,900 awaiting deportation
Mikhailovskaya: 600 deported, 2,200 awaiting deportation
In addition, 154 carriages of foodstuffs have been sent to Grozny. In the three towns where the process of deportation is not yet complete, the first people to be deported were the families of Whites and Greens and anyone who participated in the last uprising. Among those still awaiting deportation are the known supporters of the Soviet regime and the families of Red Army soldiers, Soviet officials, and Communists. The delay is to be explained by the lack of railway carriages. On average, only one convoy per day can be devoted to these operations. To finish the operation as soon as possible, we urgently request 306 extra railway carriages. 44
How did such "operations" come to an end? Unfortunately, there are no documents to provide an answer. It is clear that they continued for a considerable time, and that they almost always ended with deportations not to the great northern regions, as was to be the case for many years to come, but instead to the mines of Donetsk, which were closer. Given the state of the railways in 1920, the operation must have been fairly chaotic. Nonetheless, in their general shape and intention the de-Cossackization operations of 1920 prefigure the larger-scale dekulakization operations of ten years later. They share the same idea of collective responsibility, the same process of deportation in convoys, the same organizational problems, the same unpreparedness of the destinations for the arrival of prisoners, and the same principle of forcing deportees into heavy labor. The Cossack regions of the Don and the Kuban paid a heavy price for their opposition to the Bolsheviks. According to the most reliable estimates, between 300,000 and 500,000 people were killed or deported in 1919 and 1920, out of a population of no more than 3 million.
Among the atrocities whose scale is the most difficult to gauge are the massacres of prisoners and hostages who were taken simply on the basis of their "belonging to an enemy class" or being "socially undesirable." These massacres were part of the logic of the Red Terror in the second half of 1918, but on an even larger scale. The massacres on the basis of class were constantly justified with the claim that a new world was coming into being, and that everything was permitted to assist the difficult birth, as an editorial explained in the first issue of Krasnyt mech (The Red sword), the newspaper of the kyiv Cheka:
We reject the old systems of morality and "humanity" invented by the bourgeoisie to oppress and exploit the "lower classes." Our morality has no precedent, and our humanity is absolute because it rests on a new ideal. Our aim is to destroy all forms of oppression and violence. To us, everything is permitted, for we are the first to raise the sword not to oppress races and reduce them to slavery, but to liberate humanity from its shackles . . . Blood? Let blood flow like water! Let blood stain forever the black pirate's flag flown by the bourgeoisie, and let our flag be blood-red forever! For only through the death of the old world can we liberate ourselves forever from the return of those jackals!45
Such murderous calls found many ready to respond, and the ranks of the Cheka were filled with social elements anxious for revenge, recruited as they often were, as the Bolshevik leaders themselves acknowledged and even recommended, from the ranks of u the criminals and the socially degenerate." In a letter of 22 March to Lenin, the Bolshevik leader Serafina Gopner described the activities of the Ekaterinoslavl Cheka: "This organization is rotten to the core: the canker of criminality, violence, and totally arbitrary decisions abounds, and it is filled with common criminals and the dregs of society, men armed to the teeth who simply execute anyone they don't like. They steal, loot, rape, and throw anyone into prison, forge documents, practice extortion and blackmail, and will let anyone go in exchange for huge sums of money."46
The files of the Central Committee, like those of Feliks Dzerzhinsky, contain innumerable reports from Party leaders or inspectors from the secret police detailing the "degenerate acts" of local Chekas "driven mad by blood and violence." The absence of any juridical or moral norm often resulted in complete autonomy for local Chekas. No longer answerable for their actions to any higher authority, they became bloodthirsty and tyrannical regimes, uncontrolled and uncontrollable. Three extracts from dozens of almost identical Cheka reports illustrate the slide into almost total anarchy.
First, a report from Smirnov, a Cheka training instructor in Syzran, in Tambov Province, to Dzerzhinsky, on 22 March 1919:
I have checked up on the events surrounding the kulak uprising in the Novo-Matryonskaya volost. The interrogations were carried out in a totally chaotic manner. Seventy-five people were tortured, hut it is impossible to make head or tail of any of the written reports . . . Five people were shot on 16 February, and thirteen the following day. The report on the death sentences and the executions is dated 28 February. When I asked the local Cheka leader to explain himself, he answered, "We didn't have time to write the reports at the time. What does it matter anyway, when we are trying to wipe out the bourgeoisie and the kulaks as a class?" 47
Next, a report from the secretary of the regional organization of the Bolshevik Party in Yaroslavl on 26 September 1919: "The Cheka are looting and arresting everyone indiscriminately. Safe in the knowledge that they cannot be punished, they have transformed the Cheka headquarters into a huge brothel where they take all the bourgeois women. Drunkenness is rife. Cocaine is being used quite widely among the supervisors, " 48
Finally, a report from N. Rosental, inspector of the leadership of special departments, dated 16 October 1919:
Atarbekov, chief of the special departments of the Eleventh Army, is now refusing to recognize the authority of headquarters. On 30 July, when Comrade Andrei Zakovsky, who was sent from Moscow to examine the work of special departments, came to see Georgy Atarbekov, the latter answered openly, Tell Dzerzhinsky I am refusing his control." No administrative norm is being respected by these people, who for the most part are highly dubious, if not plainly criminal in their behavior. The Operations Department keeps almost no records whatever. For death sentences and the execution of such sentences, I found no individual judgments, just lists, for the most part incomplete, of people killed, with the mention "Shot at the behest of Comrade Atarbekov." As for the events of March, it is impossible to get any clear idea of who was shot or why . . . Orgies and drunkenness are daily occurrences. Almost all the personnel of the Cheka are heavy cocaine users. They say that this helps them deal with the sight of so much blood on a daily basis. Drunk with blood and violence, the Cheka is doing its duty, but it is made up of uncontrollable elements that will require close surveillance. 49
The internal reports of the Party and the Cheka confirm the numerous statements collected in 1919 and 1920 by the enemies of the Bolsheviks, and particularly by the Commission of Special Inquiry into Bolshevik Crimes, established by General Denikin, whose archives, after being transferred from Prague to Moscow in 1945, were long inaccessible but are now open to public scrutiny. In 1926 the Russian Socialist Revolutionary historian Sergei Melgunov, in his book The Red Terror in Russia, had tried to catalog the main massacres of prisoners, hostages, and civilians who were killed en mass by the Bolsheviks, usually on the basis of class. Though incomplete, the list of the principal episodes mentioned in that pioneering work is fully confirmed by a whole variety of documentary sources coming from the two different camps in question. Because of the organizational chaos that reigned in the Chekas, there are still gaps in this information regarding the exact number of people who died in the massacres, although we can be fairly certain of the number of massacres that took place. Using these various sources, one can attempt at least to list them in order of size.
The massacres of "suspects," "hostages," and other "enemies of the people" who were locked up as a preventive measure or for simple administrative reasons in prisons or concentration camps started in September 1918, in the first wave of Red Terror. Once the categories of "suspects," "hostages," and "enemies of the people" had been established, and the concentration camps were in place, the machinery of repression could simply swing into action. The trigger for this war, in which territory so often changed hands and each month brought some sort of turnaround in military fortunes, was usually nothing more than the taking of a village that until then had been occupied by the enemy.
The imposition of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" in cities that had been captured or retaken always went through the same stages: the dissolution of previously elected assemblies, a ban on all trade—which invariably meant immediate price rises for food, and subsequent shortages—the nationalization of all businesses, and the levying of a huge tax on the bourgeoisie—600 million rubles in Kharkiv in February 1919, 500 million in Odessa in April 1919. To ensure that this contribution was paid, hundreds of bourgeois would be taken as hostages and locked up in the concentration camps. In fact this contribution meant a sort of institutionalized pillaging, expropriation, and intimidation, the first step in the destruction of the "bourgeoisie as a social class."
"In accordance with the resolutions of the Workers Soviet, 13 May has been declared the day of expropriation of the property of the bourgeoisie," announced the lzvestiya of the Council of Workers' Delegates of Odessa on 13 May 1919. "The property-owning classes will be required to fill in a questionnaire detailing foodstuffs, shoes, clothes, jewels, bicycles, bedding, sheets, silverware, crockery, and other articles indispensable to the working population .
It is the duty of all to assist the expropriation commissions in this sacred task. Anyone failing to assist the expropriation commissions will be arrested immediately. Anyone resisting will be executed without further delay."
As Latsis, chief of the Cheka in Ukraine, acknowledged in a circular to local Chekas, the fruits of these expropriations went straight into the pockets of the Cheka or remained in the hands of the chiefs of the innumerable expropriation and requisitioning detachments or Red Guards.
The second stage of the expropriations was the confiscation of bourgeois apartments. In this "class war," humiliation of the enemy was extremely important. "We must treat them the way they deserve: the bourgeoisie respect only authority that punishes and kills," said the report of 26 April 1919 in the Odessa newspaper mentioned above. "If we execute a few dozen of these bloodsucking idiots, if we reduce them to the status of street sweepers and force their women to clean the Red Army barracks (and that would be an honor for them), they will understand that our power is here to stay, and that no one, neither the English nor the Hottentots, is going to come and help them'' 50
A recurring theme in numerous articles in Bolshevik newspapers in Odessa, Kyiv, Kharkiv, Kkaterinoslav, as well as in Perm, Ural, and Nizhni Novgorod, was the "humiliation" of bourgeois women, who were forced to clean toilets or the barracks of the Cheka or Red Guards. But this was merely the toned-down and politically presentable face of the much more brutal reality of rape, which according to innumerable statements took on gigantic proportions, particularly in the second reconquest of Ukraine and the Cossack regions of the Crimea in 1920.
The logical culmination of the "extermination of the bourgeoisie as a class," the execution of prisoners, suspects, and hostages imprisoned simply on the basis of their belonging to the "possessing classes," is recorded in many of the cities taken by the Bolsheviks. In Kharkiv there were between 2,000 and 3,000 executions in February-June 1919, and another 1,000-2,000 when the town was taken again in December of that year; in Rostov-on-Don, approximately 1,000 in January 1920; in Odessa, 2,200 in May-August 1919, then 1,500,3,000 between February 1920 and February 1921; in Kyiv, at least 3,000 in February-August 1919; in Ekaterinodar, at least 3,000 between August 1920 and February 1921; in Armavir, a small town in Kuban, between 2,000 and 3,000 in August-October 1920. The list could go on and on.
In fact many other executions took place elsewhere, but were not subject to close examination very soon afterward. Hence those that occurred in Ukraine or southern Russia are much better known than those of the Caucasus, Central Asia, and the Urals. The pace of executions was often stepped up as the enemy approached, or when the Bolsheviks were abandoning their position and "emptying" the prisons. In Kharkiv, in the days leading up to the arrival of the Whites, on 8 and 9 June 1919, hundreds of hostages were executed. In Kyiv more than 1,800 people were executed on 22-28 August, before the town was retaken by the Whites on 30 August. The same scenario played out at Ekaterinodar, where, in the face of the advancing Cossack troops, Atarbekov, head of the local Cheka, disposed of 1,600 bourgeois on 17-19 August, in a small provincial town whose population before the war numbered a mere 30,000 inhabitants. 51
Documents from the inquiry commissions of the White Army, which sometimes arrived a few days or even a few hours after the executions, contain a mass of statements, testimonies, autopsy reports, and photographs of the massacres and information about the identity of the victims. Although those who were executed at the last minute, generally with a bullet in the back of the head, showed few traces of torture, this was not always the case for the bodies that were dug out of the mass graves. The use of the most dreadful types of torture is evident from autopsy reports, circumstantial evidence, and eyewitness reports. Detailed descriptions of the torture are to be found both in Sergei Melgunov's Red Terror in Russia and in the report by the Central Committee of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, Cheka, published in Berlin in 1922. 52
It was in the Crimea, when the last units of Wrangels White forces and the civilians who had fled before the Bolshevik advance were moving out, that these massacres were most intensive. From mid-November to the end of December 1920, more than 50,000 people were shot or hanged.'' A large number of the executions happened immediately after the departure of Wrangels troops. In Sevastopol several hundred dock workers were shot on 26 November for having assisted in the White evacuation. On 28 and 30 November the Izvestiya of the Revolutionary Committee of Sevastopol published two lists of victims; the first contained 1,634 names, the second 1,202. In early December, when the first wave of executions had somewhat abated, the authorities began to draw up as complete a list as possible of the population of the main towns of the Crimea, where, they believed, tens or hundreds of thousands of bourgeois were hiding. On 6 December Lenin told an assembly in Moscow that 300,000 bourgeois were hiding out in the Crimea. He gave an assurance that in the very near future these "elements," which constituted "a reservoir of spies and secret agents ready to leap to the defense of capitalism," would all be "punished." 54
The military cordon that was closing off the Perekop isthmus, the only escape route by land, was reinforced; and once the trap was laid, the authorities ordered all inhabitants to present themselves to the local Cheka to fill in a questionnaire containing some fifty questions about their social origins, past actions, income, and other matters, especially their whereabouts in November 1920 and their opinions about Poland, Wrangel, and the Bolsheviks. On the basis of these inquiries, the population was divided into three groups: those to be shot, those to be sent to concentration camps, and those to be saved. Statements from the few survivors, published in emigre newspapers the following year, describe Sevastopol, one of the towns that suffered most heavily under the repressions, as "the city of the hanged." "From Nakhimovsky, all one could see was the hanging bodies of officers, soldiers, and civilians arrested in the streets. The town was dead, and the only people left alive were hiding in lofts or basements. All the walls, shop fronts, and telegraph poles were covered with posters calling for 'Death to the traitors.' They were hanging people for fun." 55
The last episode in the conflict between Whites and Reds was not to be the end of the terror. The military front of the civil war no longer existed, but the war to eradicate the enemy was to continue for another two years.
The third great center of conflict between peasants and Bolsheviks in 1920 was Ukraine itself, most of which had been reconquered from the White armies between December 1919 and February 1920; but the countryside had remained under the control of hundreds of detachments of free Greens of various allegiances, many of them affiliated with Makhno's command. Unlike the Black Eagles, the Ukrainian detachments were well armed, since they were made up largely of deserters. In the summer of 1920 Makhno's army numbered 15,000 men, 2,500 cavalry, approximately 100 heavy machine guns, twenty artillery pieces, and two armored vehicles. Hundreds of smaller groups, numbering from a dozen to several hundred, also put up stout resistance against the Bolshevik incursions. To fight these peasant guerrillas, the government in May 1920 called on the services of Feliks Dzerzhinsky, naming him "Commander in Chief of the Rear Front of the Southwest." Dzerzhinsky remained in Kharkiv for more than two months, setting up twenty-four special units of the Troops for the Internal Defense of the Republic, elite units with special cavalry detachments trained to pursue retreating rebels, as well as airplanes to bomb bandit strongholds. 32 Their task was to eradicate all peasant guerrillas within three months. In fact the operation took more than two years, lasting from the summer of 1920 until the autumn of 1922, and cost tens of thousands of lives.
Among the episodes in the struggle between peasants and the Bolshevik authorities, "de-Cossackization"—the systematic elimination of the Cossacks of the Don and the Kuban as social groups—occupies a special place. For the first time, on the principle of collective responsibility, a new regime took a series of measures specially designed to eliminate, exterminate, and deport the population of a whole territory, which Soviet leaders had taken to calling the "Soviet Vendee."33 These operations were plainly not the result of military excesses in the heat of battle, but were carefully planned in advance in response to decrees from the highest levels of state authority, directly implicating numerous top-ranking politicians, including Lenin, Sergo Ordzhonikidze, Sergei Syrtsov, Grigory Sokolnikov, and Isaac Reingold. Momentarily halted in the spring of 1919 because of military setbacks, the process of dc-Cossackization resumed with even greater cruelty in 1920, after Bolshevik victories in the Don and the Kuban.
The Cossack's, who since December 1917 had been deprived of the status they had enjoyed under the old regime, were classified by the Bolsheviks as "kulaks" and "class enemies"; and as a result they joined forces with the White armies that had united in southern Russia in the spring of 1918 under the banner of Ataman Krasnov. In February 1919, after the general advance of the Bolsheviks into Ukraine and southern Russia, the first detachment of the Red Army penetrated the Cossack territories along the Don. At the outset the Bolsheviks took measures to destroy everything that made the Cossack's a separate group: their land was confiscated and redistributed among Russian colonizers or local peasants who did not have Cossack status; they were ordered, on pain of death, to surrender all their arms (historically, as the traditional frontier soldiers of the Russian empire, all Cossack's had a right to bear arms); and all Cossack administrative assemblies were immediately dissolved.
All these measures were part of the pre-established de-Cossackization plan approved in a secret resolution of the Bolshevik Party's Central Committee on 24 January 1919: "In view of the experiences of the civil war against the Cossack's, we must recognize as the only politically correct measure massive terror and a merciless fight against the rich Cossack's, who must be exterminated and physically disposed of, down to the last man."34
In practice, as acknowledged by Reingold, the president of the Revolutionary Committee of the Don, who was entrusted with imposing Bolshevik rule in the Cossack territories, "what was carried out instead against the Cossacks was an indiscriminate policy of massive extermination."35 From mid February to mid-March 1919, Bolshevik detachments executed more than 8,000 Cossack's. 36 In each stamina (Cossack village) revolutionary courts passed summary judgments in a matter of minutes, and whole lists of suspects were condemned to death, generally for "counterrevolutionary behavior." In the face of this relentless destruction, the Cossack's had no choice but to revolt.
The revolt began in the district of Veshenskaya on 11 March 1919. The well-organized rebels decreed the general mobilization of all males aged sixteen to fifty-five and sent out telegrams urging the whole population to rise up against the Bolsheviks throughout the Don region and as far as the remote province of Voronezh.
"We, the Cossack's," they explained, "are not anti-Soviet. We are in favor of free elections. We are against the Communists, collective farming, and the Jews. We are against requisitioning, theft, and the endless round of executions practiced by the Chekas." 17 At the beginning of April the Cossack rebels represented a well-armed force of nearly 30,000 men, all hardened by battle. Operating behind the lines of the Red Army, which, farther south, was fighting Denikin's troops together with the Kuban Cossacks, these rebels of the Don, like their Ukrainian counterparts, contributed in no small measure to the huge advance of the White Army in May and June 1919. At the beginning of June the Cossacks of the Don and the Kuban joined up with the greater part of the White armies. The whole of the "Cossack Vendee" was freed from the dreaded power of the "Muscovites, Jews, and Bolsheviks."
But the Bolsheviks were back in February 1920. The second military occupation of the Cossack lands was even more murderous than the first. The whole Don region was forced to make a grain contribution of 36 million pudy, a quantity that easily surpassed the total annual production of the area; and the whole local population was robbed not only of its meager food and grain reserves but also of all its goods, including "shoes, clothes, bedding, and samovars," according to a Cheka report. 38 Every man who was still fit to fight responded to this institutionalized pillaging by joining groups of rebel Greens, which by July 1920 numbered at least 35,000 in the Kuban and Don regions. Trapped in the Crimea since February, General Wrangel decided in a last desperate attempt to free himself from the Bolsheviks 1 grip on the region by joining forces with the Cossacks and the Greens of Kuban. On 17 August 1920, 5,000 men landed near Novorossiisk. Faced with the combined forces of the Whites, Cossacks, and Greens, the Bolsheviks were forced to abandon Ekaterinodar, the main city of the Kuban region, and then to retreat from the region altogether. Although Wrangel made progress in the south of Ukraine, the Whites' successes were short-lived. Overcome by the numerically superior Bolshevik forces, Wrangel's troops, hampered by the large number of civilians that accompanied them, retreated in total disarray toward the Crimea at the end of October. The retaking of the Crimea by the Bolsheviks, the last confrontation between the Red and White forces, was the occasion of one of the largest massacres in the civil war. At least 50,000 civilians were killed by the Bolsheviks in November and December 1920.-39
All resistance was mercilessly punished. When its chief fell into an ambush, the Pyatigorsk Cheka organized a "day of Red Terror" that went well beyond instructions from Lander, who had recommended that "this act of terrorism should be turned to our advantage to take important hostages with a view to executing them, and as a reason to speed up the executions of White spies and counterrevolutionaries in general." In Lander's words, "The Pyatigorsk Cheka decided straight out to execute 300 people in one day. They divided up the town into various boroughs and took a quota of people from each, and ordered the Party to draw up execution lists . . . This rather unsatisfactory method led to a great deal of private settling of old scores ... In Kislovodsk, for lack of a better idea, it was decided to kill people who were in the hospital."42
One of the most effective means of de-Cossackization was the destruction of Cossack towns and the deportation of all survivors. The files of Sergo Ordzhonikidze, who was president of the Revolutionary Committee of the Northern Caucasus at the time, contain documents detailing one such operation in late October and early November 1920. On 23 October Ordzhonikidze ordered:
1. The town of Kalinovskaya to be burned
2. The inhabitants of Ermolovskaya, Romanovskaya, Samachinskava, and Mikhailovskaya to be driven out of their homes, and the houses and land redistributed among the poor peasants, particularly among the Chechen's, who have always shown great respect for Soviet power
3. All males aged eighteen to fifty from the above-mentioned towns to be gathered into convoys and deported under armed escort to the north, where they will be forced into heavy labor
4. Women, children, and old people to be driven from their homes, although they are to be allowed to resettle farther north
5. All the cattle and goods of the above-mentioned towns to be seized 43
Three weeks later Ordzhonikidze received a report outlining how the operation had progressed:
Kalinovskaya: town razed and the whole population (4,220) deported or expelled
Ermolovskaya: emptied of all inhabitants (3,218)
Romanovskaya: 1,600 deported, 1,661 awaiting deportation
Samaehinskaya: 1,018 deported, 1,900 awaiting deportation
Mikhailovskaya: 600 deported, 2,200 awaiting deportation
In addition, 154 carriages of foodstuffs have been sent to Grozny. In the three towns where the process of deportation is not yet complete, the first people to be deported were the families of Whites and Greens and anyone who participated in the last uprising. Among those still awaiting deportation are the known supporters of the Soviet regime and the families of Red Army soldiers, Soviet officials, and Communists. The delay is to be explained by the lack of railway carriages. On average, only one convoy per day can be devoted to these operations. To finish the operation as soon as possible, we urgently request 306 extra railway carriages. 44
How did such "operations" come to an end? Unfortunately, there are no documents to provide an answer. It is clear that they continued for a considerable time, and that they almost always ended with deportations not to the great northern regions, as was to be the case for many years to come, but instead to the mines of Donetsk, which were closer. Given the state of the railways in 1920, the operation must have been fairly chaotic. Nonetheless, in their general shape and intention the de-Cossackization operations of 1920 prefigure the larger-scale dekulakization operations of ten years later. They share the same idea of collective responsibility, the same process of deportation in convoys, the same organizational problems, the same unpreparedness of the destinations for the arrival of prisoners, and the same principle of forcing deportees into heavy labor. The Cossack regions of the Don and the Kuban paid a heavy price for their opposition to the Bolsheviks. According to the most reliable estimates, between 300,000 and 500,000 people were killed or deported in 1919 and 1920, out of a population of no more than 3 million.
Among the atrocities whose scale is the most difficult to gauge are the massacres of prisoners and hostages who were taken simply on the basis of their "belonging to an enemy class" or being "socially undesirable." These massacres were part of the logic of the Red Terror in the second half of 1918, but on an even larger scale. The massacres on the basis of class were constantly justified with the claim that a new world was coming into being, and that everything was permitted to assist the difficult birth, as an editorial explained in the first issue of Krasnyt mech (The Red sword), the newspaper of the kyiv Cheka:
We reject the old systems of morality and "humanity" invented by the bourgeoisie to oppress and exploit the "lower classes." Our morality has no precedent, and our humanity is absolute because it rests on a new ideal. Our aim is to destroy all forms of oppression and violence. To us, everything is permitted, for we are the first to raise the sword not to oppress races and reduce them to slavery, but to liberate humanity from its shackles . . . Blood? Let blood flow like water! Let blood stain forever the black pirate's flag flown by the bourgeoisie, and let our flag be blood-red forever! For only through the death of the old world can we liberate ourselves forever from the return of those jackals!45
Such murderous calls found many ready to respond, and the ranks of the Cheka were filled with social elements anxious for revenge, recruited as they often were, as the Bolshevik leaders themselves acknowledged and even recommended, from the ranks of u the criminals and the socially degenerate." In a letter of 22 March to Lenin, the Bolshevik leader Serafina Gopner described the activities of the Ekaterinoslavl Cheka: "This organization is rotten to the core: the canker of criminality, violence, and totally arbitrary decisions abounds, and it is filled with common criminals and the dregs of society, men armed to the teeth who simply execute anyone they don't like. They steal, loot, rape, and throw anyone into prison, forge documents, practice extortion and blackmail, and will let anyone go in exchange for huge sums of money."46
The files of the Central Committee, like those of Feliks Dzerzhinsky, contain innumerable reports from Party leaders or inspectors from the secret police detailing the "degenerate acts" of local Chekas "driven mad by blood and violence." The absence of any juridical or moral norm often resulted in complete autonomy for local Chekas. No longer answerable for their actions to any higher authority, they became bloodthirsty and tyrannical regimes, uncontrolled and uncontrollable. Three extracts from dozens of almost identical Cheka reports illustrate the slide into almost total anarchy.
First, a report from Smirnov, a Cheka training instructor in Syzran, in Tambov Province, to Dzerzhinsky, on 22 March 1919:
I have checked up on the events surrounding the kulak uprising in the Novo-Matryonskaya volost. The interrogations were carried out in a totally chaotic manner. Seventy-five people were tortured, hut it is impossible to make head or tail of any of the written reports . . . Five people were shot on 16 February, and thirteen the following day. The report on the death sentences and the executions is dated 28 February. When I asked the local Cheka leader to explain himself, he answered, "We didn't have time to write the reports at the time. What does it matter anyway, when we are trying to wipe out the bourgeoisie and the kulaks as a class?" 47
Next, a report from the secretary of the regional organization of the Bolshevik Party in Yaroslavl on 26 September 1919: "The Cheka are looting and arresting everyone indiscriminately. Safe in the knowledge that they cannot be punished, they have transformed the Cheka headquarters into a huge brothel where they take all the bourgeois women. Drunkenness is rife. Cocaine is being used quite widely among the supervisors, " 48
Finally, a report from N. Rosental, inspector of the leadership of special departments, dated 16 October 1919:
Atarbekov, chief of the special departments of the Eleventh Army, is now refusing to recognize the authority of headquarters. On 30 July, when Comrade Andrei Zakovsky, who was sent from Moscow to examine the work of special departments, came to see Georgy Atarbekov, the latter answered openly, Tell Dzerzhinsky I am refusing his control." No administrative norm is being respected by these people, who for the most part are highly dubious, if not plainly criminal in their behavior. The Operations Department keeps almost no records whatever. For death sentences and the execution of such sentences, I found no individual judgments, just lists, for the most part incomplete, of people killed, with the mention "Shot at the behest of Comrade Atarbekov." As for the events of March, it is impossible to get any clear idea of who was shot or why . . . Orgies and drunkenness are daily occurrences. Almost all the personnel of the Cheka are heavy cocaine users. They say that this helps them deal with the sight of so much blood on a daily basis. Drunk with blood and violence, the Cheka is doing its duty, but it is made up of uncontrollable elements that will require close surveillance. 49
The internal reports of the Party and the Cheka confirm the numerous statements collected in 1919 and 1920 by the enemies of the Bolsheviks, and particularly by the Commission of Special Inquiry into Bolshevik Crimes, established by General Denikin, whose archives, after being transferred from Prague to Moscow in 1945, were long inaccessible but are now open to public scrutiny. In 1926 the Russian Socialist Revolutionary historian Sergei Melgunov, in his book The Red Terror in Russia, had tried to catalog the main massacres of prisoners, hostages, and civilians who were killed en mass by the Bolsheviks, usually on the basis of class. Though incomplete, the list of the principal episodes mentioned in that pioneering work is fully confirmed by a whole variety of documentary sources coming from the two different camps in question. Because of the organizational chaos that reigned in the Chekas, there are still gaps in this information regarding the exact number of people who died in the massacres, although we can be fairly certain of the number of massacres that took place. Using these various sources, one can attempt at least to list them in order of size.
The massacres of "suspects," "hostages," and other "enemies of the people" who were locked up as a preventive measure or for simple administrative reasons in prisons or concentration camps started in September 1918, in the first wave of Red Terror. Once the categories of "suspects," "hostages," and "enemies of the people" had been established, and the concentration camps were in place, the machinery of repression could simply swing into action. The trigger for this war, in which territory so often changed hands and each month brought some sort of turnaround in military fortunes, was usually nothing more than the taking of a village that until then had been occupied by the enemy.
The imposition of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" in cities that had been captured or retaken always went through the same stages: the dissolution of previously elected assemblies, a ban on all trade—which invariably meant immediate price rises for food, and subsequent shortages—the nationalization of all businesses, and the levying of a huge tax on the bourgeoisie—600 million rubles in Kharkiv in February 1919, 500 million in Odessa in April 1919. To ensure that this contribution was paid, hundreds of bourgeois would be taken as hostages and locked up in the concentration camps. In fact this contribution meant a sort of institutionalized pillaging, expropriation, and intimidation, the first step in the destruction of the "bourgeoisie as a social class."
"In accordance with the resolutions of the Workers Soviet, 13 May has been declared the day of expropriation of the property of the bourgeoisie," announced the lzvestiya of the Council of Workers' Delegates of Odessa on 13 May 1919. "The property-owning classes will be required to fill in a questionnaire detailing foodstuffs, shoes, clothes, jewels, bicycles, bedding, sheets, silverware, crockery, and other articles indispensable to the working population .
It is the duty of all to assist the expropriation commissions in this sacred task. Anyone failing to assist the expropriation commissions will be arrested immediately. Anyone resisting will be executed without further delay."
As Latsis, chief of the Cheka in Ukraine, acknowledged in a circular to local Chekas, the fruits of these expropriations went straight into the pockets of the Cheka or remained in the hands of the chiefs of the innumerable expropriation and requisitioning detachments or Red Guards.
The second stage of the expropriations was the confiscation of bourgeois apartments. In this "class war," humiliation of the enemy was extremely important. "We must treat them the way they deserve: the bourgeoisie respect only authority that punishes and kills," said the report of 26 April 1919 in the Odessa newspaper mentioned above. "If we execute a few dozen of these bloodsucking idiots, if we reduce them to the status of street sweepers and force their women to clean the Red Army barracks (and that would be an honor for them), they will understand that our power is here to stay, and that no one, neither the English nor the Hottentots, is going to come and help them'' 50
A recurring theme in numerous articles in Bolshevik newspapers in Odessa, Kyiv, Kharkiv, Kkaterinoslav, as well as in Perm, Ural, and Nizhni Novgorod, was the "humiliation" of bourgeois women, who were forced to clean toilets or the barracks of the Cheka or Red Guards. But this was merely the toned-down and politically presentable face of the much more brutal reality of rape, which according to innumerable statements took on gigantic proportions, particularly in the second reconquest of Ukraine and the Cossack regions of the Crimea in 1920.
The logical culmination of the "extermination of the bourgeoisie as a class," the execution of prisoners, suspects, and hostages imprisoned simply on the basis of their belonging to the "possessing classes," is recorded in many of the cities taken by the Bolsheviks. In Kharkiv there were between 2,000 and 3,000 executions in February-June 1919, and another 1,000-2,000 when the town was taken again in December of that year; in Rostov-on-Don, approximately 1,000 in January 1920; in Odessa, 2,200 in May-August 1919, then 1,500,3,000 between February 1920 and February 1921; in Kyiv, at least 3,000 in February-August 1919; in Ekaterinodar, at least 3,000 between August 1920 and February 1921; in Armavir, a small town in Kuban, between 2,000 and 3,000 in August-October 1920. The list could go on and on.
In fact many other executions took place elsewhere, but were not subject to close examination very soon afterward. Hence those that occurred in Ukraine or southern Russia are much better known than those of the Caucasus, Central Asia, and the Urals. The pace of executions was often stepped up as the enemy approached, or when the Bolsheviks were abandoning their position and "emptying" the prisons. In Kharkiv, in the days leading up to the arrival of the Whites, on 8 and 9 June 1919, hundreds of hostages were executed. In Kyiv more than 1,800 people were executed on 22-28 August, before the town was retaken by the Whites on 30 August. The same scenario played out at Ekaterinodar, where, in the face of the advancing Cossack troops, Atarbekov, head of the local Cheka, disposed of 1,600 bourgeois on 17-19 August, in a small provincial town whose population before the war numbered a mere 30,000 inhabitants. 51
Documents from the inquiry commissions of the White Army, which sometimes arrived a few days or even a few hours after the executions, contain a mass of statements, testimonies, autopsy reports, and photographs of the massacres and information about the identity of the victims. Although those who were executed at the last minute, generally with a bullet in the back of the head, showed few traces of torture, this was not always the case for the bodies that were dug out of the mass graves. The use of the most dreadful types of torture is evident from autopsy reports, circumstantial evidence, and eyewitness reports. Detailed descriptions of the torture are to be found both in Sergei Melgunov's Red Terror in Russia and in the report by the Central Committee of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, Cheka, published in Berlin in 1922. 52
It was in the Crimea, when the last units of Wrangels White forces and the civilians who had fled before the Bolshevik advance were moving out, that these massacres were most intensive. From mid-November to the end of December 1920, more than 50,000 people were shot or hanged.'' A large number of the executions happened immediately after the departure of Wrangels troops. In Sevastopol several hundred dock workers were shot on 26 November for having assisted in the White evacuation. On 28 and 30 November the Izvestiya of the Revolutionary Committee of Sevastopol published two lists of victims; the first contained 1,634 names, the second 1,202. In early December, when the first wave of executions had somewhat abated, the authorities began to draw up as complete a list as possible of the population of the main towns of the Crimea, where, they believed, tens or hundreds of thousands of bourgeois were hiding. On 6 December Lenin told an assembly in Moscow that 300,000 bourgeois were hiding out in the Crimea. He gave an assurance that in the very near future these "elements," which constituted "a reservoir of spies and secret agents ready to leap to the defense of capitalism," would all be "punished." 54
The military cordon that was closing off the Perekop isthmus, the only escape route by land, was reinforced; and once the trap was laid, the authorities ordered all inhabitants to present themselves to the local Cheka to fill in a questionnaire containing some fifty questions about their social origins, past actions, income, and other matters, especially their whereabouts in November 1920 and their opinions about Poland, Wrangel, and the Bolsheviks. On the basis of these inquiries, the population was divided into three groups: those to be shot, those to be sent to concentration camps, and those to be saved. Statements from the few survivors, published in emigre newspapers the following year, describe Sevastopol, one of the towns that suffered most heavily under the repressions, as "the city of the hanged." "From Nakhimovsky, all one could see was the hanging bodies of officers, soldiers, and civilians arrested in the streets. The town was dead, and the only people left alive were hiding in lofts or basements. All the walls, shop fronts, and telegraph poles were covered with posters calling for 'Death to the traitors.' They were hanging people for fun." 55
The last episode in the conflict between Whites and Reds was not to be the end of the terror. The military front of the civil war no longer existed, but the war to eradicate the enemy was to continue for another two years.
5
From Tambov to the Great Famine
At the end of 1920 the Bolshevik regime seemed poised to triumph. The remnants of the White armies had been defeated, the Cossack's had
been beaten, and Makhno's detachments were in retreat. But although the war
against the Whites was effectively over, the conflict between the new regime
and large sections of the population was intensifying. The war against the peasants reached its height in the early months of 1921, when whole provinces were effectively beyond the control of the Bolsheviks. In the province of Tambov, one of the Volga provinces (which also included Samara, Saratov,
Tsaritsyn, and Simbirsk) in western Siberia, the Bolsheviks held only the city of Tambov itself. The countryside was either in the hands of one of hundreds
of groups of Greens or under the control of one of the peasant armies. Mutinies
broke out daily in the local Red Army garrisons. Strikes, riots, and workers'
protest movements multiplied in the few areas of the country where
industry still functioned—Moscow, Petrograd, Ivanovo Voznesensk, and Tula. At the end of February 1921, sailors from the Kronstadt naval base near Petrograd mutinied. The situation was becoming explosive, and the country was becoming ungovernable. In the face of a huge wave of social unrest that threatened to sweep away the regime, the Bolshevik leaders were forced to retreat and take the only step that could momentarily calm the massive, dangerous,
and widespread discontent: they promised an end to requisitioning,
From Tambov to the Great Famine
which was to be replaced by taxes in kind. In March 1921, against this backdrop
of conflict between society and the regime, the New Economic Policy
(N.E.P) came into being.
The dominant version of events has exaggerated for too long the extent
to which March 1921 marked a break with the past. Hastily adopted on the last day of the Bolsheviks Tenth Party Congress, the substitution of taxes in kind
for requisitioning brought neither the end of the workers' strikes nor an abatement in terror. The archives that can now be consulted show that peace did not immediately result from this new regulation in the spring of 1921. In fact tensions remained extremely high until at least the summer of 1922 and in some
regions until considerably later. Requisitioning detachments continued to scour
the countryside, strikes were still put down brutally, and the last militant
socialists were arrested. The "eradication of the bandits from the forests" was
still pursued by any means possible, including large-scale executions of hostages
and the bombing of villages with poison gas. In the final analysis, the
rebellious countryside was beaten by the great famine of 1921-22: the areas that had suffered most heavily from requisitioning were the areas of rebellion and also the areas that suffered worst during the famine. As an "objective" ally of the regime, hunger was the most powerful weapon imaginable, and it also served as a pretext for the Bolsheviks to strike a heavy blow against both
the Orthodox Church and the intelligentsia who had risen up against the regime.
Of all the revolts that had broken out since the introduction of requisitioning
in the summer of 1918, the revolt of the peasants in Tambov was the
largest, the most organized, and therefore the longest-lasting. Located less than 300 miles southeast of Moscow, Tambov Province had been one of the bastions of the Socialist Revolutionary Party since the turn of the century. From 1918
to 1920, despite heavy sanctions, the Party still had numerous militant activists. Tambov Province was also the largest wheat-producing area near Moscow, and
since the autumn of 1918 more than 100 requisitioning detachments had been
scouring this densely populated agricultural region. In 1919 a number of bunty
(short-lived riots) had been put down as soon as they had flared up. In 1920
the requisitioning requirements were increased, from 18 million to 27 million pudy while the peasants had considerably reduced the amount they sowed,
knowing that anything they did not consume themselves would be immediately
requisitioned. 1 To fill the quotas was thus to force the peasants into death by
starvation On 19 August 1920 routine incidents involving the food detachments abruptly degenerated in the town of Khitrovo. As the local authorities themselves acknowledged, "the detachments committed a series of abuses. They looted everything in their path, even pillows and kitchen utensils, shared out the booty, and beat up old men of seventy in full view of the public. The old men were being punished for the absence of their sons, who were deserters hiding in the woods. The peasants were also angry that the confiscated grain,
which had been taken to the nearest station by the cartload, was being left to rot in the open air." 2
From Khitrovo the revolt spread rapidly. By the end of August 1920 more
than 14,000 men, mostly deserters, armed with rifles, pitchforks, and scythes,
had chased out or massacred all representatives of the Soviet regime from the three districts of Tambov Province. In the space of a few weeks, this peasant
revolt, which at first could not be distinguished from the hundreds of others that had broken out all over Russia and Ukraine over the previous two years, was transformed into a well-organized uprising under the inspirational leader- ship of a first-class warlord, Aleksandr Stepanovich Antonov.
A Socialist Revolutionary activist since 1906, Antonov had spent the years after 1908 as a political exile in Siberia, returning only in October 1917. Like
many left Socialist Revolutionaries, he had rallied to the Bolshevik cause for a time, and had been the head of the local militia in Kirsanov, his native region. In August 1918 he had broken with the Bolsheviks and assumed leadership of one of the many bands of deserters that roamed the countryside, righting in guerrilla style against the requisitioning detachments and attacking the few- Soviet officials who dared go out into the remote villages. When the peasant
revolt took hold in Kirsanov in August 1920, Antonov organized both a highly
effective peasant militia and a remarkable information network that infiltrated even the Tambov Cheka. He also organized a propaganda service that distributed tracts and proclamations denouncing the "Bolshevik commissarocracy"
and mobilized the peasants around key popular demands such as free trade, the end of requisitioning, free elections, the elimination of Bolshevik commissariats,
and the disbanding of the Cheka.3
In parallel, the underground Socialist Revolutionary Party organization
established the Union of Working Peasants, a clandestine network of militant peasants from the surrounding area. Despite serious tensions between Antonov
and the leaders of the Union of Working Peasants, the peasant movement in the Tambov region basically had a military organization, an information network, and a political program that lent it strength and unity, things that no
other peasant movement (with the possible exception of the Makhnovist movement) had possessed.
In October 1920 the Bolsheviks controlled no more than the city of Tambov and a few provincial urban centers. Deserters flocked by the thousands
to join Antonov's peasant army, which at its peak numbered more than 50,000.
On 19 October, realizing at last the gravity of the situation, Lenin wrote to Dzerzhinsky: "It is vital that this movement be crushed as swiftly as possible in the most exemplary fashion: we must be more energetic than this!'' 4
At the beginning of November the Bolsheviks in the area numbered no more than 5,000 Troops for the Internal Defense of the Republic. After the
defeat of Wrangel in the Crimea, the number of troops deployed to Tambov
Province quickly reached 100,000, including some detachments from the Red
Army, who were nonetheless kept to a minimum when it came to suppressing
popular revolts.
After 1 January the peasant revolts spread to several other regions, including
the whole of the lower Volga (the provinces of Samara, Saratov, Tsaritsyn,
and Astrakhan), as well as western Siberia. The situation became explosive as famine threatened these rich, fertile regions that had been overtaxed for several
years. In Samara Province the commander of the Volga Military District re- ported on 12 February 1921 that "crowds of thousands of starving peasants
are besieging the barns where the food detachments have stored the grain that has been requisitioned for urban areas and the army. The situation has deteriorated
several times, and the army has been forced to open fire repeatedly on
the enraged crowd." From Saratov the local Bolshevik leaders sent the following telegram to Moscow: "Banditry has overwhelmed the whole province. The
peasants have seized all the stocks—3 million pudy—from the state grain stores. They are heavily armed, thanks to all the rifles from the deserters. Whole units of the Red Army have simply vanished.
"
At the same time, about 600 miles eastward, a new trouble spot was
emerging. Having extracted all the resources that it could from the prosperous
agricultural regions of southern Russia and Ukraine, the Bolshevik government
in the autumn of 1919 had turned to western Siberia, where the quotas were
fixed arbitrarily on the basis of wheat export figures dating from 1913. Evidently
no attempt was made to consider the difference between the old harvest,
which had been destined for export and had been paid for with gold-standard
rubles, and the pitifully meager reserves that the peasants had set aside for requisitioning. As in other regions, the Siberian peasants responded with an
uprising to protect the results of their labors and to assure their own survival. From January to March 1921 the Bolsheviks lost control of the provinces of Tyumen, Omsk, Chelyabinsk, and Ekaterinburg—a territory larger than
France. The Trans-Siberian Railway, the only link between western Russia and
Siberia, was also cut off. On 21 February a Russian peasant army seized the
city of Tobolsk, which Red Army units did not manage to retake until 30
March. 5
At the other end of the country, in both Petrograd, the old capital, and
Moscow, the new one, the situation at the beginning of 1921 was almost as explosive. The economy had nearly stopped, and the transport system had
ground to a halt. Most of the factories were closed or working at half-speed
because of lack of fuel, and food supplies to the cities were in danger of ceasing altogether. All the workers were in the streets, in the surrounding villages
scavenging for food, or standing around and talking in the freezing, half-empty
factories, many of which had been stripped for items to exchange for food.
"Discontent is widespread," said a Cheka Information Department report on 16 January. "The workers are predicting the imminent demise of the regime. No one works any more because they are all too hungry. Strikes on a huge scale are bound to start any day now. The garrisons in Moscow are less and less trustworthy and could become uncontrollable at any moment. Preventive measures are required."6
On 21 January a government decree ordered a 30 percent reduction in bread rations for Moscow; Petrograd, Ivanovo Vozncsensk, and Kronstadt. Coming at a time when the last White armies had been defeated and the government could no longer claim that the counterrevolutionaries were to blame, this measure was enough to light the powder keg of rebellion. From the end of January to mid-March 1921, strikes, protest meetings, hunger marches, demonstrations, and factory sit-ins occurred daily, reaching their height in Moscow and Petrograd at the end of February and the beginning of March. In Moscow from 22 to 24 March there were serious confrontations between Cheka detachments and groups of demonstrators who were attempting to force their way into the barracks to join forces with the soldiers. Many of the workers were shot, and hundreds were arrested. 7
In Petrograd the troubles became more widespread after 22 February, when workers from several of the main factories voted in a new "Plenipotentiary Workers' Assembly" that was strongly Menshevik and Socialist Revolutionary in character. In its first decree the assembly demanded the elimination of the Bolshevik dictatorship, free elections to the soviet, freedom of speech, assembly, and the press, and the release of all political prisoners. To achieve these ends the assembly called for a general strike. The military command failed to stop several regiments from holding meetings that passed motions of support for the strikers. On 24 February Cheka detachments opened fire on a workers demonstration, killing twelve men. That same day, more than 1,000 workers and militant socialists were arrested. 8 Yet the ranks of the strikers continued to swell, with thousands of soldiers leaving their units to join forces with the workers. Four years after the February days that had overturned the tsarist regime, history seemed to be repeating itself as militant workers and mutinying soldiers joined forces. On 26 February at 9:00 p.m. Grigory Zinoviev, the head of the Bolshevik Party in Petrograd, sent a telegram to Lenin in panic: "The workers have joined up with the soldiers in the barracks . . . We are still waiting for the reinforcements we demanded from Novgorod. If they don't arrive in the next few hours, we are going to be overrun."
Two days later came the event that the Bolshevik leaders had been fearing above all else: a mutiny of the sailors aboard the two warships in the Kronstadt base near Petrograd. Zinoviev sent another telegram to Lenin on 28 February at 11:00 p.m.: "Kronstadt: the two main ships, the Sevastopol and the Petropavlovsk, have adopted Socialist Revolutionary and Black Hundred resolutions and given us an ultimatum to which we have twenty-four hours to respond. The situation among the workers is very unstable. All the main factories are on strike. We think that the Socialist Revolutionaries are going to step up protests." 9
The demands that Zinoviev labeled "Socialist Revolutionary and Black Hundred" were the same things that the immense majority of citizens were demanding after three years of Bolshevik dictatorship: free and secret elections, freedom of speech, and freedom of the press—at least for "workers, peasants, anarchists, and left-wing socialist parties." They also demanded equal rations for all, the freeing of all political prisoners, the convocation of a special commission to reexamine the cases of those imprisoned in concentration camps, an end to requisitioning, the abolition of special Cheka detachments, and freedom for the peasants "to do whatever they want with their land, and to raise their own livestock, provided they do it using their own resources " 10
At Kronstadt events were gathering momentum. On 1 March a huge meeting gathered together more than 15,000 people, a quarter of the entire civil and military population of the naval base. Mikhail Kalinin, president of the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets, arrived in person to try to defuse the situation; but he failed to make himself heard over the boos of the crowd. The following day the rebels, joined by at least 2,000 Bolsheviks from Kronstadt, formed a provisional revolutionary committee that attempted to link up with the strikers and soldiers from Petrograd.
The daily Cheka reports on the situation in Petrograd in the first week of March 1921 leave no doubt about the widespread popular support for the mutiny at Kronstadt: "The Kronstadt revolutionary committee clearly expects a general uprising in Petrograd any day now. They have made contact with the mutineers and with a number of the factories. Today, at a meeting in the Arsenal factory, workers voted for a resolution to join the general insurrection. A delegation of three people—including an anarchist, a Menshevik, and a Socialist Revolutionary—has been elected to keep in contact with Kronstadt." 11
On 7 March the Petrograd Cheka received the order to "undertake decisive action against the workers." Within forty-eight hours more than 2,000 workers, all known socialist or anarchist sympathizers or activists, were arrested. Unlike the mutineers, the workers were unarmed and could put up little resistance to the Cheka detachments. Having thus broken the support for the insurrection, the Bolsheviks carefully prepared the assault on Kronstadt itself The task of liquidating the rebellion was entrusted to General Mikhail Tukhachevsky. In opening fire on the crowd, the victor from the Polish campaign of 1920 used young recruits from the military school, who had no tradition of revolution, and special detachments from the Cheka. The operation began on 8 March. Ten days later Kronstadt fell after thousands of people had lost their lives. Several hundred rebels who had been taken prisoner were shot over the next few days. The records of the event, recently published for the first time, show that from April to June 1921, 2,103 were sentenced to death and 6,459 were sent to prison or to the camps. 12 Just before the fall of Kronstadt nearly 8,000 people managed to escape across the ice to Finland, where they were interned in transit camps in Terioki, Vyborg, and Ino. Deceived by the promise of an amnesty, a number of them returned to Russia in 1922, where they were immediately arrested and sent to camps on the Solovetski Islands and to Kholmogory, one of the worst concentration camps, near Arkhangelsk. 13 According to one anarchist source, of the 5,000 Kronstadt prisoners who were sent to Kholmogory, fewer than 1,500 were stilt alive in the spring of 1922. 14
The Kholmogory camp, on the great river Dvina, was sadly famous for the swift manner in which it dispatched a great number of its prisoners. They were often loaded onto barges, stones were tied around their necks, their arms and legs were tied, and they were thrown overboard into the river. Mikhail Kedrov, one of the main leaders of the Cheka, had started these massive drownings in June 1920. Several eyewitness reports concur that a large number of the mutineers from Kronstadt, together with Cossacks and peasants from Tambov Province who had also been deported to Kholmogory, were drowned in the Dvina in this fashion in 1922. That same year, a special evacuation committee deported to Siberia some 2,514 civilians from Kronstadt, merely on the grounds that they had stayed in the town through the events.15
Once the Kronstadt rebellion had been crushed, the regime concentrated its energies on hunting down socialist activists, fighting strikes and ''workers' complacency," quelling the peasant uprisings that continued despite the official ending of requisitioning, and taking measures to repress the church.
On 28 February 1921 Dzerzhinsky had ordered all the provincial Chekas "(1) to carry out immediate arrests of all anarchist, Menshcvik, and Socialist Revolutionary intelligentsia, in particular the officials working in the People's Commissariats of Agriculture and Food; and (2) to arrest all Mensheviks, anarchists, and Socialist Revolutionaries working in factories and liable to call for strikes or demonstrations." 16
Rather than marking the beginning of a relaxation in the repressive policies, the introduction of the NEP was accompanied by a resurgence in the repressions against the moderate socialist activists. The repressions were motivated not by the danger of their perceived opposition to the New Economic Policy, but by the fact that they had been campaigning for it for so long, and might thus use it to justify their own approach to politics. "The only place for Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries, whether they hide their allegiances or are open about them," wrote Lenin in 1921, is prison."
A few months later, judging that the socialists were still making too much trouble, he wrote: "If the Mensheviks or Socialist Revolutionaries so much as peek out again, they must all be shot without pity." Between March and June 1921 more than 2,000 moderate socialist activists and sympathizers were again arrested. By now all the members of the Central Committee of the Menshevik Party were in prison; when threatened with expulsion to Siberia in January 1921 they began a hunger strike, and twelve of the leaders, including Fedor Dan and Boris Nikolaevsky, were expelled abroad and arrived in Berlin in February 1922.
One of the main priorities of the regime in the spring of 1921 was to revive
industrial production, which had fallen to 10 percent of what it had been in 1911 Rather than relaxing the pressure on workers, the Bolsheviks maintained
and even increased the militarization begun over the preceding years. The
policies pursued in 1921 after the adoption of the NEP in the great industrial and mining region of the Donbass, which produced more than 80 percent of
the country's coal and steel, seem particularly revealing of the sort of dictatorial methods used by the Bolsheviks to get the workers back to work. At the end
of 1920 Gcorgy Pyatakov, one of the main leaders who was close to Trotsky,
had been appointed head of the Central Directory of the Coal Industry. Within
a year he increased coal production five fold by means of a policy of unremitting
exploitation and intimidation. Pyatokov imposed excruciating discipline on his 120,000 workers: any absenteeism was equated with an act of sabotage and
punished with expulsion to a camp or even a death sentence. In 1921 18 miners
were executed for "persistent parasitism." Work hours were increased, particularly
on Sundays, and Pyatokov effectively blackmailed the workers into increasing productivity by threatening the confiscation of ration cards. These
measures were taken at a time when the workers received between one-third
and one-half of the bread ration they needed to survive; often at the end of the day they had to lend their boots to comrades who were taking over the next
shift. The directory acknowledged that absenteeism among the workforce was
due in part to epidemics, "permanent hunger," and "a total absence of clothes,
trousers, and shoes." To reduce the number of mouths to feed when the threat of famine was at its height, Pyatokov on 24 June 1921 ordered the expulsion
from the mining villages of everyone who did not work in the mines. Ration
cards were confiscated from family members of miners. Rationing was also calculated strictly in accordance with the production of individual miners, thus
introducing a rudimentary form of productivity-related pay.
17
Such practices went directly against the ideas of equality of treatment that many workers, deceived by Bolshevik rhetoric, still cherished. In a remarkable way these measures prefigured those taken against the working classes in the 1930's. The working masses were nothing more than the rabsila —the workforce—which had to be exploited in the most effective manner possible. Doing so involved overturning legislation and the appeals of the unions, which were totally hamstrung and were ordered to support the directives of management at all costs. Militarization of the workforce seemed to be the most effective means of forcing the hungry, stubborn, and unproductive workers to cooperate. The similarities between this exploitation of the theoretically free workforce and the forced labor of the great penal colonies created in the early 1930's seem inescapable. Like so many other episodes in the formative years of Bolshevism, none of which can be explained through the context of the civil war, the events in the Donbass in 1921 prefigured a series of practices that were later to be found at the heart of Stalinism.
Among the other top-priority operations for the Bolshevik regime in the spring of 1921 was the "pacification" of all the regions that were in the hands
of the peasants. On 27 April 1921 the Politburo appointed General Tukhachevsky
to lead "operations to liquidate the Antonov elements in Tambov
Province." With nearly 100,000 men at his disposal, including many special
Cheka detachments, and equipped with airplanes and heavy artillery, Tukhachevsky
waged war on the Antonov units with extraordinary violence. Together
with Antonov-Ovseenko, president of the Plenipotentiary Commission
of the Central Executive Committee established to constitute an occupying
force in the region, he took hostages on an enormous scale, carried out executions,
set up death camps where prisoners were gassed, and deported entire
villages suspected of assisting or collaborating with the so-called bandits. 18
Order No. 171, dated 11 June 1921 and signed by Antonov-Ovseenko and Tukhachevsky, shows clearly the sorts of methods used to "pacify" Tambov Province. The order stipulated:
1 . Shoot on sight any citizens who refuse to give their names.
2. District and Regional Political Commissions are hereby authorized to pronounce sentence on any village where arms are being hidden, and to arrest hostages and shoot them if the whereabouts of the arms are not revealed.
3. Wherever arms are found, execute immediately the eldest son in the family.
4. Any family that has harbored a bandit is to be arrested and deported from the province, their possessions are to be seized, and the eldest son is to be executed immediately.
5. Any families sheltering other families who have harbored bandits are to be punished in the same manner, and their eldest son is to be shot.
6. In the event that bandit families have fled, their possessions are to be redistributed among peasants who are loyal to the Soviet regime, and their houses are to be burned or demolished.
7. These orders are to be carried out rigorously and without mercy 19
The day after Order No. 171 was sent out, Tukhachevsky ordered all rebels to be gassed. "The remnants of the defeated rebel gangs and a few isolated bandits are still hiding in the forests . . . The forests where the bandits are hiding are to be cleared by the use of poison gas. This must be carefully calculated, so that the layer of gas penetrates the forests and kills everyone hiding there. The artillery inspector is to provide the necessary amounts of gas immediately, and find staff qualified to carry out this sort of operation."20
On 10 July 1921 the head of a five-member commission on the measures taken against the "bandits" in Tambov Province reported:
Mopping-up operations in the Kudryukovskaya volost began on 27 June in the village of Ossinovki, which in the past has been a known hideout for bandits. The attitude of peasants toward our detachments is perhaps best described as one of mistrust. They refused to name the bandits in the forests, and when asked questions they replied that they knew nothing.
We took some forty hostages, declared the village to be under a state of siege, and gave the villagers two hours to hand over the bandits and their arms. The villagers then called a meeting, where it was apparent that they were undecided as to how to respond; but they resolved not to provide active help in the hunt for the bandits. Undoubtedly they had not taken seriously our threat to shoot the hostages. When the deadline had passed, we executed twenty-one of the hostages before the village assembly. These public executions, in accordance with the usual procedure, were carried out one by one in the presence of all five members of the Plenipotentiary Commission, and had a considerable effect on the peasants.
Regarding the village of kareevka, which was a bandit stronghold because of its geographical situation, the commission decided to strike it from the map. The whole population was deported and their possessions confiscated, with the exception of the families of soldiers serving in the Red Army, who were transferred to the town of Kurdyuki and relocated in houses previously occupied by the families of bandits. After objects of value had been removed—window frames, glass, wooden objects, and other such items—all the houses in the village were set on fire.
On 3 July we began operations in the town of Bogoslovka. We have rarely come across peasants so stubborn or well organized. No matter wbom we spoke to, of whatever age, they invariably replied with an air of surprise, "Bandits? In these parts? Not at all. We might have seen one or two people go by, but we couldn't say whether they were bandits or not. We live quietly here, minding our own business. We don't know anything."
We took the same measures as in Ossinovki: we took 58 hostages. On 4 July we publicly executed a first group of 21, another 15 the next day, and removed the families of about 60 bandits, about 200 people in all. We finally achieved our objectives, and the peasants were obliged to go out looking for the bandits and the weapons caches.
The mopping-up operations in the above-mentioned towns and villages came to an end on 6 July. The operation was a great success, and its impact was felt even further afield than the neighboring cantons. The bandit elements are still surrendering.
President of the Plenipotentiary Commission of Five Members, [M.V.] Uskonin. 21
On 19 July, as a result of much high-level opposition to this extreme form of "eradication," Order No. 171 was annulled.
By July 1921 the military authorities and the Cheka had set up seven concentration camps. According to information that even now is incomplete, at least 50,000 people were interned in the camps, for the most part women, children, and the elderly, as well as hostages and members of the families of deserters. The conditions in these camps were intolerable: typhus and cholera were endemic, and the half-naked prisoners lacked even basic requirements. A famine began in the summer of 1921, and by the autumn the mortality rate had climbed to 15-20 percent a month. The peasant movement, which in February had numbered some 40,000, was reduced to 1,000 by the beginning of September. From November onward, long after the "pacification" of the countryside, several thousand of the strongest prisoners were deported to the concentration camps in northern Russia, to Arkhangelsk and Kholmogory. 22
As is evident from the weekly Cheka reports to the Bolshevik leaders, the "pacification" of the countryside continued at least into the second half of 1922 in many regions of Ukraine, western Siberia, the Volga provinces, and the Caucasus. The habits of earlier years died hard, and although requisitioning had officially been abolished in March 1921, taxes in kind also were levied with extreme brutality. Given the catastrophic agricultural situation of 1921, the quotas were extremely high, and this meant a constant state of tension in the countryside, where many of the peasants were still armed.
Describing his impressions of a trip to the provinces of Tula, Orel, and Voronezh in May 1921, Nikolai Osinsky, the people's commissar of agriculture, reported that local officials were convinced that requisitioning would be brought back in the autumn. Moreover, local authorities ''seemed incapable of considering the peasants to be anything other than born saboteurs."23
To facilitate the collection of taxes in Siberia, the region expected to provide most of the wheat after famine began ravaging the provinces of the Volga, Feliks Dzerzhinsky was sent there in December 1921 as extraordinary plenipotentiary. He established "flying revolutionary courts" whose mission was to travel through the villages and pass sentence immediately on peasants who had not paid their taxes, handing out prison sentences or sending them off to camps. 24 Like the requisitioning detachments, these courts, bolstered by "fiscal detachments," were responsible for so many abuses that the President of the Supreme Court himself, Nikolai Krylenko, was forced to open an inquiry. From Omsk on 14 February 1922 one inspector wrote:
Abuses of position by the requisitioning detachments, frankly speaking, have now reached unbelievable levels. Systematically, the peasants who are arrested are all locked up in big unhealed barns; they are then whipped and threatened with execution. Those who have not filled the whole of their quota are bound and forced to run naked all along the main street of the village and then locked up in another unheated hangar. A great number of women have been beaten until they are unconscious and then thrown naked into holes dug in the snow . . .
The situation remained extremely tense in all the provinces.
A great deal can also be derived from these excerpts from the secret police reports for October 1922, a year and half after the NEP had come into force:
In Pskov Province the quotas fixed for the taxes in kind represent two thirds of the harvest. Four districts have taken up arms ... In the province of Novgorod the quotas will not be filled, despite the 25 per- cent reduction that was recently approved because of the exceptionally poor harvest. In the provinces of Ryazan and Tver a 100 percent realization of the targets would condemn the peasants to death by starvation ... In the province of Novonikolaevsk [Novosibirsk] the famine is threatening and the peasants are already reduced to trying to eat grass and roots ... But this information seems mild compared with the reports we are receiving from Kyiv, where the suicide rate has never been so high. Peasants are killing themselves en mass because they can neither pay their taxes nor rebel, since all their arms have been confiscated. Famine has been hanging over the regions for more than a year now, and the peasants are extremely pessimistic about the future. 25
After the autumn of 1922 the worst seemed over. Following two years of
famine, the survivors managed to store enough of a harvest to get them through
the winter, provided that taxes were not levied in their entirety. 'This year the grain harvest will be lower than the average for the last decade": these were the
laconic terms in which Pravda, in a short article on the back page on 2 July
1921, had first mentioned the existence of a "feeding problem on the agricultural
front." In an "Appeal to All the Citizens of Soviet Russia" published in Pravda on 12 July 1921, Mikhail Kalinin, president of the Central Executive
Committee of Soviets, admitted that "in numerous districts, the drought this year has destroyed the harvest."
"This calamity is not solely a result of the drought," explained a resolution of the Central Committee dated 21 July.
It is the result of all our past history, of the backwardness of our agriculture, of the lack of organization, of the low level of our knowledge of agronomy, of the lack of materials, and of outdated methods of crop rotation. The situation has been exacerbated by the war and by the economic blockade, by the rearguard action fought by the landowners, capitalists, and their servants, and by the constant actions of bandits carrying out the orders of organizations hostile to Soviet Russia and its working population. 26
In a long enumeration of the causes of this ''calamity," whose real nature no one yet dared mention, one major factor was lacking: the requisitioning policy that for years had been such a drain on the resources of the already fragile agricultural system. All the leaders of the provinces where the famine was beginning to be felt, summoned to Moscow in June 1921, emphasized the government's responsibility and pointed out in particular the causal role of the all-powerful People's Commissariat of Food. I.N. Vavilin, the representative for the Samara region, explained that the provincial food committee, since the first introduction of requisitioning, had constantly inflated the estimates for the harvest.
Despite the bad harvest of 1920, 10 million pudy had been requisitioned that year. All grain stocks, even the seed for the future harvest, had been seized. Numerous peasants had had virtually nothing to eat since January 1921. The mortality rate had immediately increased in February. In the space of two to three months, riots and revolts against the regime had effectively stopped in the province of Samara. "Today," Vavilin explained, "there are no more revolts. We see new phenomena instead: crowds of thousands of starving people gather around the Executive Committee or the Party headquarters of the soviet to wait, for days and days, for the miraculous appearance of the food they need. It is impossible to chase this crowd away, and every day more of them die. They are dropping like flies ... I think there must be at least 900,000 starving people in this province."27
The Cheka reports and the military bulletins make it clear that famine had been threatening the region since at least 1919. The situation had deteriorated considerably throughout 1920. In their internal reports that summer the Cheka, the People's Commissariat of Agriculture, and the People's Commissariat of Food, fully aware of the gravity of the situation, drew up lists of districts and provinces judged to be starving or threatened by imminent famine. In January 1921 one report claimed that among the causes of the famine in Tambov was the "orgy" of requisitioning of 1920. It was quite obvious to the common people, as conversations reported by the political police made clear, that the "soviet regime is trying to starve out all the peasants who dare resist it." Though perfectly well informed of the inevitable consequences of the requisitioning policy, the government took no steps to combat these predicted effects. On 30 July 1921, while famine gripped a growing number of regions, Lenin and Molotov sent a telegram to all leaders of regional and provincial Party committees asking them to "bolster the mechanisms for food collection . . . step up the propaganda for the rural population, explaining the economic and political importance of the prompt paying of taxes ... put at the disposal of the agencies for the collection of taxes in kind all the authority of the Party, and allow them to use all the disciplinary measures that the state itself would use".28
Faced with this attitude of the authorities, who seemed to be pursuing a policy of starving out the peasantry at all cost, the more enlightened intelligentsia began to react. In June 1921 the agronomists, economists, and university lecturers who belonged to the Moscow Agricultural Society established a Social Committee for the Fight against Famine. Among the first members were the eminent economists Nikolai Kondratyev and Sergei Prokopovich, who had been a minister of food in the provisional government; the journalist Ekatenna Kuskova, a close friend of Maksim Gorky; and various writers, doctors, and agronomists. In mid-July, with the help of Gorky, who was highly influential among Party leaders, a delegation from the committee obtained an audience with Lev Kamenev after Lenin had refused to see them. Following the interview Lenin, still distrusting what he described as the overly emotional reactions of certain other Bolshevik leaders, sent the following note to his colleagues in the Politburo: "This Kuskova woman must not cause any damage ... We will use her name and her signature, and a carriage or two from the people who sympathize with her and her kind. Nothing more than that." 29
Finally the committee members convinced some Party leaders of their usefulness. As internationally prominent scientists and writers, they were well known abroad, and many of them had taken an active part in aid for the victims of the famine of 1891. Moreover, they had numerous contacts with other intellectuals the world over, and seemed to be guarantors that the food would reach its intended destination, in the event that the appeal was successful. They were prepared to allow their names to be used, provided that some sort of official status was granted to the Committee for Aid to the Hungry.
On 21 July 1921 the Bolshevik government reluctantly legalized the committee, naming it the All-Russian Committee for Aid to the Starving. It was immediately given the emblem of the Red Cross and was permitted to collect food, medicine, and animal feed both in Russia and abroad and to share it out among the needy. It was allowed to use whatever means of transport necessary to distribute the food, to set up soup kitchens and local and regional committees, "to communicate freely with designated organizations abroad," and even "to discuss measures taken by local or central authorities that in its opinion are relevant to the question of the struggle against the famine." 30 At no other moment in the history of the Soviet regime was any other organization granted such privileges. The government's concessions were a measure of the scale of the catastrophe facing the country, four months after the official (and somewhat muted) introduction of the N.E.P.
One of the committee's first actions was to establish contact with the Patriarch Tikhon, head of the Orthodox Church, who immediately set up an
All-Russian Ecclesiastical Committee for Aid to the Hungry. On 7 July 1921 the patriarch had a letter read out in all the churches: "Rotten meat would be
gladly eaten by the starving population, but even that is now impossible to find. Cries and moans are all that one hears wherever one goes. People's minds turn even to thoughts of cannibalism . . . Lend a helping hand to your brothers and
sisters! With the consent of your brethren, you may use church treasures that have no sacramental value, such as rings, chains, bracelets, decorations that adorn icons, and other items to help the hungry."
Having obtained the assistance of the church, the All-Russian Committee for Aid to the Starving contacted various international organizations, including the Red Cross, the Quakers, and the American Relief Association (ARA), presided over by Herbert Hoover; all responded positively. Even so, cooperation between the committee and the regime lasted only five weeks; on 27 August 1921 the committee was dissolved, six days after the government had signed an agreement with a representative of the ARA. For Lenin, now that the Americans were sending the first cargoes of food, the committee had served its purpose: "The name and the signature of Kuskova" had played the required role, and that was enough. In announcing this decision, Lenin wrote:
I propose to dissolve the Committee immediately . . . Prokopovich is to be arrested for seditious behavior and kept in prison for three months . . . The other Committee members are to be exiled from Moscow immediately, sent to the chief cities of different regions, cut off if possible from all means of communication, including railways, and kept under close surveillance. Tomorrow we will release a brief governmental communique saying that the Committee has been dissolved because it refused to work. Instruct all newspapers to begin insulting these people, and heap opprobrium upon them, accusing them of being closet White Guard supporters and bourgeois do-gooders who are much keener to travel abroad than to help at home. In general, make them look ridiculous and mock them at least once a week for the next two months.31
Following these instructions to the letter, the press unleashed a ferocious attack against the sixty famous intellectuals who had served on the committee. The titles alone of the articles demonstrate the eloquence of this campaign of defamation: "You shouldn't play with hunger" (Pravda, 30 August 1921); "Hunger Speculators" (Kommunistuheskii trucl, 31 August 1921); u Committee for Aid ... to the Counterrevolution" (Izvestiya, 30 August 1921). When someone tried to intercede in favor of the committee members who had been arrested and deported, Josif Unshlikht, one of Dzerzhinsky's assistants at the Cheka, declared: "You say the Committee has done nothing wrong. It's possible. But it has become a rallying point in society, and that we cannot allow. When you put a seed in water, it soon starts to sprout roots, and the Committee was beginning to spread its roots throughout society, undermining collectivity . . . we had no choice but to pull it up by the roots and to crush it." 32
In place of the committee the government set up a Central Commission for Help for the Hungry, a slow-moving and bureaucratic organization made up of civil servants from various People's Commissariats, which was characterized by inefficiency and corruption. When the famine was at its worst in the summer of 1922 and nearly 30 million people were starving, the Central Commission was assuring an irregular supply to about 3 million people, whereas the Red Cross, the Quakers, and the ARA supplied about 11 million people per day. Despite the massive international relief effort, at least 5 million of the 29 million Russians affected died of hunger in 1921 and 1922.33
The last great famine that Russia had known, in 1891, had affected most of the same regions (mid-Russia, the lower Volga, and part of Kazakhstan) and had been responsible for the deaths of between 400,000 and 500,000 people. Both the state and society in general had fought extremely hard to save lives. A young lawyer called Vladimir Ilych Ulyanov was then living in Samara, the regional capital of one of the areas worst affected by the famine. He was the only member of the local intelligentsia who not only refused to participate in the aid for the hungry, but publicly opposed it. As one of his friends later recalled, "Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov had the courage to come out and say openly that famine would have numerous positive results, particularly in the appearance of a new industrial proletariat, which would take over from the bourgeoisie .. . Famine, he explained, in destroying the outdated peasant economy,would bring about the next stage more rapidly, and usher in socialism, the stage that necessarily followed capitalism. Famine would also destroy faith not only in the czar, but in God too." 34
Thirty years later, when the young lawyer had become the head of the Bolshevik government, his ideas remained unchanged: famine could and should "strike a mortal blow against the enemy." The enemy in question was the Orthodox Church. "Electricity will replace God. The peasants should pray to it; in any case they will feel its effects long before they feel any effect from on high" said Lenin in 1918 when discussing the electrification of Russia with Leonid Krasin. As soon as the Bolshevik regime had come to power, relations with the Orthodox Church had deteriorated. On 5 February 1918 the government had declared the separation of church and state and of the church and schools, proclaimed freedom of conscience and worship, and announced the nationalization of all church property. Patriarch Tikhon had vigorously protested this attack on the traditional role of the church in four pastoral letters to the faithful. The behavior of the Bolsheviks became more and more provocative. They ordered all church relics to be "valued," organized anti-religious carnivals to coincide with traditional feast days, and demanded that the great monastery of the Trinity and St. Sergius near Moscow, where the relics of St. Sergius of Radonezh were kept, be turned into a museum of atheism. Numerous priests and bishops had already been arrested for protesting the intimidatory measures of the state when the Bolshevik leaders, on Lenin's orders, used the famine as a pretext to launch a large-scale campaign against the church.
On 26 February 1922 a government decree was published in the press ordering "the immediate confiscation from churches of all precious objects of gold or silver and of all precious stones that do not have a religious importance. These objects will be sent to the People's Commissariat of Finance and will then be transferred to the Central Committee for Help for the Hungry." The confiscations began in early March and were accompanied by many confrontations between the detachments responsible for impounding the church treasures and the church faithful. The most serious incidents took place on 15 March 1922 in Cbuya, a small industrial town in Ivanovo Province, where troops opened fire on the crowd and killed a dozen of the faithful. Lenin used this massacre as a pretext to step up the anti-religious campaign.
In a letter addressed to the Politburo on 19 March 1922, he explained, with characteristic cynicism, how the famine could be turned to the Bolsheviks' advantage and exploited to strike the enemy a mortal blow:
Regarding the events at Chuya, which the Politburo will be discussing, I think a firm decision should be adopted immediately as part of the general campaign on this front ... If we bear in mind what the newspapers are saying about the attitude of the clergy toward the confiscation of church goods, and the subversive attitude that is being adopted by the Patriarch Tikhon, it becomes apparent that the Black Hundred clergy are putting into action a plan that has been developed to strike a decisive blow against us ... I think our enemies are committing a monumental strategic error. In fact the present moment favors us far more than it does them. We are almost 99 percent sure that we can strike a mortal blow against them and consolidate the central position that we are going to need to occupy for several decades to come. With the help of all those starving people who are starting to eat each other, who are dying by the millions, and whose bodies litter the roadside all over the country, it is now and only now that we can—and therefore must—confiscate all church property with all the ruthless energy we can still muster. This is precisely the moment when the masses will support us most fervently, and rise up against the reactionary machinations of the petit-bourgeois and Black Hundred religious conspirators ... we must therefore amass a treasure of hundreds of millions of gold rubles (think how rich some of those monasteries are!). Without treasure on that scale, no state projects, no economic projects, and no shoring up of our present position will be conceivable. No matter what the cost, we must have those hundreds of millions (or even billions) of rubles. This can be carried out only at the present moment. All evidence suggests that we could not do this at any other moment, because our only hope is the despair engendered in the masses by the famine, which will cause them to look at us in a favorable light or, at the very least, with indifference. I thus can affirm categorically that this is the moment to crush the Black Hundred clergy in the most decisive manner possible, and to act without any mercy at all, with the sort of brutality that they will remember for decades. I propose to implement our plan in the following manner: Only Comrade Kalinin will act openly. Whatever happens, Comrade Trotsky will not appear in the press or in public . . . One of the most intelligent and energetic members of the Central Executive Committee must be sent to Chuya, with oral instructions from one of the members of the Politburo. These instructions will stipulate that his mission in Chuya is to arrest a large number of members of the clergy, of bourgeoisie and petit-bourgeoisie, several dozen at least, who will all be accused of direct or indirect participation in violent resistance against the decree regarding the confiscation of church goods. Once back from this mission, the envoy will make a full report to the entire Politburo or to a meeting of two or three members. On the basis of this report, the Politburo, again orally, will issue precise instructions to the judicial authorities, to the effect that the trial of the Chuya rebels is to be expedited as rapidly as possible. The result of the trial is to be the execution, by public shooting, of a large number of the Chuya Black Hundreds as well as the shooting of as many as possible from Moscow and other important religious centers . . . The more representatives from the reactionary clergy and the recalcitrant bourgeoisie we shoot, the better it will be for us. We must teach these people a lesson as quickly as possible, so that the thought of protesting again doesn't occur to them for decades to come."35
As the weekly reports from the secret police indicate, the campaign to confiscate church goods was at its height in March, April, and May 1922, when it led to 1,414 incidents and the arrest of thousands of priests, nuns, and monks. According to church records, 2,691 priests, 1,962 monks, and 3,447 nuns were killed that year. 36 The government organized several large show trials for members of the clergy in Moscow, Ivanovo, Chuya, Smolensk, and Pctrograd. A week after the incidents in Chuya, in accordance with Lenin's instructions, the Politburo proposed a series of measures: u Arrest the synod and the patriarch, not immediately, but between a fortnight and a month from now. Make public the circumstances surrounding the business in Chuya. Bring to trial all the priests and lay members of Chuya in one week's time. Shoot all the rebel leaders."37 In a note to the Politburo, Dzerzhinsky indicated that
the patriarch and his followers ... are openly resisting the confiscation of church goods ... We already have enough evidence to arrest Tikhon and the more reactionary members of the synod. In the view of the GPU: (1) the time is right for the arrest of the patriarch and the synod; (2) permission should not be granted for the formation of a new synod; (3) all priests resisting the confiscation of church goods should be designated enemies of the people and exiled to one of the Volga regions most affected by the famine. 38
In Petrograd 77 priests were sent to camps; 4 were sentenced to death, including the metropolitan of Petrograd, Benjamin, who had been elected in 1917 and enjoyed a wide popular following. Ironically, he was among those who had spoken strongly in favor of the separation of church and state. In Moscow 148 priests and lay brethren were sent to the camps, and 6 received death sentences that were immediately carried out. Patriarch Tikhon was placed under close surveillance in the Donskoi monastery in Moscow.
On 6 June 1922, a few weeks after these legal travesties in Moscow, a large public trial began, announced in the press since the end of February: thirty- four Socialist Revolutionaries were accused of "counterrevolutionary and terrorist activities against the Soviet government," including most notably the attempt to assassinate Lenin on 31 August 1918 and participation in the Tambov peasant revolt. In a scenario that was replayed over and over in the 1930's, the accused included authentic political leaders, such as the twelve members of the Central Committee of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, led by Avraham Gots and Dmitry Donskoi, and agents provocateurs instructed to testify against the others and to "confess their crimes." As Helene Carrere d'Encausse has pointed out, this trial permitted the authorities to "test out the 'Russian doll' method of accusation, whereby one solid accusation—the fact that since 1918 the Socialist Revolutionaries had been opposed to Bolshevik rule—was cited to 'prove' that any opposition to the Bolsheviks' policies was, in the final analysis, an act of cooperation with the international bourgeoisie."39
At the conclusion of this parody of justice, after the authorities had orchestrated political demonstrations calling for the death penalty for the "terrorists," eleven of the accused leaders of the Socialist Revolutionary Party were condemned to death. Faced with protests from the international community, organized largely by exiled Russian socialists, and with the more serious threat of uprisings in the pro-Socialist Revolutionary countryside, the sentences were suspended on the condition that "the Socialist Revolutionary Party ends all conspiratorial, insurrectionary, and terrorist activities." In January 1924 the death sentences were reduced to five years' internment in the camps. Needless to say the prisoners were never set free, and were in fact executed in the 1930's, when international opinion and the danger of peasant uprisings no longer posed a threat to the Bolshevik leadership.
The trial of the Socialist Revolutionaries was one of the first opportunities to test the new penal code, which had come into force on 1 June 1922. Lenin had followed its elaboration quite closely. One of the code's functions was to permit the use of all necessary violence against political enemies even though the civil war was over and "expeditious elimination" could no longer be justified. The first drafts of the code, shown to Lenin on 15 May 1922, provoked the following reply to Kursky, the people's commissar of justice: "It is my view that the leeway for applying the death penalty should be considerably enlarged, and should include all the activities of Mensheviks, Socialist Revolutionaries, and others. Create a new punishment involving banishment abroad. And find some formulation that will link all these activities to the international bourgeoisie."40 Two days later Lenin wrote again:
Comrade Kursky, I want you to add this draft of a complementary paragraph to the penal code ... It is quite clear for the most part. We must openly—and not simply in narrow juridical terms—espouse a politically just principle that is the essence and motivation for terror, showing its necessity and its limits. The courts must not end the terror or suppress it in any way. To do so would be deception. They must give it a solid basis, and clearly legalize all its principles without any form m of deception or deceit. It must be formulated as openly as possible: what we need to encourage is a revolutionary legal consciousness that will allow it to be applied wherever it is needed.41
In accordance with Lenin's instructions, the penal code defined counterrevolutionary activity as any action "aiming to attack or destabilize the power given to Soviet workers and peasants by the revolutionary proletariat," as well as "any action in favor of the international bourgeoisie that fails to recognize the validity of the Communist system and the fair distribution of property as a natural successor to the capitalist system, and any action that tries to reverse the situation by force, military intervention, economic blockade, espionage, illegal financing of the press, or other such means."
Anything that was classified as a counterrevolutionary action, including rebellion, rioting, sabotage, and espionage, was immediately punishable by death, as was participation in or support for any organization "that might provide support for the international bourgeoisie." Even "propaganda that might be of use to the international bourgeoisie" was considered a counterrevolutionary crime, punishable by incarceration for not less than three years or by lifelong exile.
Along with the legalization of political violence, discussed in early 1922, came nominal changes within the secret police. On 6 February 1922 the Chcka was abolished by decree, to be immediately replaced by the State Political Directorate Administration (Gosudastvennoe politicheskoe upravlenie; GPU), which was responsible to the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs. Although the name had changed, the staff and the administrative structure remained the same, ensuring a high degree of continuity within the institution. The change in title emphasized that whereas the Cheka had been an extraordinary agency, which in principle was only transitory, the GPU was permanent. The state thus gained a ubiquitous mechanism for political repression and control. Lying behind the name change were the legalization and the institutionalization of terror as a means of resolving all conflict between the people and the state.
One of the new punishments instituted in the new penal code was lifelong banishment, with the understanding that any return to the US.S.R. would be greeted with immediate execution. It was put into practice from as early as 1922 as part of a long expulsion operation that affected nearly 200 well-known intellectuals suspected of opposing Bolshevism. Among them were many of the prominent figures who had participated in the Social Committee for the Fight against Famine, which had been dissolved on 27 July of that year.
In a long letter to Dzerzhinsky dated 20 May 1922, Lenin laid out a vast plan for the "banishment abroad of all writers and teachers who have assisted the counterrevolution . . . This operation must be planned with great care. A special commission must be set up. All members of the Politburo must spend two to three hours each week carefully examining books and newspapers Information must be gathered systematically on the political past, the work, and the literary activity of teachers and writers."
Lenin led the way with an example:
As far as the journal Ekonomist is concerned, for example, it is clearly a center for White Guard activity. On the cover of the third issue (N.B.: as early as that!) all the collaborators are listed. I think they are all legitimate candidates for expulsion. They are all known counterrevolutionaries and accomplices of the Entente, and they make up a network of its servants, spies, and corrupters of youth. Things must be set in motion such that they are hunted down and imprisoned in a systematic and organized fashion and banished abroad. 42
On 22 May the Politburo established a special commission, including notably Kamenev, Kursky, Unshlikht, and Vasily Mantsev (the last two being Dzerzhinksy's two assistants), to collect information on intellectuals to be arrested and expelled. The first two people expelled in this fashion were the two main leaders of the Social Committee for the Fight against Famine, Sergei Prokopovich and Ekaterina Kuskova. A first group of 160 well-known intellectuals, philosophers, writers, historians, and university professors, who were arrested on 16 and 17 August, were deported in September. Some of the names on the list were already famous internationally or would soon become so: Nikolai Berdyaev, Sergei Bulgakov, Scmyon Frank, Nikolai Loski, Lev Karsavin, Fyodor Stepun, Sergei Trubetskoi, Alcksandr Isgoev, Mikhail Ossorgin, Aleksandr Kiesewetter. Each was forced to sign a document stating that he understood that if he ever returned to the US.S.R., he would immediately be shot. Each was allowed to take one winter coat and one summer coat, one suit and change of clothes, two shirts, two nightshirts, two pairs of socks, two sets of underwear, and twenty dollars in foreign currency.
Parallel to these expulsions, the secret police proceeded with its policy of gathering information about all second-tier intellectuals who were under suspicion and were destined either for administrative deportation to remote areas of the country, codified in law by a decree on 10 August 1922, or for the concentration camps. On 5 September Dzerzhinsky wrote to his assistant Unshlikht:
Comrade Unshlikht! Regarding the files kept on the intelligentsia, the system is not nearly sophisticated enough. Since [Yakov] Agronov left, we seem to have no one capable of organizing this properly, Zaraysky is still too young. It seems to me that if we are going to make any progress at all, Menzhinsky is going to have to take things in hand ... It is essential to devise a clear plan that can be regularly completed and updated. The intelligentsia must be classed into groups and subgroups:
1. Writers
2. Journalists and politicians
3. Economists: subgroups are very important here:
(a) financiers,
(b) workers in the energy sector,
(c) transport specialists,
(d) tradesmen,
(e) people with experience in cooperatives, etc.
4. Technical specialists: here too subgroups are necessary:
(a) engineers,
(b) agronomists,
(c) doctors, etc.
5. University lecturers and their assistants, etc.
Information on all such people must go to specific departments and be synthesized by the Main Department on the Intelligentsia. Every intellectual must have his own file . . . It must be clear in our minds that the objective of the department is not simply to expel or arrest individuals, but to contribute to general political matters and policies concerning intellectuals. They must be controlled, closely watched and divided up, and those who are ready to support the Soviet regime and demonstrate this by their actions and their words should be considered for promotion. 43
A few days later Lenin sent a long memorandum to Stalin in which he returned over and over, in almost maniacal detail, to the question of a "definitive purging" of all socialists, intellectuals, and liberals in Russia:
Regarding the question of the expulsion of Mensheviks, populist socialists, cadets, etc., I would like to raise a few questions here. This issue came up in my absence and has not yet been dealt with fully Mas the decision been made yet to root out all the popular socialists? [Andrei] Pechekhonov, [Aleksandr] Myakotin, [A.G.] Gornfeld, [N.] Petrishchcv, and the like? I think the time has come for them to be exiled. They are more dangerous than the Socialist Revolutionaries because they are more cunning. We could say the same of [Aleksandr] Potresov, [Aleksandr] Isgoev, and the rest of the staff at the journal Ekonomist, such as Ozerov and several others. The same applies to the Mensheviks such as [Vasily] Rozanov (a doctor, not to be trusted), Vigdorshik (Migulo or something like that), Lyubov Nikolaevna Radchenko and her young daughter (who seem to be two of the worst enemies of Bolshevism), and N. A. Rozhkov (he must be exiled, he really is incorrigible) . . . The Mantsev-Messing commission must draw up lists, and hundreds of these people should be expelled immediately. It is our duty to clean up Russia once and for all . . . All the authors at the House of Writers and Thinkers in Petrograd, too, must go. Kharkiv must be searched from top to bottom. We currently have absolutely no idea what is happening there; it might as well be in a foreign country. The city needs a radical cleansing as soon as possible, right after the trial of all the Socialist Revolutionaries. Do something about all those authors and writers in Petrograd (you can find all their addresses in New Russian Thought, no. 4, 1922, p. 37) and all the editors of small publishing houses too (their names and addresses are on page 29). This is all of supreme importance. 44
Next
From the Truce to the Great Turning Point
notes
4. The Dirty War 1 . L. G. Gorelik, ed., Goneniya na anarkhism v Sovietskoi Rossii (The persecution of anarchism in Soviet Russia) (Berlin, 1922), pp. 27-63.
2. Izvestiya, 18 March 1919, L. D. Gerson, The Secret Police in Lemins Russia (Philadelphia: Tample University Press, 1976), pp. 151-152; G. Leggett, The Cheka: Lenin's Political Police (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), pp. 31 1-316.
3. V. I. Brovkin, Behind the Front Lines of the Civil War: Political Parties and Social Movements in Russia, 1918-1922 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 54.
4. G. A. Belov, Iz istorii Vserossnskoi Chrezvchainoi Komissn, 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), p. 354; CRCEDHC 5/1/2615.
5. Brovkin, Behind the Front Lines, pp. 252-257.
6. Tsirkulyarnoe pis'mo VChK (Cheka circular), pp. 267-268, B. I. Nikolaevsky Archives, Hoover Institution, Stanford, Calif,
7. RTsKhlDNI, 17/84/43/2-4.
8. Brovkin, Behind the Front Lines, p. 69; RTsKhlDNI, 17/84/43.
9. Leggett, The Cheka, p. 313; Brovkin, Behind the Front Lines, p. 71; Petrogradskaya pravda, 13 April 1919, p. 3.
10. RTsKhlDNI, 17/66/68/2-5; 17/6/351.
11. Ibid., 17/6/197/105; 17/66/68.
12. Ibid., 17/6/351; Izvestiya TsKa RKP(b) (News from the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party), no. 3 (4 July 1919), RTsKhlDNI, 2/1/24095; GARF, 1.30/3/363.
13. Brovkin, Behind the Front Lines, pp. 82-85; S. P. Melgunov, The Red Terror in Russia (London: Dent, 1925), pp. 58-60; P. Silin, u Astrakhanskie rasstrely" (The shootings in Astrakhan), in Cheka: Materialy po deyatelnosii Chrezvuhamoi Komissti (Cheka: Materials on the activities of the Extraordinary Commission), ed. V. Chernov (Berlin: Izd. TSentr. biuro Partii sotsialistov-revoliutsionerov, 1922), pp. 248-255.
14. RTsKhlDNI, 2/1/11957.
15. The Trotsky Papers, 1917-1922, ed. Jan M. Meijer (The Hague: Mouton, 1964— 1971), 2:22.
16. Brovkin, Behind the Front Lines, p. 289.
17. Trotsky Papers, 2: 20.
18. Brovkin, Behind the Front Lines, pp. 297 ff.
19. Ibid., pp. 292-296.
20. Andrea Graziosi, The Great Soviet Peasant War: Bolsheviks and Peasants, 1917- 1933 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University, Ukrainian Research Institute, 1996).
21. S. A. Pavlyuchenkov, Krestyanskii Brest (The peasants' Brest Treaty) (Moscow: Russkoe knigoizd. tov., 1996), pp. 188-240.
22. Orlando Figes, "The Red Army and Mass Mobilization during the Russian Civil War, 1918-1920," Past and Present, no. 129 (November 1990), 199-200.
23. Dekrety sovietskot vlasti (Decrees of the Soviet regime) (Moscow: Gos. izd-vo polit. lit-ry, 1957-), 4: 167.
24. Brovkin, Behind the Front Lines, p, 318.
25. Russian State Military Archives, Moscow, 33987/3/32.
26. A collection of these reports, assembled by a team of Russian, French, and Italian historians, under the direction of V. P. Danilov, appeared in Russian at the end of 1997,
27. M. S. Frenkin, Tragedia krestyansktkh vosstamy v Rossii, 1918-1921 (Tragedy of peasant uprisings in Russia, 1918-1921) (Jerusalem: Leksikon, 1987); Orlando Figes, Peasant Russia, Civil War: The Volga Countryside in the Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); Brovkin, Behind the Front Lines.
28. Taros Hunczak, ed., The Ukraine, 1917-1921: A Study in Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute and Harvard University Press, 1977).
29. Volin (V. M. Eikhenbaum), The Unknown Revolution, 1917-1921, trans. Holley Cantine (New York: Free Life Editions, 1974), pp. 509-626; Alexandre Skirda, Les Cossaques de la liberie (Paris: J. C. Lattes, 1985); Richard Pipes, Russia under the Bolshe- vik Regime, 1919-1924 (London: HarperCollins, 1994), pp. 106-108.
30. Pipes, Russia under the Bolshevik Regime, pp. 105-131 .
31. Figes, Peasant Russia, Civil War, pp. 333 ff; Brovkin, Behind the Front Lines, pp. 323-325.
32. RTsKhlDNI, 76/3/109.
33. V. L. Genis, "Raskazachivanie v Sovietskoi Rossii" (The de-Cossackization in Soviet Russia), Voprosy tstoru (Problems of history), no. 1 (1994), 42-55.
34. Izvesttya TsKPSS, no. 6(1989), 177-178.
35. RTsKhlDNI, 5/2/106/7.
36. Genis, "Raskazachivanie v Sovietskoi Rossii," pp. 42-55.
37. RTsKhlDNI, 17/6/83.
38. Genis, "Raskazachivanie v Sovietskoi Rossii,' 1 p. 50; RTsKhlDNI, 17/84/75.
39. Melgunov, The Red Terror in Russia, p. 77; Brovkin, Behind the Front Lines, p. 346. 40. RTsKhlDNI, 17/84/75/28.
41. Ibid., 17/84/75/59.
42. Quoted in Brovkin, Behind the Front Lines, p. 353.
43. RTsKhlDNI, 85/11/131/11.
44. Ibid., 85/1 1/123/15.
45. Krasnyi mech (Red sword), no. 1 (18 August 1919), 1.
46. RTsKhlDNI, 5/1/2159/35-38.
47. ibid., 76/3/70/20.
48. Ibid., 17/6/384/62.
49. Ibid., 17/66/66.
50. Izvestiya Odesskogo Sovieta rahochtkh deputatov, no. 36, p. 1, quoted in Brovkin, Behind the Front Lines, p. 121.
51. Melgunov, The Red Terror in Russia, pp. 61-77; Leggett, The Cheka, pp. 199- Notesto Pages 106-117 767 200; Brovkin, Behind the Front Lines, pp. 122-125; GARF, Denikin Commission files, nos. 134 (Kharkiv), 157 (Odessa), 194, 195 (Kyiv).
52. Chernov, Cheka: Materialy.
53. Estimates based on Melgunov, The Red Terror in Russia, p. 77; and on Socialist Revolutionary sources from Kharkiv in May 1921.
54. V. I. Lenin, Polnoe sohrame sochinemi (Complete collected works) (Moscow: Gos. izd-vo polit. lit-ry, 1958-1966), 42: 74.
55. Melgunov, The Red Terror in Russia, p. 81 .
5. From Tambov to the Great Famine
1. V. Danilov and T Shanin, Krestyanskoe vosstanie v Tamhovskoi gubermi v 191 (/~ 1921 (The peasant revolt in Tambov Province, 1919-1921) (Tambov: Intertsentr: Arkhivnyi otdel administratsii Tambovskoi obi., 1994), pp. 38-40.
2. RTsKhlDNI, 17/86/103/4; S. Singleton, "The Tambov Revolt;' Slavic Review 26 (1966), 49&-512; Oliver Radkey, The Unknown Civtl War in Russia: A Study of the Green Movement in the Tambov Region (Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution Press, Stanford University, 1976); Orlando Figes, Peasant Russia, Civil War: The Volga Countryside in the Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).
3. Danilov and Shanin, Krestyanskoe vosstanie, pp. 63-64; Radkey, The Unknown Civil War, pp. 122-126.
4. V. I. Lenin, Polnoe sobrante sochmenii (Complete collected works) (Moscow: Gos, izd-vo polit. lit-ry, 1958-1966), 51: 310.
5. M. Bogdanov, Razgrom zapadno-silnrskogo kttlachko-eserovskogo myatezha ([De- struction of the west Siberian kulak-SR rebellion) (Tyumen: Polit Tyum, 1961).
6. RTsKhlDNI, 76/3/208/12.
7. Ibid, 76/3/166/3.
8. V. I. Brovkin, Behind the Front Lines of the Civil War: Political Parties and Social Movements in Russia, 1918-1922 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 392.
9. RTsKhlDNI, 76/3/167/23.
10. P. Avrich, Kronstadt, 1921 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), pp. 153-183.
11. RTsKhlDNI, 76/3/167.
12. "Kronstadt, 1921," in Dokumenty (Moscow, 1997), p. 15.
13. George Leggett, The Cheka: Lenin s Political Police (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), p. 328.
14. S. A. Malsagov, An Island Hell: A Soviet Prison in the Far North, trans. K H. Lyon (London: A. M. Philpot, 1926), pp. 45^46.
15. "Kronstadt, 1921," p. 367.
16. Brovkin, Behind the Front Lines, p. 400.
17. Andrea Graziosi, "At the Roots of Soviet Industrial Relations and Practices — Piatokov's Donbass in 1921," Cahiers du monde russe 36 (1995), 95-138.
18. Danilov and Shanin, Krestyanskoe vosstanie, pp. 179-180.
19. Ibid., pp. 178-179.
20. Ibid., pp. 226-227.
21. Ibid., p. 218.
22. GARF, 393/89/182; 393/89/295.
23. RTsKhlDNI, 5/2/244/1.
24. Ibid., 17/87/164; 76/3/237.
25. Ibid., 17/87/296/35-36.
26. Pravda, 21 July 1921; Mikhail Heller, "Premier avertissement: Un coupde fouet. L'histoire de Texpulsion des personnalites culturelles hors de PUnion sovietique en 1922," Cahters du monde russe et sovietique, 20 (April-June 1979), 131-172.
27. GARF, 1064/1/1/33.
28. RTsKhlDNI, 2/1/26847.
29. Heller, "Premier avertissement," p. 141.
30. Ibid., p. 143.
31. Ibid., pp. 148-149.
32. Ibid., p. 151.
33. S. Adamets, "Catastrophes demographiques en Russie sovietique en 1918-1923" (Doctoral thesis, EHESS, December 1995), p. 191.
34. A. Beliakov, Yunost vozhdya (The adolescence of the leader) (Moscow: Molodaya gvardiia, 1958), pp. 80-82, quoted in Heller, "Premier avertissement," p. 134.
35. RTsKhlDNI, 2/1/22947/1-4.
36. Russkaya Pravoslavnaya tserkva i kommumsticheskoe gosudarstvo, 19/ 7-1941 (The Russian Orthodox Church and the Communist state, 1917-1941) (Moscow: Terra, 1996), p. 69.
37. Dmitry Volkogonov, Lenm: politicheskii portret; v dvukh knigakh (Lenin: A politi- cal portrait) (Moscow: Novosti, 1994), p. 346.
38. Ibid.
39. Helene Carrere d'Encausse, The Russian Syndrome: One Thousand Years of Political Murder (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1992), p. 400.
40. Lenin, Polnoe sohranie sochinemi, 54: 189.
41. Ibid., p. 198.
42. Ibid., pp. 265-266.
43. RTsKhlDNI, 76/3/303.
44. Ibid., 2/2/1338.
"Discontent is widespread," said a Cheka Information Department report on 16 January. "The workers are predicting the imminent demise of the regime. No one works any more because they are all too hungry. Strikes on a huge scale are bound to start any day now. The garrisons in Moscow are less and less trustworthy and could become uncontrollable at any moment. Preventive measures are required."6
On 21 January a government decree ordered a 30 percent reduction in bread rations for Moscow; Petrograd, Ivanovo Vozncsensk, and Kronstadt. Coming at a time when the last White armies had been defeated and the government could no longer claim that the counterrevolutionaries were to blame, this measure was enough to light the powder keg of rebellion. From the end of January to mid-March 1921, strikes, protest meetings, hunger marches, demonstrations, and factory sit-ins occurred daily, reaching their height in Moscow and Petrograd at the end of February and the beginning of March. In Moscow from 22 to 24 March there were serious confrontations between Cheka detachments and groups of demonstrators who were attempting to force their way into the barracks to join forces with the soldiers. Many of the workers were shot, and hundreds were arrested. 7
In Petrograd the troubles became more widespread after 22 February, when workers from several of the main factories voted in a new "Plenipotentiary Workers' Assembly" that was strongly Menshevik and Socialist Revolutionary in character. In its first decree the assembly demanded the elimination of the Bolshevik dictatorship, free elections to the soviet, freedom of speech, assembly, and the press, and the release of all political prisoners. To achieve these ends the assembly called for a general strike. The military command failed to stop several regiments from holding meetings that passed motions of support for the strikers. On 24 February Cheka detachments opened fire on a workers demonstration, killing twelve men. That same day, more than 1,000 workers and militant socialists were arrested. 8 Yet the ranks of the strikers continued to swell, with thousands of soldiers leaving their units to join forces with the workers. Four years after the February days that had overturned the tsarist regime, history seemed to be repeating itself as militant workers and mutinying soldiers joined forces. On 26 February at 9:00 p.m. Grigory Zinoviev, the head of the Bolshevik Party in Petrograd, sent a telegram to Lenin in panic: "The workers have joined up with the soldiers in the barracks . . . We are still waiting for the reinforcements we demanded from Novgorod. If they don't arrive in the next few hours, we are going to be overrun."
Two days later came the event that the Bolshevik leaders had been fearing above all else: a mutiny of the sailors aboard the two warships in the Kronstadt base near Petrograd. Zinoviev sent another telegram to Lenin on 28 February at 11:00 p.m.: "Kronstadt: the two main ships, the Sevastopol and the Petropavlovsk, have adopted Socialist Revolutionary and Black Hundred resolutions and given us an ultimatum to which we have twenty-four hours to respond. The situation among the workers is very unstable. All the main factories are on strike. We think that the Socialist Revolutionaries are going to step up protests." 9
The demands that Zinoviev labeled "Socialist Revolutionary and Black Hundred" were the same things that the immense majority of citizens were demanding after three years of Bolshevik dictatorship: free and secret elections, freedom of speech, and freedom of the press—at least for "workers, peasants, anarchists, and left-wing socialist parties." They also demanded equal rations for all, the freeing of all political prisoners, the convocation of a special commission to reexamine the cases of those imprisoned in concentration camps, an end to requisitioning, the abolition of special Cheka detachments, and freedom for the peasants "to do whatever they want with their land, and to raise their own livestock, provided they do it using their own resources " 10
At Kronstadt events were gathering momentum. On 1 March a huge meeting gathered together more than 15,000 people, a quarter of the entire civil and military population of the naval base. Mikhail Kalinin, president of the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets, arrived in person to try to defuse the situation; but he failed to make himself heard over the boos of the crowd. The following day the rebels, joined by at least 2,000 Bolsheviks from Kronstadt, formed a provisional revolutionary committee that attempted to link up with the strikers and soldiers from Petrograd.
The daily Cheka reports on the situation in Petrograd in the first week of March 1921 leave no doubt about the widespread popular support for the mutiny at Kronstadt: "The Kronstadt revolutionary committee clearly expects a general uprising in Petrograd any day now. They have made contact with the mutineers and with a number of the factories. Today, at a meeting in the Arsenal factory, workers voted for a resolution to join the general insurrection. A delegation of three people—including an anarchist, a Menshevik, and a Socialist Revolutionary—has been elected to keep in contact with Kronstadt." 11
On 7 March the Petrograd Cheka received the order to "undertake decisive action against the workers." Within forty-eight hours more than 2,000 workers, all known socialist or anarchist sympathizers or activists, were arrested. Unlike the mutineers, the workers were unarmed and could put up little resistance to the Cheka detachments. Having thus broken the support for the insurrection, the Bolsheviks carefully prepared the assault on Kronstadt itself The task of liquidating the rebellion was entrusted to General Mikhail Tukhachevsky. In opening fire on the crowd, the victor from the Polish campaign of 1920 used young recruits from the military school, who had no tradition of revolution, and special detachments from the Cheka. The operation began on 8 March. Ten days later Kronstadt fell after thousands of people had lost their lives. Several hundred rebels who had been taken prisoner were shot over the next few days. The records of the event, recently published for the first time, show that from April to June 1921, 2,103 were sentenced to death and 6,459 were sent to prison or to the camps. 12 Just before the fall of Kronstadt nearly 8,000 people managed to escape across the ice to Finland, where they were interned in transit camps in Terioki, Vyborg, and Ino. Deceived by the promise of an amnesty, a number of them returned to Russia in 1922, where they were immediately arrested and sent to camps on the Solovetski Islands and to Kholmogory, one of the worst concentration camps, near Arkhangelsk. 13 According to one anarchist source, of the 5,000 Kronstadt prisoners who were sent to Kholmogory, fewer than 1,500 were stilt alive in the spring of 1922. 14
The Kholmogory camp, on the great river Dvina, was sadly famous for the swift manner in which it dispatched a great number of its prisoners. They were often loaded onto barges, stones were tied around their necks, their arms and legs were tied, and they were thrown overboard into the river. Mikhail Kedrov, one of the main leaders of the Cheka, had started these massive drownings in June 1920. Several eyewitness reports concur that a large number of the mutineers from Kronstadt, together with Cossacks and peasants from Tambov Province who had also been deported to Kholmogory, were drowned in the Dvina in this fashion in 1922. That same year, a special evacuation committee deported to Siberia some 2,514 civilians from Kronstadt, merely on the grounds that they had stayed in the town through the events.15
Once the Kronstadt rebellion had been crushed, the regime concentrated its energies on hunting down socialist activists, fighting strikes and ''workers' complacency," quelling the peasant uprisings that continued despite the official ending of requisitioning, and taking measures to repress the church.
On 28 February 1921 Dzerzhinsky had ordered all the provincial Chekas "(1) to carry out immediate arrests of all anarchist, Menshcvik, and Socialist Revolutionary intelligentsia, in particular the officials working in the People's Commissariats of Agriculture and Food; and (2) to arrest all Mensheviks, anarchists, and Socialist Revolutionaries working in factories and liable to call for strikes or demonstrations." 16
Rather than marking the beginning of a relaxation in the repressive policies, the introduction of the NEP was accompanied by a resurgence in the repressions against the moderate socialist activists. The repressions were motivated not by the danger of their perceived opposition to the New Economic Policy, but by the fact that they had been campaigning for it for so long, and might thus use it to justify their own approach to politics. "The only place for Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries, whether they hide their allegiances or are open about them," wrote Lenin in 1921, is prison."
A few months later, judging that the socialists were still making too much trouble, he wrote: "If the Mensheviks or Socialist Revolutionaries so much as peek out again, they must all be shot without pity." Between March and June 1921 more than 2,000 moderate socialist activists and sympathizers were again arrested. By now all the members of the Central Committee of the Menshevik Party were in prison; when threatened with expulsion to Siberia in January 1921 they began a hunger strike, and twelve of the leaders, including Fedor Dan and Boris Nikolaevsky, were expelled abroad and arrived in Berlin in February 1922.
Such practices went directly against the ideas of equality of treatment that many workers, deceived by Bolshevik rhetoric, still cherished. In a remarkable way these measures prefigured those taken against the working classes in the 1930's. The working masses were nothing more than the rabsila —the workforce—which had to be exploited in the most effective manner possible. Doing so involved overturning legislation and the appeals of the unions, which were totally hamstrung and were ordered to support the directives of management at all costs. Militarization of the workforce seemed to be the most effective means of forcing the hungry, stubborn, and unproductive workers to cooperate. The similarities between this exploitation of the theoretically free workforce and the forced labor of the great penal colonies created in the early 1930's seem inescapable. Like so many other episodes in the formative years of Bolshevism, none of which can be explained through the context of the civil war, the events in the Donbass in 1921 prefigured a series of practices that were later to be found at the heart of Stalinism.
Order No. 171, dated 11 June 1921 and signed by Antonov-Ovseenko and Tukhachevsky, shows clearly the sorts of methods used to "pacify" Tambov Province. The order stipulated:
1 . Shoot on sight any citizens who refuse to give their names.
2. District and Regional Political Commissions are hereby authorized to pronounce sentence on any village where arms are being hidden, and to arrest hostages and shoot them if the whereabouts of the arms are not revealed.
3. Wherever arms are found, execute immediately the eldest son in the family.
4. Any family that has harbored a bandit is to be arrested and deported from the province, their possessions are to be seized, and the eldest son is to be executed immediately.
5. Any families sheltering other families who have harbored bandits are to be punished in the same manner, and their eldest son is to be shot.
6. In the event that bandit families have fled, their possessions are to be redistributed among peasants who are loyal to the Soviet regime, and their houses are to be burned or demolished.
7. These orders are to be carried out rigorously and without mercy 19
The day after Order No. 171 was sent out, Tukhachevsky ordered all rebels to be gassed. "The remnants of the defeated rebel gangs and a few isolated bandits are still hiding in the forests . . . The forests where the bandits are hiding are to be cleared by the use of poison gas. This must be carefully calculated, so that the layer of gas penetrates the forests and kills everyone hiding there. The artillery inspector is to provide the necessary amounts of gas immediately, and find staff qualified to carry out this sort of operation."20
On 10 July 1921 the head of a five-member commission on the measures taken against the "bandits" in Tambov Province reported:
Mopping-up operations in the Kudryukovskaya volost began on 27 June in the village of Ossinovki, which in the past has been a known hideout for bandits. The attitude of peasants toward our detachments is perhaps best described as one of mistrust. They refused to name the bandits in the forests, and when asked questions they replied that they knew nothing.
We took some forty hostages, declared the village to be under a state of siege, and gave the villagers two hours to hand over the bandits and their arms. The villagers then called a meeting, where it was apparent that they were undecided as to how to respond; but they resolved not to provide active help in the hunt for the bandits. Undoubtedly they had not taken seriously our threat to shoot the hostages. When the deadline had passed, we executed twenty-one of the hostages before the village assembly. These public executions, in accordance with the usual procedure, were carried out one by one in the presence of all five members of the Plenipotentiary Commission, and had a considerable effect on the peasants.
Regarding the village of kareevka, which was a bandit stronghold because of its geographical situation, the commission decided to strike it from the map. The whole population was deported and their possessions confiscated, with the exception of the families of soldiers serving in the Red Army, who were transferred to the town of Kurdyuki and relocated in houses previously occupied by the families of bandits. After objects of value had been removed—window frames, glass, wooden objects, and other such items—all the houses in the village were set on fire.
On 3 July we began operations in the town of Bogoslovka. We have rarely come across peasants so stubborn or well organized. No matter wbom we spoke to, of whatever age, they invariably replied with an air of surprise, "Bandits? In these parts? Not at all. We might have seen one or two people go by, but we couldn't say whether they were bandits or not. We live quietly here, minding our own business. We don't know anything."
We took the same measures as in Ossinovki: we took 58 hostages. On 4 July we publicly executed a first group of 21, another 15 the next day, and removed the families of about 60 bandits, about 200 people in all. We finally achieved our objectives, and the peasants were obliged to go out looking for the bandits and the weapons caches.
The mopping-up operations in the above-mentioned towns and villages came to an end on 6 July. The operation was a great success, and its impact was felt even further afield than the neighboring cantons. The bandit elements are still surrendering.
President of the Plenipotentiary Commission of Five Members, [M.V.] Uskonin. 21
On 19 July, as a result of much high-level opposition to this extreme form of "eradication," Order No. 171 was annulled.
By July 1921 the military authorities and the Cheka had set up seven concentration camps. According to information that even now is incomplete, at least 50,000 people were interned in the camps, for the most part women, children, and the elderly, as well as hostages and members of the families of deserters. The conditions in these camps were intolerable: typhus and cholera were endemic, and the half-naked prisoners lacked even basic requirements. A famine began in the summer of 1921, and by the autumn the mortality rate had climbed to 15-20 percent a month. The peasant movement, which in February had numbered some 40,000, was reduced to 1,000 by the beginning of September. From November onward, long after the "pacification" of the countryside, several thousand of the strongest prisoners were deported to the concentration camps in northern Russia, to Arkhangelsk and Kholmogory. 22
As is evident from the weekly Cheka reports to the Bolshevik leaders, the "pacification" of the countryside continued at least into the second half of 1922 in many regions of Ukraine, western Siberia, the Volga provinces, and the Caucasus. The habits of earlier years died hard, and although requisitioning had officially been abolished in March 1921, taxes in kind also were levied with extreme brutality. Given the catastrophic agricultural situation of 1921, the quotas were extremely high, and this meant a constant state of tension in the countryside, where many of the peasants were still armed.
Describing his impressions of a trip to the provinces of Tula, Orel, and Voronezh in May 1921, Nikolai Osinsky, the people's commissar of agriculture, reported that local officials were convinced that requisitioning would be brought back in the autumn. Moreover, local authorities ''seemed incapable of considering the peasants to be anything other than born saboteurs."23
To facilitate the collection of taxes in Siberia, the region expected to provide most of the wheat after famine began ravaging the provinces of the Volga, Feliks Dzerzhinsky was sent there in December 1921 as extraordinary plenipotentiary. He established "flying revolutionary courts" whose mission was to travel through the villages and pass sentence immediately on peasants who had not paid their taxes, handing out prison sentences or sending them off to camps. 24 Like the requisitioning detachments, these courts, bolstered by "fiscal detachments," were responsible for so many abuses that the President of the Supreme Court himself, Nikolai Krylenko, was forced to open an inquiry. From Omsk on 14 February 1922 one inspector wrote:
Abuses of position by the requisitioning detachments, frankly speaking, have now reached unbelievable levels. Systematically, the peasants who are arrested are all locked up in big unhealed barns; they are then whipped and threatened with execution. Those who have not filled the whole of their quota are bound and forced to run naked all along the main street of the village and then locked up in another unheated hangar. A great number of women have been beaten until they are unconscious and then thrown naked into holes dug in the snow . . .
The situation remained extremely tense in all the provinces.
A great deal can also be derived from these excerpts from the secret police reports for October 1922, a year and half after the NEP had come into force:
In Pskov Province the quotas fixed for the taxes in kind represent two thirds of the harvest. Four districts have taken up arms ... In the province of Novgorod the quotas will not be filled, despite the 25 per- cent reduction that was recently approved because of the exceptionally poor harvest. In the provinces of Ryazan and Tver a 100 percent realization of the targets would condemn the peasants to death by starvation ... In the province of Novonikolaevsk [Novosibirsk] the famine is threatening and the peasants are already reduced to trying to eat grass and roots ... But this information seems mild compared with the reports we are receiving from Kyiv, where the suicide rate has never been so high. Peasants are killing themselves en mass because they can neither pay their taxes nor rebel, since all their arms have been confiscated. Famine has been hanging over the regions for more than a year now, and the peasants are extremely pessimistic about the future. 25
"This calamity is not solely a result of the drought," explained a resolution of the Central Committee dated 21 July.
It is the result of all our past history, of the backwardness of our agriculture, of the lack of organization, of the low level of our knowledge of agronomy, of the lack of materials, and of outdated methods of crop rotation. The situation has been exacerbated by the war and by the economic blockade, by the rearguard action fought by the landowners, capitalists, and their servants, and by the constant actions of bandits carrying out the orders of organizations hostile to Soviet Russia and its working population. 26
In a long enumeration of the causes of this ''calamity," whose real nature no one yet dared mention, one major factor was lacking: the requisitioning policy that for years had been such a drain on the resources of the already fragile agricultural system. All the leaders of the provinces where the famine was beginning to be felt, summoned to Moscow in June 1921, emphasized the government's responsibility and pointed out in particular the causal role of the all-powerful People's Commissariat of Food. I.N. Vavilin, the representative for the Samara region, explained that the provincial food committee, since the first introduction of requisitioning, had constantly inflated the estimates for the harvest.
Despite the bad harvest of 1920, 10 million pudy had been requisitioned that year. All grain stocks, even the seed for the future harvest, had been seized. Numerous peasants had had virtually nothing to eat since January 1921. The mortality rate had immediately increased in February. In the space of two to three months, riots and revolts against the regime had effectively stopped in the province of Samara. "Today," Vavilin explained, "there are no more revolts. We see new phenomena instead: crowds of thousands of starving people gather around the Executive Committee or the Party headquarters of the soviet to wait, for days and days, for the miraculous appearance of the food they need. It is impossible to chase this crowd away, and every day more of them die. They are dropping like flies ... I think there must be at least 900,000 starving people in this province."27
The Cheka reports and the military bulletins make it clear that famine had been threatening the region since at least 1919. The situation had deteriorated considerably throughout 1920. In their internal reports that summer the Cheka, the People's Commissariat of Agriculture, and the People's Commissariat of Food, fully aware of the gravity of the situation, drew up lists of districts and provinces judged to be starving or threatened by imminent famine. In January 1921 one report claimed that among the causes of the famine in Tambov was the "orgy" of requisitioning of 1920. It was quite obvious to the common people, as conversations reported by the political police made clear, that the "soviet regime is trying to starve out all the peasants who dare resist it." Though perfectly well informed of the inevitable consequences of the requisitioning policy, the government took no steps to combat these predicted effects. On 30 July 1921, while famine gripped a growing number of regions, Lenin and Molotov sent a telegram to all leaders of regional and provincial Party committees asking them to "bolster the mechanisms for food collection . . . step up the propaganda for the rural population, explaining the economic and political importance of the prompt paying of taxes ... put at the disposal of the agencies for the collection of taxes in kind all the authority of the Party, and allow them to use all the disciplinary measures that the state itself would use".28
Faced with this attitude of the authorities, who seemed to be pursuing a policy of starving out the peasantry at all cost, the more enlightened intelligentsia began to react. In June 1921 the agronomists, economists, and university lecturers who belonged to the Moscow Agricultural Society established a Social Committee for the Fight against Famine. Among the first members were the eminent economists Nikolai Kondratyev and Sergei Prokopovich, who had been a minister of food in the provisional government; the journalist Ekatenna Kuskova, a close friend of Maksim Gorky; and various writers, doctors, and agronomists. In mid-July, with the help of Gorky, who was highly influential among Party leaders, a delegation from the committee obtained an audience with Lev Kamenev after Lenin had refused to see them. Following the interview Lenin, still distrusting what he described as the overly emotional reactions of certain other Bolshevik leaders, sent the following note to his colleagues in the Politburo: "This Kuskova woman must not cause any damage ... We will use her name and her signature, and a carriage or two from the people who sympathize with her and her kind. Nothing more than that." 29
Finally the committee members convinced some Party leaders of their usefulness. As internationally prominent scientists and writers, they were well known abroad, and many of them had taken an active part in aid for the victims of the famine of 1891. Moreover, they had numerous contacts with other intellectuals the world over, and seemed to be guarantors that the food would reach its intended destination, in the event that the appeal was successful. They were prepared to allow their names to be used, provided that some sort of official status was granted to the Committee for Aid to the Hungry.
On 21 July 1921 the Bolshevik government reluctantly legalized the committee, naming it the All-Russian Committee for Aid to the Starving. It was immediately given the emblem of the Red Cross and was permitted to collect food, medicine, and animal feed both in Russia and abroad and to share it out among the needy. It was allowed to use whatever means of transport necessary to distribute the food, to set up soup kitchens and local and regional committees, "to communicate freely with designated organizations abroad," and even "to discuss measures taken by local or central authorities that in its opinion are relevant to the question of the struggle against the famine." 30 At no other moment in the history of the Soviet regime was any other organization granted such privileges. The government's concessions were a measure of the scale of the catastrophe facing the country, four months after the official (and somewhat muted) introduction of the N.E.P.
Having obtained the assistance of the church, the All-Russian Committee for Aid to the Starving contacted various international organizations, including the Red Cross, the Quakers, and the American Relief Association (ARA), presided over by Herbert Hoover; all responded positively. Even so, cooperation between the committee and the regime lasted only five weeks; on 27 August 1921 the committee was dissolved, six days after the government had signed an agreement with a representative of the ARA. For Lenin, now that the Americans were sending the first cargoes of food, the committee had served its purpose: "The name and the signature of Kuskova" had played the required role, and that was enough. In announcing this decision, Lenin wrote:
I propose to dissolve the Committee immediately . . . Prokopovich is to be arrested for seditious behavior and kept in prison for three months . . . The other Committee members are to be exiled from Moscow immediately, sent to the chief cities of different regions, cut off if possible from all means of communication, including railways, and kept under close surveillance. Tomorrow we will release a brief governmental communique saying that the Committee has been dissolved because it refused to work. Instruct all newspapers to begin insulting these people, and heap opprobrium upon them, accusing them of being closet White Guard supporters and bourgeois do-gooders who are much keener to travel abroad than to help at home. In general, make them look ridiculous and mock them at least once a week for the next two months.31
Following these instructions to the letter, the press unleashed a ferocious attack against the sixty famous intellectuals who had served on the committee. The titles alone of the articles demonstrate the eloquence of this campaign of defamation: "You shouldn't play with hunger" (Pravda, 30 August 1921); "Hunger Speculators" (Kommunistuheskii trucl, 31 August 1921); u Committee for Aid ... to the Counterrevolution" (Izvestiya, 30 August 1921). When someone tried to intercede in favor of the committee members who had been arrested and deported, Josif Unshlikht, one of Dzerzhinsky's assistants at the Cheka, declared: "You say the Committee has done nothing wrong. It's possible. But it has become a rallying point in society, and that we cannot allow. When you put a seed in water, it soon starts to sprout roots, and the Committee was beginning to spread its roots throughout society, undermining collectivity . . . we had no choice but to pull it up by the roots and to crush it." 32
In place of the committee the government set up a Central Commission for Help for the Hungry, a slow-moving and bureaucratic organization made up of civil servants from various People's Commissariats, which was characterized by inefficiency and corruption. When the famine was at its worst in the summer of 1922 and nearly 30 million people were starving, the Central Commission was assuring an irregular supply to about 3 million people, whereas the Red Cross, the Quakers, and the ARA supplied about 11 million people per day. Despite the massive international relief effort, at least 5 million of the 29 million Russians affected died of hunger in 1921 and 1922.33
The last great famine that Russia had known, in 1891, had affected most of the same regions (mid-Russia, the lower Volga, and part of Kazakhstan) and had been responsible for the deaths of between 400,000 and 500,000 people. Both the state and society in general had fought extremely hard to save lives. A young lawyer called Vladimir Ilych Ulyanov was then living in Samara, the regional capital of one of the areas worst affected by the famine. He was the only member of the local intelligentsia who not only refused to participate in the aid for the hungry, but publicly opposed it. As one of his friends later recalled, "Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov had the courage to come out and say openly that famine would have numerous positive results, particularly in the appearance of a new industrial proletariat, which would take over from the bourgeoisie .. . Famine, he explained, in destroying the outdated peasant economy,would bring about the next stage more rapidly, and usher in socialism, the stage that necessarily followed capitalism. Famine would also destroy faith not only in the czar, but in God too." 34
Thirty years later, when the young lawyer had become the head of the Bolshevik government, his ideas remained unchanged: famine could and should "strike a mortal blow against the enemy." The enemy in question was the Orthodox Church. "Electricity will replace God. The peasants should pray to it; in any case they will feel its effects long before they feel any effect from on high" said Lenin in 1918 when discussing the electrification of Russia with Leonid Krasin. As soon as the Bolshevik regime had come to power, relations with the Orthodox Church had deteriorated. On 5 February 1918 the government had declared the separation of church and state and of the church and schools, proclaimed freedom of conscience and worship, and announced the nationalization of all church property. Patriarch Tikhon had vigorously protested this attack on the traditional role of the church in four pastoral letters to the faithful. The behavior of the Bolsheviks became more and more provocative. They ordered all church relics to be "valued," organized anti-religious carnivals to coincide with traditional feast days, and demanded that the great monastery of the Trinity and St. Sergius near Moscow, where the relics of St. Sergius of Radonezh were kept, be turned into a museum of atheism. Numerous priests and bishops had already been arrested for protesting the intimidatory measures of the state when the Bolshevik leaders, on Lenin's orders, used the famine as a pretext to launch a large-scale campaign against the church.
On 26 February 1922 a government decree was published in the press ordering "the immediate confiscation from churches of all precious objects of gold or silver and of all precious stones that do not have a religious importance. These objects will be sent to the People's Commissariat of Finance and will then be transferred to the Central Committee for Help for the Hungry." The confiscations began in early March and were accompanied by many confrontations between the detachments responsible for impounding the church treasures and the church faithful. The most serious incidents took place on 15 March 1922 in Cbuya, a small industrial town in Ivanovo Province, where troops opened fire on the crowd and killed a dozen of the faithful. Lenin used this massacre as a pretext to step up the anti-religious campaign.
In a letter addressed to the Politburo on 19 March 1922, he explained, with characteristic cynicism, how the famine could be turned to the Bolsheviks' advantage and exploited to strike the enemy a mortal blow:
Regarding the events at Chuya, which the Politburo will be discussing, I think a firm decision should be adopted immediately as part of the general campaign on this front ... If we bear in mind what the newspapers are saying about the attitude of the clergy toward the confiscation of church goods, and the subversive attitude that is being adopted by the Patriarch Tikhon, it becomes apparent that the Black Hundred clergy are putting into action a plan that has been developed to strike a decisive blow against us ... I think our enemies are committing a monumental strategic error. In fact the present moment favors us far more than it does them. We are almost 99 percent sure that we can strike a mortal blow against them and consolidate the central position that we are going to need to occupy for several decades to come. With the help of all those starving people who are starting to eat each other, who are dying by the millions, and whose bodies litter the roadside all over the country, it is now and only now that we can—and therefore must—confiscate all church property with all the ruthless energy we can still muster. This is precisely the moment when the masses will support us most fervently, and rise up against the reactionary machinations of the petit-bourgeois and Black Hundred religious conspirators ... we must therefore amass a treasure of hundreds of millions of gold rubles (think how rich some of those monasteries are!). Without treasure on that scale, no state projects, no economic projects, and no shoring up of our present position will be conceivable. No matter what the cost, we must have those hundreds of millions (or even billions) of rubles. This can be carried out only at the present moment. All evidence suggests that we could not do this at any other moment, because our only hope is the despair engendered in the masses by the famine, which will cause them to look at us in a favorable light or, at the very least, with indifference. I thus can affirm categorically that this is the moment to crush the Black Hundred clergy in the most decisive manner possible, and to act without any mercy at all, with the sort of brutality that they will remember for decades. I propose to implement our plan in the following manner: Only Comrade Kalinin will act openly. Whatever happens, Comrade Trotsky will not appear in the press or in public . . . One of the most intelligent and energetic members of the Central Executive Committee must be sent to Chuya, with oral instructions from one of the members of the Politburo. These instructions will stipulate that his mission in Chuya is to arrest a large number of members of the clergy, of bourgeoisie and petit-bourgeoisie, several dozen at least, who will all be accused of direct or indirect participation in violent resistance against the decree regarding the confiscation of church goods. Once back from this mission, the envoy will make a full report to the entire Politburo or to a meeting of two or three members. On the basis of this report, the Politburo, again orally, will issue precise instructions to the judicial authorities, to the effect that the trial of the Chuya rebels is to be expedited as rapidly as possible. The result of the trial is to be the execution, by public shooting, of a large number of the Chuya Black Hundreds as well as the shooting of as many as possible from Moscow and other important religious centers . . . The more representatives from the reactionary clergy and the recalcitrant bourgeoisie we shoot, the better it will be for us. We must teach these people a lesson as quickly as possible, so that the thought of protesting again doesn't occur to them for decades to come."35
As the weekly reports from the secret police indicate, the campaign to confiscate church goods was at its height in March, April, and May 1922, when it led to 1,414 incidents and the arrest of thousands of priests, nuns, and monks. According to church records, 2,691 priests, 1,962 monks, and 3,447 nuns were killed that year. 36 The government organized several large show trials for members of the clergy in Moscow, Ivanovo, Chuya, Smolensk, and Pctrograd. A week after the incidents in Chuya, in accordance with Lenin's instructions, the Politburo proposed a series of measures: u Arrest the synod and the patriarch, not immediately, but between a fortnight and a month from now. Make public the circumstances surrounding the business in Chuya. Bring to trial all the priests and lay members of Chuya in one week's time. Shoot all the rebel leaders."37 In a note to the Politburo, Dzerzhinsky indicated that
the patriarch and his followers ... are openly resisting the confiscation of church goods ... We already have enough evidence to arrest Tikhon and the more reactionary members of the synod. In the view of the GPU: (1) the time is right for the arrest of the patriarch and the synod; (2) permission should not be granted for the formation of a new synod; (3) all priests resisting the confiscation of church goods should be designated enemies of the people and exiled to one of the Volga regions most affected by the famine. 38
In Petrograd 77 priests were sent to camps; 4 were sentenced to death, including the metropolitan of Petrograd, Benjamin, who had been elected in 1917 and enjoyed a wide popular following. Ironically, he was among those who had spoken strongly in favor of the separation of church and state. In Moscow 148 priests and lay brethren were sent to the camps, and 6 received death sentences that were immediately carried out. Patriarch Tikhon was placed under close surveillance in the Donskoi monastery in Moscow.
On 6 June 1922, a few weeks after these legal travesties in Moscow, a large public trial began, announced in the press since the end of February: thirty- four Socialist Revolutionaries were accused of "counterrevolutionary and terrorist activities against the Soviet government," including most notably the attempt to assassinate Lenin on 31 August 1918 and participation in the Tambov peasant revolt. In a scenario that was replayed over and over in the 1930's, the accused included authentic political leaders, such as the twelve members of the Central Committee of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, led by Avraham Gots and Dmitry Donskoi, and agents provocateurs instructed to testify against the others and to "confess their crimes." As Helene Carrere d'Encausse has pointed out, this trial permitted the authorities to "test out the 'Russian doll' method of accusation, whereby one solid accusation—the fact that since 1918 the Socialist Revolutionaries had been opposed to Bolshevik rule—was cited to 'prove' that any opposition to the Bolsheviks' policies was, in the final analysis, an act of cooperation with the international bourgeoisie."39
At the conclusion of this parody of justice, after the authorities had orchestrated political demonstrations calling for the death penalty for the "terrorists," eleven of the accused leaders of the Socialist Revolutionary Party were condemned to death. Faced with protests from the international community, organized largely by exiled Russian socialists, and with the more serious threat of uprisings in the pro-Socialist Revolutionary countryside, the sentences were suspended on the condition that "the Socialist Revolutionary Party ends all conspiratorial, insurrectionary, and terrorist activities." In January 1924 the death sentences were reduced to five years' internment in the camps. Needless to say the prisoners were never set free, and were in fact executed in the 1930's, when international opinion and the danger of peasant uprisings no longer posed a threat to the Bolshevik leadership.
The trial of the Socialist Revolutionaries was one of the first opportunities to test the new penal code, which had come into force on 1 June 1922. Lenin had followed its elaboration quite closely. One of the code's functions was to permit the use of all necessary violence against political enemies even though the civil war was over and "expeditious elimination" could no longer be justified. The first drafts of the code, shown to Lenin on 15 May 1922, provoked the following reply to Kursky, the people's commissar of justice: "It is my view that the leeway for applying the death penalty should be considerably enlarged, and should include all the activities of Mensheviks, Socialist Revolutionaries, and others. Create a new punishment involving banishment abroad. And find some formulation that will link all these activities to the international bourgeoisie."40 Two days later Lenin wrote again:
Comrade Kursky, I want you to add this draft of a complementary paragraph to the penal code ... It is quite clear for the most part. We must openly—and not simply in narrow juridical terms—espouse a politically just principle that is the essence and motivation for terror, showing its necessity and its limits. The courts must not end the terror or suppress it in any way. To do so would be deception. They must give it a solid basis, and clearly legalize all its principles without any form m of deception or deceit. It must be formulated as openly as possible: what we need to encourage is a revolutionary legal consciousness that will allow it to be applied wherever it is needed.41
In accordance with Lenin's instructions, the penal code defined counterrevolutionary activity as any action "aiming to attack or destabilize the power given to Soviet workers and peasants by the revolutionary proletariat," as well as "any action in favor of the international bourgeoisie that fails to recognize the validity of the Communist system and the fair distribution of property as a natural successor to the capitalist system, and any action that tries to reverse the situation by force, military intervention, economic blockade, espionage, illegal financing of the press, or other such means."
Anything that was classified as a counterrevolutionary action, including rebellion, rioting, sabotage, and espionage, was immediately punishable by death, as was participation in or support for any organization "that might provide support for the international bourgeoisie." Even "propaganda that might be of use to the international bourgeoisie" was considered a counterrevolutionary crime, punishable by incarceration for not less than three years or by lifelong exile.
Along with the legalization of political violence, discussed in early 1922, came nominal changes within the secret police. On 6 February 1922 the Chcka was abolished by decree, to be immediately replaced by the State Political Directorate Administration (Gosudastvennoe politicheskoe upravlenie; GPU), which was responsible to the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs. Although the name had changed, the staff and the administrative structure remained the same, ensuring a high degree of continuity within the institution. The change in title emphasized that whereas the Cheka had been an extraordinary agency, which in principle was only transitory, the GPU was permanent. The state thus gained a ubiquitous mechanism for political repression and control. Lying behind the name change were the legalization and the institutionalization of terror as a means of resolving all conflict between the people and the state.
One of the new punishments instituted in the new penal code was lifelong banishment, with the understanding that any return to the US.S.R. would be greeted with immediate execution. It was put into practice from as early as 1922 as part of a long expulsion operation that affected nearly 200 well-known intellectuals suspected of opposing Bolshevism. Among them were many of the prominent figures who had participated in the Social Committee for the Fight against Famine, which had been dissolved on 27 July of that year.
In a long letter to Dzerzhinsky dated 20 May 1922, Lenin laid out a vast plan for the "banishment abroad of all writers and teachers who have assisted the counterrevolution . . . This operation must be planned with great care. A special commission must be set up. All members of the Politburo must spend two to three hours each week carefully examining books and newspapers Information must be gathered systematically on the political past, the work, and the literary activity of teachers and writers."
Lenin led the way with an example:
As far as the journal Ekonomist is concerned, for example, it is clearly a center for White Guard activity. On the cover of the third issue (N.B.: as early as that!) all the collaborators are listed. I think they are all legitimate candidates for expulsion. They are all known counterrevolutionaries and accomplices of the Entente, and they make up a network of its servants, spies, and corrupters of youth. Things must be set in motion such that they are hunted down and imprisoned in a systematic and organized fashion and banished abroad. 42
On 22 May the Politburo established a special commission, including notably Kamenev, Kursky, Unshlikht, and Vasily Mantsev (the last two being Dzerzhinksy's two assistants), to collect information on intellectuals to be arrested and expelled. The first two people expelled in this fashion were the two main leaders of the Social Committee for the Fight against Famine, Sergei Prokopovich and Ekaterina Kuskova. A first group of 160 well-known intellectuals, philosophers, writers, historians, and university professors, who were arrested on 16 and 17 August, were deported in September. Some of the names on the list were already famous internationally or would soon become so: Nikolai Berdyaev, Sergei Bulgakov, Scmyon Frank, Nikolai Loski, Lev Karsavin, Fyodor Stepun, Sergei Trubetskoi, Alcksandr Isgoev, Mikhail Ossorgin, Aleksandr Kiesewetter. Each was forced to sign a document stating that he understood that if he ever returned to the US.S.R., he would immediately be shot. Each was allowed to take one winter coat and one summer coat, one suit and change of clothes, two shirts, two nightshirts, two pairs of socks, two sets of underwear, and twenty dollars in foreign currency.
Parallel to these expulsions, the secret police proceeded with its policy of gathering information about all second-tier intellectuals who were under suspicion and were destined either for administrative deportation to remote areas of the country, codified in law by a decree on 10 August 1922, or for the concentration camps. On 5 September Dzerzhinsky wrote to his assistant Unshlikht:
Comrade Unshlikht! Regarding the files kept on the intelligentsia, the system is not nearly sophisticated enough. Since [Yakov] Agronov left, we seem to have no one capable of organizing this properly, Zaraysky is still too young. It seems to me that if we are going to make any progress at all, Menzhinsky is going to have to take things in hand ... It is essential to devise a clear plan that can be regularly completed and updated. The intelligentsia must be classed into groups and subgroups:
1. Writers
2. Journalists and politicians
3. Economists: subgroups are very important here:
(a) financiers,
(b) workers in the energy sector,
(c) transport specialists,
(d) tradesmen,
(e) people with experience in cooperatives, etc.
4. Technical specialists: here too subgroups are necessary:
(a) engineers,
(b) agronomists,
(c) doctors, etc.
5. University lecturers and their assistants, etc.
Information on all such people must go to specific departments and be synthesized by the Main Department on the Intelligentsia. Every intellectual must have his own file . . . It must be clear in our minds that the objective of the department is not simply to expel or arrest individuals, but to contribute to general political matters and policies concerning intellectuals. They must be controlled, closely watched and divided up, and those who are ready to support the Soviet regime and demonstrate this by their actions and their words should be considered for promotion. 43
A few days later Lenin sent a long memorandum to Stalin in which he returned over and over, in almost maniacal detail, to the question of a "definitive purging" of all socialists, intellectuals, and liberals in Russia:
Regarding the question of the expulsion of Mensheviks, populist socialists, cadets, etc., I would like to raise a few questions here. This issue came up in my absence and has not yet been dealt with fully Mas the decision been made yet to root out all the popular socialists? [Andrei] Pechekhonov, [Aleksandr] Myakotin, [A.G.] Gornfeld, [N.] Petrishchcv, and the like? I think the time has come for them to be exiled. They are more dangerous than the Socialist Revolutionaries because they are more cunning. We could say the same of [Aleksandr] Potresov, [Aleksandr] Isgoev, and the rest of the staff at the journal Ekonomist, such as Ozerov and several others. The same applies to the Mensheviks such as [Vasily] Rozanov (a doctor, not to be trusted), Vigdorshik (Migulo or something like that), Lyubov Nikolaevna Radchenko and her young daughter (who seem to be two of the worst enemies of Bolshevism), and N. A. Rozhkov (he must be exiled, he really is incorrigible) . . . The Mantsev-Messing commission must draw up lists, and hundreds of these people should be expelled immediately. It is our duty to clean up Russia once and for all . . . All the authors at the House of Writers and Thinkers in Petrograd, too, must go. Kharkiv must be searched from top to bottom. We currently have absolutely no idea what is happening there; it might as well be in a foreign country. The city needs a radical cleansing as soon as possible, right after the trial of all the Socialist Revolutionaries. Do something about all those authors and writers in Petrograd (you can find all their addresses in New Russian Thought, no. 4, 1922, p. 37) and all the editors of small publishing houses too (their names and addresses are on page 29). This is all of supreme importance. 44
Next
From the Truce to the Great Turning Point
notes
4. The Dirty War 1 . L. G. Gorelik, ed., Goneniya na anarkhism v Sovietskoi Rossii (The persecution of anarchism in Soviet Russia) (Berlin, 1922), pp. 27-63.
2. Izvestiya, 18 March 1919, L. D. Gerson, The Secret Police in Lemins Russia (Philadelphia: Tample University Press, 1976), pp. 151-152; G. Leggett, The Cheka: Lenin's Political Police (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), pp. 31 1-316.
3. V. I. Brovkin, Behind the Front Lines of the Civil War: Political Parties and Social Movements in Russia, 1918-1922 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 54.
4. G. A. Belov, Iz istorii Vserossnskoi Chrezvchainoi Komissn, 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), p. 354; CRCEDHC 5/1/2615.
5. Brovkin, Behind the Front Lines, pp. 252-257.
6. Tsirkulyarnoe pis'mo VChK (Cheka circular), pp. 267-268, B. I. Nikolaevsky Archives, Hoover Institution, Stanford, Calif,
7. RTsKhlDNI, 17/84/43/2-4.
8. Brovkin, Behind the Front Lines, p. 69; RTsKhlDNI, 17/84/43.
9. Leggett, The Cheka, p. 313; Brovkin, Behind the Front Lines, p. 71; Petrogradskaya pravda, 13 April 1919, p. 3.
10. RTsKhlDNI, 17/66/68/2-5; 17/6/351.
11. Ibid., 17/6/197/105; 17/66/68.
12. Ibid., 17/6/351; Izvestiya TsKa RKP(b) (News from the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party), no. 3 (4 July 1919), RTsKhlDNI, 2/1/24095; GARF, 1.30/3/363.
13. Brovkin, Behind the Front Lines, pp. 82-85; S. P. Melgunov, The Red Terror in Russia (London: Dent, 1925), pp. 58-60; P. Silin, u Astrakhanskie rasstrely" (The shootings in Astrakhan), in Cheka: Materialy po deyatelnosii Chrezvuhamoi Komissti (Cheka: Materials on the activities of the Extraordinary Commission), ed. V. Chernov (Berlin: Izd. TSentr. biuro Partii sotsialistov-revoliutsionerov, 1922), pp. 248-255.
14. RTsKhlDNI, 2/1/11957.
15. The Trotsky Papers, 1917-1922, ed. Jan M. Meijer (The Hague: Mouton, 1964— 1971), 2:22.
16. Brovkin, Behind the Front Lines, p. 289.
17. Trotsky Papers, 2: 20.
18. Brovkin, Behind the Front Lines, pp. 297 ff.
19. Ibid., pp. 292-296.
20. Andrea Graziosi, The Great Soviet Peasant War: Bolsheviks and Peasants, 1917- 1933 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University, Ukrainian Research Institute, 1996).
21. S. A. Pavlyuchenkov, Krestyanskii Brest (The peasants' Brest Treaty) (Moscow: Russkoe knigoizd. tov., 1996), pp. 188-240.
22. Orlando Figes, "The Red Army and Mass Mobilization during the Russian Civil War, 1918-1920," Past and Present, no. 129 (November 1990), 199-200.
23. Dekrety sovietskot vlasti (Decrees of the Soviet regime) (Moscow: Gos. izd-vo polit. lit-ry, 1957-), 4: 167.
24. Brovkin, Behind the Front Lines, p, 318.
25. Russian State Military Archives, Moscow, 33987/3/32.
26. A collection of these reports, assembled by a team of Russian, French, and Italian historians, under the direction of V. P. Danilov, appeared in Russian at the end of 1997,
27. M. S. Frenkin, Tragedia krestyansktkh vosstamy v Rossii, 1918-1921 (Tragedy of peasant uprisings in Russia, 1918-1921) (Jerusalem: Leksikon, 1987); Orlando Figes, Peasant Russia, Civil War: The Volga Countryside in the Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); Brovkin, Behind the Front Lines.
28. Taros Hunczak, ed., The Ukraine, 1917-1921: A Study in Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute and Harvard University Press, 1977).
29. Volin (V. M. Eikhenbaum), The Unknown Revolution, 1917-1921, trans. Holley Cantine (New York: Free Life Editions, 1974), pp. 509-626; Alexandre Skirda, Les Cossaques de la liberie (Paris: J. C. Lattes, 1985); Richard Pipes, Russia under the Bolshe- vik Regime, 1919-1924 (London: HarperCollins, 1994), pp. 106-108.
30. Pipes, Russia under the Bolshevik Regime, pp. 105-131 .
31. Figes, Peasant Russia, Civil War, pp. 333 ff; Brovkin, Behind the Front Lines, pp. 323-325.
32. RTsKhlDNI, 76/3/109.
33. V. L. Genis, "Raskazachivanie v Sovietskoi Rossii" (The de-Cossackization in Soviet Russia), Voprosy tstoru (Problems of history), no. 1 (1994), 42-55.
34. Izvesttya TsKPSS, no. 6(1989), 177-178.
35. RTsKhlDNI, 5/2/106/7.
36. Genis, "Raskazachivanie v Sovietskoi Rossii," pp. 42-55.
37. RTsKhlDNI, 17/6/83.
38. Genis, "Raskazachivanie v Sovietskoi Rossii,' 1 p. 50; RTsKhlDNI, 17/84/75.
39. Melgunov, The Red Terror in Russia, p. 77; Brovkin, Behind the Front Lines, p. 346. 40. RTsKhlDNI, 17/84/75/28.
41. Ibid., 17/84/75/59.
42. Quoted in Brovkin, Behind the Front Lines, p. 353.
43. RTsKhlDNI, 85/11/131/11.
44. Ibid., 85/1 1/123/15.
45. Krasnyi mech (Red sword), no. 1 (18 August 1919), 1.
46. RTsKhlDNI, 5/1/2159/35-38.
47. ibid., 76/3/70/20.
48. Ibid., 17/6/384/62.
49. Ibid., 17/66/66.
50. Izvestiya Odesskogo Sovieta rahochtkh deputatov, no. 36, p. 1, quoted in Brovkin, Behind the Front Lines, p. 121.
51. Melgunov, The Red Terror in Russia, pp. 61-77; Leggett, The Cheka, pp. 199- Notesto Pages 106-117 767 200; Brovkin, Behind the Front Lines, pp. 122-125; GARF, Denikin Commission files, nos. 134 (Kharkiv), 157 (Odessa), 194, 195 (Kyiv).
52. Chernov, Cheka: Materialy.
53. Estimates based on Melgunov, The Red Terror in Russia, p. 77; and on Socialist Revolutionary sources from Kharkiv in May 1921.
54. V. I. Lenin, Polnoe sohrame sochinemi (Complete collected works) (Moscow: Gos. izd-vo polit. lit-ry, 1958-1966), 42: 74.
55. Melgunov, The Red Terror in Russia, p. 81 .
5. From Tambov to the Great Famine
1. V. Danilov and T Shanin, Krestyanskoe vosstanie v Tamhovskoi gubermi v 191 (/~ 1921 (The peasant revolt in Tambov Province, 1919-1921) (Tambov: Intertsentr: Arkhivnyi otdel administratsii Tambovskoi obi., 1994), pp. 38-40.
2. RTsKhlDNI, 17/86/103/4; S. Singleton, "The Tambov Revolt;' Slavic Review 26 (1966), 49&-512; Oliver Radkey, The Unknown Civtl War in Russia: A Study of the Green Movement in the Tambov Region (Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution Press, Stanford University, 1976); Orlando Figes, Peasant Russia, Civil War: The Volga Countryside in the Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).
3. Danilov and Shanin, Krestyanskoe vosstanie, pp. 63-64; Radkey, The Unknown Civil War, pp. 122-126.
4. V. I. Lenin, Polnoe sobrante sochmenii (Complete collected works) (Moscow: Gos, izd-vo polit. lit-ry, 1958-1966), 51: 310.
5. M. Bogdanov, Razgrom zapadno-silnrskogo kttlachko-eserovskogo myatezha ([De- struction of the west Siberian kulak-SR rebellion) (Tyumen: Polit Tyum, 1961).
6. RTsKhlDNI, 76/3/208/12.
7. Ibid, 76/3/166/3.
8. V. I. Brovkin, Behind the Front Lines of the Civil War: Political Parties and Social Movements in Russia, 1918-1922 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 392.
9. RTsKhlDNI, 76/3/167/23.
10. P. Avrich, Kronstadt, 1921 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), pp. 153-183.
11. RTsKhlDNI, 76/3/167.
12. "Kronstadt, 1921," in Dokumenty (Moscow, 1997), p. 15.
13. George Leggett, The Cheka: Lenin s Political Police (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), p. 328.
14. S. A. Malsagov, An Island Hell: A Soviet Prison in the Far North, trans. K H. Lyon (London: A. M. Philpot, 1926), pp. 45^46.
15. "Kronstadt, 1921," p. 367.
16. Brovkin, Behind the Front Lines, p. 400.
17. Andrea Graziosi, "At the Roots of Soviet Industrial Relations and Practices — Piatokov's Donbass in 1921," Cahiers du monde russe 36 (1995), 95-138.
18. Danilov and Shanin, Krestyanskoe vosstanie, pp. 179-180.
19. Ibid., pp. 178-179.
20. Ibid., pp. 226-227.
21. Ibid., p. 218.
22. GARF, 393/89/182; 393/89/295.
23. RTsKhlDNI, 5/2/244/1.
24. Ibid., 17/87/164; 76/3/237.
25. Ibid., 17/87/296/35-36.
26. Pravda, 21 July 1921; Mikhail Heller, "Premier avertissement: Un coupde fouet. L'histoire de Texpulsion des personnalites culturelles hors de PUnion sovietique en 1922," Cahters du monde russe et sovietique, 20 (April-June 1979), 131-172.
27. GARF, 1064/1/1/33.
28. RTsKhlDNI, 2/1/26847.
29. Heller, "Premier avertissement," p. 141.
30. Ibid., p. 143.
31. Ibid., pp. 148-149.
32. Ibid., p. 151.
33. S. Adamets, "Catastrophes demographiques en Russie sovietique en 1918-1923" (Doctoral thesis, EHESS, December 1995), p. 191.
34. A. Beliakov, Yunost vozhdya (The adolescence of the leader) (Moscow: Molodaya gvardiia, 1958), pp. 80-82, quoted in Heller, "Premier avertissement," p. 134.
35. RTsKhlDNI, 2/1/22947/1-4.
36. Russkaya Pravoslavnaya tserkva i kommumsticheskoe gosudarstvo, 19/ 7-1941 (The Russian Orthodox Church and the Communist state, 1917-1941) (Moscow: Terra, 1996), p. 69.
37. Dmitry Volkogonov, Lenm: politicheskii portret; v dvukh knigakh (Lenin: A politi- cal portrait) (Moscow: Novosti, 1994), p. 346.
38. Ibid.
39. Helene Carrere d'Encausse, The Russian Syndrome: One Thousand Years of Political Murder (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1992), p. 400.
40. Lenin, Polnoe sohranie sochinemi, 54: 189.
41. Ibid., p. 198.
42. Ibid., pp. 265-266.
43. RTsKhlDNI, 76/3/303.
44. Ibid., 2/2/1338.
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