The Russian Revolution

18

The Red Terror

Terror is for the most part useless cruelties committed by frightened people to reassure themselves.

—F. Engels to K. Marx¹

Systematic state terror is hardly a Bolshevik invention: its antecedents go back to the Jacobins. Even so, the differences between Jacobin and Bolshevik practices in this respect are so profound that one can credit the Bolsheviks with having invented terror. Suffice it to say that the French Revolution culminated in terror, whereas the Russian one began with it. The former has been called a “brief parenthesis,” a “countercurrent”:² the Red Terror constituted from the outset an essential element of the regime, which now intensified, now abated, but never disappeared, hanging like a permanent dark cloud over Soviet Russia.

As in the case of War Communism, the Civil War, and other unsavory aspects of Bolshevism, Bolshevik spokesmen and apologists like to place the blame for terror on their opponents. It is said to have been a regrettable, but unavoidable reaction to the counterrevolution: in other words, a practice they would have shunned if given the chance. Typical is the verdict of Lenin’s friend Angelica Balabanoff:

Unfortunate though it might be, the terror and repression which had been inaugurated by the Bolsheviks had been forced upon them by foreign intervention and by Russian reactionaries determined to defend their privileges and reestablish the old regime.³

Such apologias can be dismissed on several grounds.

If terror had indeed been “forced” on the Bolsheviks by “foreign interventionists” and “Russian reactionaries,” then they would have abandoned it as soon as they had decisively defeated these enemies—that is, in 1920. They did nothing of the kind. Although with the termination of the Civil War they did put an end to the indiscriminate massacres of 1918–19, they made certain to leave intact the laws and institutions which had made them possible. Once Stalin became undisputed master of Soviet Russia all the instruments which he required to resume the terror on an incomparably vaster scale lay at hand. This fact alone demonstrates that for the Bolsheviks terror was not a defensive weapon but an instrument of governance.

This interpretation is confirmed by the fact that the principal institution of Bolshevik terror, the Cheka, was founded in early December 1917, before any organized opposition to the Bolsheviks had had a chance to emerge and when the “foreign interventionists” were still assiduously courting them. We have it on the authority of one of the most sadistic functionaries of the Cheka, the Latvian la. Kh. Peters, that in the first half of 1918, when the Cheka began to experiment with terror, “counterrevolutionary organizations … as such were not observed.”*

The evidence shows that Lenin, its most determined instigator, regarded terror as an indispensable instrument of revolutionary government. He was quite prepared to resort to it preventively—that is, in the absence of active opposition to his rule. His commitment to it was rooted in a deep-seated belief in the Rightness of his cause and in an inability to perceive politics in hues other than pure white and pure black. It was essentially the same outlook that had driven Robespierre, to whom Trotsky had compared Lenin as early as 1904.⁴ Like the French Jacobin, Lenin sought to build a world inhabited exclusively by “good citizens.” This objective led him, like Robespierre, morally to justify the physical elimination of “bad” citizens.

From the time he formed the Bolshevik organization, for which he was proud to claim the title “Jacobin,” Lenin spoke of the need for revolutionary terror. In a 1908 essay, “Lessons of the Commune,” he made revealing observations on this subject. Having listed the achievements and failures of this first “proletarian revolution,” he indicated its cardinal weakness: the proletariat’s “excessive generosity—it should have exterminated its enemies,” instead of trying “to exert moral influence on them.”⁵ This remark must be one of the earliest instances in political literature in which the term “extermination,” normally used for vermin, is applied to human beings. As we have seen, Lenin habitually described those whom he chose to designate as his regime’s “class enemies” in terms borrowed from the vocabulary of pest control, calling kulaks “bloodsuckers,” “spiders,” and “leeches.” As early as January 1918 he used inflammatory language to incite the population to carry out pogroms:

The communes, small cells in the village and city, must themselves work out and test thousands of forms and methods of practical accounting and control over the rich, swindlers, and parasites. Variety here is a guarantee of vitality, of success and the attainment of the single objective: the cleansing of Russia’s soil of all harmful insects, of scoundrel fleas, bedbugs—the rich, and so on.⁶

Hitler would follow this example in regard to the leaders of German Social Democracy, whom he thought of as mainly Jews, calling them in Mein Kampf “Ungeziefer,” or “vermin,” fit only for extermination.⁷

Nothing illustrates better how deeply the passion for terror was embedded in Lenin’s psyche than an incident which occurred on his first day as head of state. As the Bolsheviks were taking power, Kamenev asked the Second Congress of Soviets to abolish the death penalty for front-line deserters, which Kerensky had reintroduced in mid-1917. The congress adopted this proposal and abolished capital punishment at the front.⁸ Lenin, busy elsewhere, missed this event. According to Trotsky, when he learned of it, he became “utterly indignant.” “Nonsense,” he said,

how can you make a revolution without executions? Do you expect to dispose of your enemies by disarming yourself? What other means of repression are there? Prisons? Who attaches significance to that during a civil war, when each side hopes to win? … It is a mistake, he repeated, impermissible weakness, pacifist illusion, and so on.⁹

This was said at a time when the Bolshevik dictatorship was barely in the saddle, when no organized opposition had formed because no one believed the Bolsheviks would last, when there was as yet nothing remotely resembling a “civil war.” On Lenin’s insistence, the Bolsheviks ignored the congress’s action in regard to the death penalty and reintroduced it more or less formally the following June.

Although Lenin preferred to direct the terror from behind the scenes, he occasionally let it be known he had no patience with complaints about “innocent” victims of the Cheka. “I judge soberly and categorically,” he replied in 1919 to a Menshevik worker who criticized arrests of innocent citizens, “what is better—to put in prison a few dozen or a few hundred inciters, guilty or not, conscious or not, or to lose thousands of Red Army soldiers and workers? The former is better.”¹⁰ This kind of reasoning served to justify indiscriminate persecution.*

Trotsky fell in step. On December 2, 1917, addressing the new, Bolshevik Ispolkom, he said:

There is nothing immoral in the proletariat finishing off the dying class. This is its right. You are indignant … at the petty terror which we direct against our class opponents. But be put on notice that in one month at most this terror will assume more frightful forms, on the model of the great revolutionaries of France. Our enemies will face not prison but the guillotine.¹¹

He defined the guillotine on this occasion (plagiarizing from the French revolutionary Jacques Hébert) as a device which “shortens a man by the length of a head.”

In light of this evidence it is absurd to talk of Red Terror as an “unfortunate” policy “forced” upon the Bolsheviks by foreign and domestic opponents. As it had been for the Jacobins, terror served the Bolsheviks not as a weapon of last resort, but as a surrogate for the popular support which eluded them. The more their popularity eroded, the more they resorted to terror, until in the fall and winter of 1918–19 they raised it to a level of indiscriminate slaughter never before seen.*

For these reasons, the Red Terror cannot be compared either with the so-called White Terror of the anti-Bolshevik armies in Russia, to which the Bolsheviks habitually referred for self-justification, or with the Jacobin Terror of France, which they liked to claim as a model.

The White armies did, indeed, execute many Bolsheviks and Bolshevik sympathizers, usually in summary fashion, sometimes in a barbarous manner. But they never elevated terror to the status of a policy and never created a formal institution like the Cheka to carry it out. Their executions were as a rule ordered by field officers, acting on their own initiative, often in an emotional reaction to the sights which greeted their eyes when they entered areas evacuated by the Red Army. Odious as it was, the terror of the White armies was never systematic, as was the case with the Red Terror.

The Jacobin Terror of 1793–94, for all its psychological and philosophical similarities with the Red Terror, also differed from it in several fundamental ways. For one, it had its origin in pressures from below, from the streets, from mobs outraged by shortages of food and in search of scapegoats. The Bolshevik terror, by contrast, was imposed from above on a population that had had its fill of bloodshed. As we shall see, Moscow had to threaten provincial soviets with severe punishments for failing to implement its terroristic directives. Although there was a great deal of spontaneous violence in 1917–18, there exists no evidence of mobs calling for the blood of entire social classes.

Second, the two terrors were of a very different duration. The Jacobin Terror took up less than one year of a revolution that by the narrowest definition lasted a decade: hence it could properly be described as an episode, “a brief parenthesis.” Immediately after the 9th of Thermidor, when the Jacobin leaders were arrested and guillotined, the French terror came to a sudden and permanent halt. But in Soviet Russia, the terror never ceased, going on intermittently, although at varying levels of intensity. While the death penalty was once again abolished at the end of the Civil War, executions went on as before, with minimum respect for judiciary procedures.

The difference between the Jacobin and Bolshevik terrors is perhaps best symbolized by the fact that in Paris no monuments have been raised to Robespierre and no streets named after him, whereas in the capital of Soviet Russia a giant statue of Feliks Dzerzhinskii, the founder of the Cheka, stands in the heart of the city, dominating a square named in his honor.

Bolshevik terror involved much more than mass executions: in the opinion of some contemporaries, these executions, terrible as they were, had a less oppressive effect than the pervasive atmosphere of repression. Isaac Steinberg, who was in a unique position to evaluate the phenomenon by virtue of his legal training and his experience as Lenin’s Commissar of Justice, noted in 1920 that even though the Civil War was over, the terror continued, having become an intrinsic feature of the regime. Summary executions of prisoners and hostages were to him only “the most glittering object in the somberly flickering firmament of terror that dominates the revolutionary earth,” “its bloody pinnacle, its apotheosis”:

Terror is not an individual act, not an isolated, fortuitous—even if recurrent—expression of the government’s fury. Terror is a system … a legalized plan of the regime for the purpose of mass intimidation, mass compulsion, mass extermination. Terror is a calculated register of punishments, reprisals, and threats by means of which the government intimidates, entices, and compels the fulfillment of its imperative will. Terror is a heavy, suffocating cloak thrown from above over the entire population of the country, a cloak woven of mistrust, lurking vigilance, and lust for revenge. Who holds this cloak in his hands, who presses through it on the entire population, without exception? … Under terror, force rests in the hands of a minority, the notorious minority, which senses its isolation and fears it. Terror exists precisely because the minority, ruling on its own, regards an ever-growing number of persons, groups, and strata as its enemy.… This “enemy of the Revolution” … expands until he dominates the entire expanse of the Revolution.… The concept keeps on enlarging until, by degrees, it comes to embrace the entire land, the entire population, and, in the end, “all with the exception of the government” and its collaborators.*

Steinberg included among the manifestations of the Red Terror the dissolution of free trade unions, the suppression of free speech, the ubiquity of police agents and informers, the disregard for human rights, and the all-pervasive hunger and want. In his view, this “atmosphere of terror,” its ever-present threat, poisoned Soviet life even more than the executions.

At the root of the terror lay Lenin’s Jacobin conviction that if the Bolsheviks were to stay and expand their power, the embodiment of “evil” ideas and interests, labeled “bourgeoisie,” had to be physically exterminated. The term “bourgeoisie” the Bolsheviks applied loosely to two groups: those who by virtue of their background or position in the economy functioned as “exploiters,” be they a millionaire industrialist or a peasant with an extra acre of land, and those who, regardless of their economic or social status, opposed Bolshevik policies. One could thus qualify as a “bourgeois,” objectively as well as subjectively, by virtue of one’s opinions. There exists telling testimony of Lenin’s genocidal fury in Steinberg’s recollections of his days in the Sovnarkom. On February 21, 1918, Lenin submitted to the cabinet the draft of a decree called “The Socialist Fatherland in Danger!”¹² The inspiration was the German advance into Russia following the Bolshevik failure to sign the Brest Treaty. The document appealed to the people to rise in defense of the country and the Revolution. In it, Lenin inserted a clause that provided for the execution “on the spot”—that is, without trial—of a broad and undefined category of villains labeled “enemy agents, speculators, burglars, hooligans, counterrevolutionary agitators, [and] German spies.” Lenin included summary justice for ordinary criminals (“speculators, burglars, hooligans”) in order to gain support for the decree from the population, which was sick of crime, but his true target was his political opponents, called “counterrevolutionary agitators.”

99. Isaac Steinberg.

The Left SRs criticized this measure, being opposed in principle to the death penalty for political opponents. “I objected,” Steinberg writes:

that this cruel threat killed the whole pathos of the manifesto. Lenin replied with derision, “On the contrary, herein lies true revolutionary pathos. Do you really believe that we can be victorious without the very crudest revolutionary terror?”

It was difficult to argue with Lenin on this score, and we soon reached an impasse. We were discussing a harsh police measure with far-reaching terroristic potentialities. Lenin resented my opposition to it in the name of revolutionary justice. So I called out in exasperation, “Then why do we bother with a Commissariat of Justice? Let’s call it frankly the Commissariat for Social Extermination and be done with it!” Lenin’s face suddenly brightened and he replied, “Well put … that’s exactly what it should be … but we can’t say that.”*

Although Lenin all along provided the main driving force for the Red Terror and often had to cajole his more humane colleagues, he went to extraordinary lengths to disassociate his name from the terror. He who insisted on affixing his signature to all laws and decrees omitted to do so whenever acts of state violence were involved: in these cases, he preferred to give credit to the chairman of the Central Committee, the Commissar of the Interior, or some other authority, such as the Ural Regional Soviet, which he made falsely assume responsibility for the massacre of the Imperial family. He desperately wanted to avoid having his name historically linked with the inhumanities which he instigated. “He took care,” writes one of his biographers,

to speak of the terror only in the abstract, disassociating himself from individual acts of terrorism, the murders in the basement of the Lubianka and in all the other basements.… Lenin kept himself so remote from the terror that the legend has grown up that he took no active part in it, leaving all decisions to Dzerzhinskii. It is an unlikely legend, for he was a man constitutionally incapable of deputing authority on important matters.¹³

In fact, all decisions bearing on this matter, whether they concerned general procedures or the execution of important prisoners, required the approval of the Bolshevik Central Committee (later the Politburo), of which Lenin was the permanent de facto chairman.¹⁴ The Red Terror was Lenin’s child, even if he desperately tried to deny parenthood.

The guardian of this unacknowledged progeny was Dzerzhinskii (Dzier-zyński), the Cheka’s founder and director. Almost forty at the outbreak of the Revolution, he was born near Vilno into a patriotic Polish gentry family. He broke with his family’s religious and nationalist heritage and joined the Lithuanian Social-Democratic Party, turning into a full-time revolutionary organizer and agitator. He spent eleven years in tsarist prisons and on hard labor. These were harsh years, which left indelible scars on his psyche, developing in him an indomitable will as well as an unquenchable thirst for revenge. He was capable of perpetrating the worst imaginable cruelties without pleasure, as an idealistic duty. Lean and ascetic, he carried out Lenin’s instructions with a religious dedication, sending “bourgeois” and “counterrevolutionaries” before firing squads with the same joyless compulsion with which centuries earlier he might have ordered heretics burned at the stake.

100. Feliks Dzerzhinskii.

The first step in the introduction of mass terror to Soviet Russia was the elimination of all legal restraint—indeed, of law itself—and its replacement by something labeled “revolutionary conscience.” Nothing like this had ever happened anywhere: Soviet Russia was the first state in history formally to outlaw law. This measure freed the authorities to dispose of anyone they disliked and legitimized pogroms against their opponents.

Lenin had planned it this way long before he took power. He believed that one of the cardinal mistakes of the Paris Commune had been its failure to abolish France’s legal system. This mistake he meant to avoid. In late 1918, he defined the dictatorship of the proletariat as “rule unrestricted by any law.”¹⁵ He viewed law and courts in the Marxist fashion as tools by means of which the ruling class advanced its interests: in “bourgeois” society, under the guise of enforcing impartial justice, law served to safeguard private property. This point of view was articulated in early 1918 by N. V. Krylenko, who would later serve as Commissar of Justice:

It is one of the most widespread sophistries of bourgeois science to maintain that the court … is an institution whose task it is to realize some sort of special “justice” that stands above classes, that is independent in its essence of society’s class structure, the class interests of the struggling groups, and the class ideology of the ruling classes … “Let justice prevail in courts”—one can hardly conceive more bitter mockery of reality than this.… Alongside, one can quote many such sophistries: that the court is a guardian of “law,” which, like “governmental authority,” pursues the higher task of assuring the harmonious development of “personality” … Bourgeois “law,” bourgeois “justice,” the interests of the “harmonious development” of bourgeois “personality” … Translated into the simple language of living reality this meant, above all, the preservation of private property …¹⁶

101. Fannie Kaplan.

From this premise, Krylenko concluded that the disappearance of private property would automatically lead to the disappearance of law: socialism would thus “destroy in embryo” the “psychological emotions” that made for crime. In this view, law did not prevent but caused crime.

Of course, some judiciary institutions would have to remain during the transition to full socialism, but these would serve the purposes not of hypocritical “justice” but of class war. “We need the state, we need compulsion,” Lenin wrote in March 1918. “The organs of the proletarian state in realizing this compulsion are to be Soviet courts.”¹⁷

True to his word, shortly after taking office, Lenin, with a stroke of the pen, liquidated Russia’s entire legal system as it had developed since the reform of 1864. This he accomplished with the decree of November 22, 1917, released after prolonged discussion in the Sovnarkom.¹⁸ The decree in the first instance dissolved nearly all existing courts, up to and including the Senate, the highest court of appeals. It further abolished the professions associated with the judiciary system, including the office of the Procurator (the Russian equivalent of the Attorney General), the legal profession, and most justices of the peace. It left intact only the “local courts” (mestnye sudy) which dealt with minor offenses.

The decree did not explicitly invalidate the laws on the statute books—this was to come one year later. But it produced the same effect by instructing judges of the local courts to be “guided in making decisions and passing sentences by the laws of the overthrown government only to the extent that these have not been annuled by the Revolution and do not contradict the revolutionary conscience and the revolutionary sense of legality.” An amendment clarifying this vague provision specified that those laws were annulled which ran contrary to Soviet decrees as well as to the “programs-minimum of the Social-Democratic Labor Party and the Party of the Socialists-Revolutionaries.” Essentially, in offenses still subject to judiciary procedures, guilt was determined by the impression gained by the judge or judges.

In March 1918, the regime replaced the local courts with People’s Courts (narodnye sudy). These were to deal with every category of crime of citizen against citizen: murder, bodily injury, theft, etc. The elected judges of these courts were not bound by any formalities concerning evidence.¹⁹ A ruling issued in November 1918 forbade judges of People’s Courts to refer to laws enacted before October 1917; it also absolved them further from having to observe any “formal” rules of evidence. In rendering verdicts, they were to be guided by the decrees of the Soviet Government and, when these were lacking, by the “socialist sense of justice” (sotsialisticheskoe pravosoznanie).²⁰

In line with the traditional Russian practice of treating crimes against the state and its representatives differently from crimes against private persons, the Bolsheviks concurrently (November 22, 1917) introduced a new type of court, modeled on a similar institution of the French Revolution, called Revolutionary Tribunals. These were to try persons charged with “counterrevolutionary crimes,” a category which embraced economic crimes and “sabotage.”²¹ To give them guidance, the Commissariat of Justice, then headed by Steinberg, issued on December 21, 1917, a supplementary instruction, which specified that “in setting the penalty, the Revolutionary Tribunal shall be guided by the circumstances of the case and the dictates of revolutionary conscience.”²² How the “circumstances of the case” were to be determined and what exactly constituted “revolutionary conscience” was left unsaid.* In effect, therefore, the Revolutionary Tribunals, from their foundation, operated as kangaroo courts, which sentenced defendants on the basis of a commonsensical impression of guilt. Initially, the Revolutionary Tribunals had no authority to mete out capital punishment. This situation was reversed with the surreptitious introduction of the death penalty. On June 16, 1918, Izvestiia published a “Resolution” signed by the new Commissar of Justice, P. I. Stuchka, which stated: “Revolutionary Tribunals are not bound by any rules in the choice of measures against the counterrevolution except in cases where the law defines the measure in terms of ‘no lower than’ such punishment.” This convoluted language meant that Revolutionary Tribunals were free to sentence offenders to death as they saw fit, but were required to do so when the government mandated such punishment. The first victim of this new ruling was the Soviet commander of the Baltic Fleet, Admiral A. M. Shchastnyi, whom Trotsky accused of plotting to surrender his ships to the Germans: his example was to serve as a lesson to the other officers. Shchastnyi was tried and sentenced on June 21 by a Special Revolutionary Tribunal of the Central Executive Committee, set up on Lenin’s orders to try cases of high treason.²³ When the Left SRs objected to this revival of the odious practice of the death penalty, Krylenko replied that the admiral “had been condemned not ‘to death’ but ‘to be shot.’ ”²⁴

With the expulsion of other parties from Soviet institutions, first the Mensheviks and SRs and then the Left SRs, the Revolutionary Tribunals turned into tribunals of the Bolshevik Party thinly disguised as public courts. In 1918, 90 percent of their staff were members of the Bolshevik Party.²⁵ To be appointed a judge on a Revolutionary Tribunal one needed no formal qualifications other than the ability to read and write. According to contemporary statistics, 60 percent of the judges on these tribunals had less than secondary schooling.²⁶ Steinberg writes, however, that some of the worst offenders were not such semi-educated proletarians but intellectuals who used the tribunals to pursue personal vendettas and who were not above taking bribes from families of the accused.²⁷

Those living under Bolshevik rule found themselves in a situation for which there was no historic precedent. There were courts for ordinary crimes and for crimes against the state, but no laws to guide them; citizens were sentenced by judges lacking in professional qualifications for crimes which were nowhere defined. The principles nullum crimen sine lege and nulla poena sine lege—no crime without a law and no punishment without a law—which had traditionally guided Western jurisprudence (and Russia’s since 1864), went overboard as so much useless ballast. The situation struck contemporaries as unusual in the extreme. One observer noted in April 1918 that in the preceding five months no one had been sentenced for looting, robbery, or murder, except by execution squads and lynching mobs. He wondered where all the criminals had disappeared to, given that the old courts had had to work around the clock.²⁸ The answer, of course, was that Russia had been turned into a lawless society. In April 1918, the novelist Leonid Andreev described what this meant for the average citizen:

We live in unusual conditions, still comprehensible to a biologist who studies the life of molds and fungi, but inadmissible for the psycho-sociologist. There is no law, there is no authority, the entire social order is defenseless.… Who protects us? Why are we still alive, unrobbed, not evicted from our homes? The old authority is gone; a band of unknown Red Guards occupies the neighborhood railroad station, learns how to shoot … carries out searches for food and weapons, and issues “permits” for travel to the city. There is no telephone and no telegraph. Who protects us? What remains of reason? Chance that no one has noticed us.… Finally, some general human cultural experiences, sometimes simple, unconscious habits: walking on the right side of the road, saying “good day” on meeting someone, tipping one’s own hat, not the other person’s. The music has long stopped, and we, like dancers, continue rhythmically to shuffle our feet and sway to the inaudible melody of law.²⁹

To Lenin’s disappointment, the Revolutionary Tribunals did not turn into instruments of terror. The judges worked lackadaisically and passed mild sentences. One newspaper noted in April 1918 that they had done little more than shut down a few newspapers and sentence a few “bourgeois.”³⁰ Even after being empowered to do so, they were reluctant to pass sentences of death. In the course of 1918, a year which included the official Red Terror, the Revolutionary Tribunals tried 4,483 defendants, one-third of whom it sentenced to hard labor, another third to the payment of fines, and only fourteen to death.³¹

This is not what Lenin intended. The judges, who in time were almost exclusively members of the Bolshevik Party, were urged to pass extreme sentences and given ever wider discretion to do so. In March 1920, the tribunals

received the authority to refuse to call and interrogate witnesses if their testimony during the preliminary inquest was clear, as well as the authority to stop at any moment the judiciary proceeding if [they] determined that the circumstances of the case had been adequately clarified. Tribunals had the authority to refuse the plaintiff and the defendant the right to appear and plead.³²

These measures returned Russian judiciary procedures to the practices of the seventeenth century.

But even thus streamlined, the Revolutionary Tribunals proved too slow and too cumbersome to satisfy Lenin’s quest for rule “unrestricted by any laws.” Hence, he increasingly came to rely on the Cheka, which he endowed with the license to kill without having to follow even the most perfunctory procedures.

The Cheka was born in virtual secrecy. The decision to create a security force—essentially, a revived tsarist Department of Police and Okhrana—was adopted by the Sovnarkom on December 7, 1917, on the basis of Dzerzhinskii’s report on fighting “sabotage,” by which was meant the strike of white-collar employees.* The Sovnarkom’s resolution was not made public at the time. It first appeared in print in 1924 in a falsified and incomplete version, then again in 1926 in a fuller but still falsified version, and in its full and authentic version only in 1958.³³ In 1917, there was published in the Bolshevik press only a terse, two-sentence announcement that the Sovnarkom had established an “Extraordinary Commission to Fight the Counterrevolution and Sabotage” (Chrezvy-chainaia kommissia po bor’be s kontrrevoliutsiei i sabotazhem), the office of which would be located in Petrograd at Gorokhovaia 2.³⁴ Before the Revolution this building had served as the bureau of the city’s governor as well as of the local branch of the Department of Police. Neither the powers nor the responsibilities of the Cheka were spelled out.

The failure of the Bolshevik Government to make public, at the time of its founding, the functions and powers of the Cheka had dire consequences, because it enabled the Cheka to claim authority which it had not been intended to have. The Cheka’s original mandate, it is now known, modeled on the tsarist security police, charged it with investigating and preventing crimes against the state. It was to have no judiciary powers: the Sovnarkom intended for the Cheka to turn over political suspects to Revolutionary Tribunals for prosecution and sentencing. The pertinent clause of the secret resolution setting up the Cheka read as follows:

The tasks of the [Extraordinary] Commission: (I) to suppress [presek(at’)] and liquidate all attempts and acts of counterrevolution and sabotage throughout Russia, from every quarter; (2) to turn over all saboteurs and counterrevolutionaries to the court of the Revolutionary Tribunal and to work out the means of combating them; (3) the Commission conducts only a preliminary investigation to the extent that this is necessary to bar [counterrevolution and sabotage].³⁵

In the first published versions of this resolution (1924, 1926) one critical word was changed. As is now known, in the manuscript of the resolution the word “to suppress”—“presekat’”—appeared in an abbreviated form as “pre-sek[at’].” In the earliest published versions, this word was altered to read “presledovat’,” which means “to prosecute.”³⁶ The transposition and substitution of a few letters had the effect of giving the Cheka judiciary powers. This forgery, revealed only after Stalin’s death, allowed the Cheka and its successors (GPU, OGPU, and NKVD) to sentence political prisoners, by summary procedures conducted in camera, to a full range of punishments, including death. The Soviet security police was deprived of this right, which had claimed the lives of millions, only in 1956.

The Bolsheviks, who were normally punctilious about bureaucratic proprieties, made a significant exception in the case of the secret police. This institution, which was subsequently credited with saving the regime, had for a long time no legal standing.³⁷ Ignored in the Collection of Laws and Ordinances (Sobranie Uzakonenii i Rasporiazhenii) for 1917–18, it lacked a formal identity. This was deliberate policy. In early 1918, the Cheka forbade any information to be published on it except with its approval.³⁸ The injunction was not strictly observed, but it gives an idea of the Cheka’s conception of itself and its role in society. In this, the Bolsheviks followed the precedent set by Peter the Great, who had established Russia’s first political police, the Preobrazhenskii Prikaz, without a formal ukaz.*

The Cheka began with a small staff of officials and some military units. In March it moved with the rest of the government to Moscow, where it took over the spacious quarters of the Iakor Insurance Company on Bolshaia Lubianka 11. At the time it claimed to have only 120 employees, although some scholars estimate the true figure to have been closer to 600.³⁹ The Chekist Peters conceded that the Cheka had difficulty recruiting personnel because Russians, with the tsarist police fresh in mind, reacted “sentimentally,” and unable to distinguish persecution by the old regime from that of the new, refused to join.⁴⁰ * As a consequence, a high proportion of Cheka functionaries were non-Russians. Dzerzhinskii was a Pole, and many of his closest associates were Latvians, Armenians, and Jews. The guards the Cheka used to protect Communist officials and important prisoners were recruited exclusively from the Latvian Rifles because Latvians were considered more brutal and less susceptible to bribery. Lenin strongly favored this reliance on foreigners. Steinberg recalls his “fear” of the Russian national character. He thought that Russians lacked firmness: “ ‘Soft, too soft is the Russian,’ he would say, ‘He is incapable of applying the harsh measures of revolutionary terror.’ ”⁴¹

Employing foreigners had the additional advantage that they were less likely to be bound to their potential victims by ties of kinship or inhibited by opprobrium of the Russian community. Dzerzhinskii, for one, had grown up in an atmosphere of intense Polish nationalism: as a youth he wanted to “exterminate all Muscovites” for the suffering they had inflicted on his people.† The Latvians looked on Russians with contempt. During his brief internment by the Cheka in September 1918, Bruce Lockhart heard from his Latvian guards that Russians were “lazy and dirty” and in battle always “let them down.”⁴² Lenin’s reliance on foreign elements to terrorize the Russian population recalled the practice of Ivan the Terrible, who had also filled his terror apparatus, the Oprichnina, with foreigners, mostly Germans.

To remove some of the odium which attached to the political police in a socialist country, the Bolsheviks combined the Cheka’s primary mission, which was political, with the task of fighting ordinary crime. Soviet Russia was in the grip of murders, lootings, and robberies, which the citizens desperately wanted to stop. To make the new political police more acceptable, the regime also assigned the Cheka responsibility for eradicating ordinary crimes, including banditry and “speculation.” In an interview with a Menshevik daily in June 1918, Dzerzhinskii laid stress on the Cheka’s twin missions:

[The task of the Cheka] is to fight the enemies of Soviet authority and of the new way of life. Such enemies are both our political opponents and all bandits, thieves, speculators, and other criminals who undermine the foundations of the socialist order.⁴³

Bridling at the limitations which its mandate imposed, the Cheka sought unrestricted freedom to deal with political undesirables. This led to a conflict with the Commissariat of Justice.

From the day of its foundation, the Cheka arrested on its own authority persons suspected of engaging in “counterrevolution” and “speculation.” The prisoners were delivered under guard to Smolnyi. This procedure did not suit Commissar of Justice Steinberg, a twenty-nine-year-old Jewish lawyer who had received his degree in Germany with a dissertation on the Talmudic concept of justice. On December 15 he issued a resolution forbidding further delivery of arrested citizens either to Smolnyi or to the Revolutionary Tribunal without prior approval of the Commissariat of Justice. Prisoners in the Cheka’s custody were to be released.⁴⁴

Apparently confident of Lenin’s backing, Dzerzhinskii ignored these instructions. On December 19, he arrested the members of the Union for the Defense of the Constituent Assembly. As soon as he learned of Dzerzhinskii’s action, Steinberg countermanded it, ordering the prisoners set free. The dispute was placed on the Sovnarkom’s agenda for that evening. The cabinet sided with Dzerzhinskii and reprimanded Steinberg for releasing Cheka prisoners.⁴⁵ But Steinberg, undeterred by this defeat, asked the Sovnarkom to regularize relations between the Commissariat of Justice and the Cheka, and presented the Sovnarkom with a draft project, “On the Competence of the Commissariat of Justice.”⁴⁶ The document forbade the Cheka to carry out political arrests without prior sanction from the Commissariat of Justice. Lenin and the rest of the cabinet approved Steinberg’s proposal, for the Bolsheviks did not want at this time to quarrel with the Left SRs. The resolution adopted required that all orders for arrests “with prominent political significance” carry the countersignature of the Commissar of Justice. Presumably the Cheka could carry out ordinary arrests on its own authority.

But even this limited concession was almost immediately withdrawn. Two days later, probably responding to Dzerzhinskii’s complaints, the Sovnarkom approved a very different resolution. While confirming that the Cheka was an investigatory body, it enjoined the Commissariat of Justice and all other bodies from interfering with its power to arrest important political figures. The Cheka had merely to inform the commissariats of Justice and of the Interior of its actions after the fact. Lenin added a stipulation that persons already under arrest be either turned over to the courts or released.⁴⁷ The next day, the Cheka arrested the center which directed the strike of white-collar employees in Petrograd.⁴⁸

As part of the agreement with the Bolsheviks, concluded in December 1917, the Left SRs received the right to have representatives on the Cheka governing board, known as the Collegium. This concession ran contrary to the Bolshevik intention to keep the Cheka 100 percent Bolshevik, but Lenin agreed to it over Dzerzhinskii’s objections. The Sovnarkom appointed a Left SR deputy director of the Cheka and added several members of this party to the Collegium.⁴⁹ The Left SRs further secured acceptance of the principle that the Cheka would carry out no executions except with the unanimous consent of the Collegium, which gave them a veto over death sentences. On January 31, 1918, the Sovnarkom confirmed, in an unpublished resolution, that the Cheka had exclusively investigatory responsibilities:

The Cheka concentrates in its hands the entire work of intelligence, suppression [presechenie] and prevention of crimes, but the entire subsequent conduct of the investigation and the presentation of the case to the court is entrusted to the Investigatory Commission of the [Revolutionary] Tribunal.⁵⁰

This restriction was abandoned a month later in the decree “The Socialist Fatherland in Danger!”⁵¹ The document did not spell out who would “shoot on the spot” counterrevolutionaries and other enemies of the new state, but there could be no doubt that this responsibility devolved on the Cheka. The next day the Cheka confirmed that this was indeed the case by warning the population that “counterrevolutionaries” would be “mercilessly liquidated on the spot.”⁵² That day, February 23, Dzerzhinskii advised provincial soviets by wire that in view of the prevalence of anti-regime “plots” they should proceed at once to set up their own Chekas, arrest “counterrevolutionaries,” and execute them wherever apprehended.⁵³ The decree thus transformed the Cheka, formally and permanently, from an investigating agency into a full-fledged machine of terror. The transformation was made with Lenin’s concurrence.

In Moscow and Petrograd the Cheka was prevented from executing political offenders by agreements with the Left SRs. As long as the Left SRs worked in the Cheka—that is, until July 6, 1918—no formal political executions took place in either of those cities. The first victim of the February 22 decree was an ordinary criminal who under the alias “Prince Eboli” had impersonated a Chekist.⁵⁴ In the provinces, however, the organs of the Cheka were not bound by such restrictions and routinely executed citizens for political offenses. The Menshevik Grigorii Aronson recalled, for example, that in the spring of 1918 the Vitebsk Cheka arrested and executed two workers charged with distributing posters of the Council of Workers’ Plenipotentiaries.* How many fell victim of such arbitrary executions will probably never be known.

Emulating the Corps of Gendarmes of the tsarist security system, the Cheka acquired an armed force. The first military unit to come under its control was a small Finnish detachment. Other units were added, and at the end of April 1918 the Cheka had a Boevoi Otriad (Combat Detachment) of six companies of infantry, fifty cavalrymen, eighty bicyclists, sixty machine gunners, forty artillerymen, and three armored cars.⁵⁵ It was these detachments which in April 1918 carried out perhaps the only popular action ever undertaken by the Cheka, the disarming in Moscow of the “Black Guards,” bands of anarchists who had occupied residential buildings and terrorized the civilian population. Acquiring a rudimentary military force was only the first step in the expansion of the political police into a virtual state within the state. In June 1918, at a conference of Chekists, voices were heard demanding the creation of a regular Cheka armed force and entrusting the Cheka with the security of the railways as well as borders.⁵⁶

Much of the efforts of the Cheka in the first months of its existence went to fighting ordinary commercial activities. Since the most routine retail trade transactions, such as selling a bag of flour, were now classified as “speculation,” and the Cheka’s mandate included fighting speculation, its agents spent much time chasing peasant “bagmen,” inspecting luggage of railway passengers, and raiding black markets. This preoccupation with “economic crimes” prevented it from keeping an eye on far more dangerous anti-government plots that were beginning to take shape in the spring of 1918. In the first half of 1918, its only success in this field was uncovering the Moscow headquarters of Savinkov’s organization. This, however, was due to a fortuitous accident and, in any event, did not enable the Cheka to penetrate the center of Savinkov’s Union for the Defense of the Fatherland and Freedom, with the result that the Iaroslavl uprising in July caught it completely by surprise. Even more astonishing was the Cheka’s ignorance of Left SR plans for a rebellion, given that the Left SR leaders had all but advertised their intentions. To make matters worse, the Left SR plot was hatched inside the Cheka headquarters and was supported by its armed detachments. This resounding fiasco forced Dzerzhinskii on July 8 to relinquish his office, which was temporarily entrusted to Peters. He was reinstated on August 22, just in time to suffer another humiliating embarrassment, the failure to forestall a nearly successful terrorist attempt on the life of Lenin.

No tsar, even at the height of radical terrorism, was as afraid for his life and as well protected as Lenin. The tsars traveled in Russia and abroad; they entertained and appeared frequently at public functions. Lenin cowered behind the brick walls of the Kremlin, guarded around the clock by Latvian Riflemen. When from time to time he went to the city, it was usually without prior notice. Between his move to Moscow in March 1918 and his death in January 1924, he revisited Petrograd, the scene of his revolutionary triumph, only twice, and he never traveled to see the country or mingle with the population. The farthest he ventured was to travel in his Rolls-Royce for occasional rests at Gorki, a village near Moscow, where an estate had been requisitioned for his use.

Trotsky showed greater daring, traveling incessantly to the front to talk to the commanders and inspect the troops. He frequently changed schedules and itineraries to throw off potential assassins.

No serious assassination attempts against the lives of Lenin and Trotsky took place before September 1918 because the Central Committee of the SR Party, the terrorist party par excellence, opposed active resistance to the Bolsheviks. Its unwillingness to resort to methods used against the tsars and their officials stemmed from two considerations. One was the belief of the SR leadership that time was on its side and that all it had to do was to sit tight and await the resurgence of democracy in Russia. The murder of the Bolshevik leaders was certain, in its view, to ensure the victory of the counterrevolution. The second consideration was fear of Bolshevik reprisals and pogroms.

Not all SRs shared this outlook. Some party members were prepared to take up arms against the Bolsheviks, with or without the approval of the Central Committee. One such group began to form in Moscow in the summer of 1918, under the very noses of the Cheka.

It was the custom of Bolshevik leaders, Lenin included, every Friday afternoon or evening to address workers and party members in various parts of Moscow. Lenin’s appearances were usually not announced beforehand. On Friday, August 30, he was scheduled to attend two rallies: one in the Basmannyi District, in the building of the Grain Commodity Exchange, another at the Mikhelson factory in the southern part of the city. Earlier that day news had arrived that the chief of the Petrograd Cheka, M. S. Uritskii, had been shot. The assassin was a Jewish youth, L. A. Kannegisser, a member of the moderate Popular Socialist Party. It later transpired that he had acted on his own, to avenge the execution of a friend. But this was not known at the time and fears arose that perhaps a terrorist campaign was underway. Worried family members urged Lenin to cancel his appearances, but he quite uncharacteristically chose to face danger and went to town in a car, driven by his trusted chauffeur, S. K. Gil. He first appeared at the Grain Commodity Exchange, from where he proceeded to Mikhelson’s. Although the audience half expected Lenin, there was no certainty he would appear until his car pulled into the courtyard. Lenin delivered his customary canned speech attacking Western “imperialists.” He concluded with the words: “We shall die or triumph!” As Gil later told the Cheka, while Lenin was speaking, a woman dressed in work clothes came up and asked whether Lenin was inside. He gave an evasive reply.

As Lenin was making his way to the exit through a dense crowd, someone close behind him slipped and fell, barring the crowd. Lenin went into the courtyard followed by a few people. As he was about to enter his car, a woman approached to complain that bread was being confiscated at railroad stations. Lenin said that instructions had been issued to stop this practice. He had a foot on the running board when three shots rang out. Gil swung around. He recognized the person firing from several paces away as the woman who had inquired about Lenin. Lenin fell to the ground. Panic-stricken onlookers fled in all directions. Drawing his revolver, Gil raced in pursuit of the assassin, but she had vanished. Children who remained in the courtyard indicated the direction in which she had fled. A few people followed her. She kept on running, but then abruptly stopped and faced her pursuers. She was arrested and taken to Cheka headquarters in the Lubianka.

Lenin was carried unconscious into his car and driven at top speed to the Kremlin. A physician was called for. By then he was barely able to move. His pulse grew faint and he bled profusely. It seemed he was breathing his last. A medical examination revealed two wounds: one, relatively harmless, lodged in the arm; the other, potentially fatal, at the juncture of the jaw and neck. (The third bullet, it was learned later, struck the woman who had been conversing with Lenin when he was shot.)

In the next several hours, the terrorist underwent five interrogations by Cheka personnel.* She was very uncommunicative. Her name was Fannie Efimovna Kaplan, born Feiga Roidman or Roitblat. Her father was a teacher in the Ukraine. It was later learned that as a young girl she had joined the anarchists. She was sixteen when a bomb which anarchists were assembling in her room to kill the governor-general of Kiev exploded. A field court-martial condemned her to death, then commuted the sentence to lifelong hard labor, which she served in Siberia. There she met Spiridonova and other convicted terrorists, under whose influence she became a Socialist-Revolutionary. Early in 1917, benefiting from the political amnesty, she returned to central Russia, settling first in the Ukraine and then in the Crimea. By then, her family had emigrated to the United States.

According to her deposition, she had decided in February 1918 to assassinate Lenin to avenge the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly and the imminent signing of the Brest Treaty. But her objections to Lenin ran deeper: “I shot Lenin because I believe him to be a traitor,” she told the Cheka. “By living long, he postpones the idea of socialism for decades to come.” She further said that although she belonged to no political party, she sympathized with the Committee of the Constituent Assembly in Samara, liked Chernov, and favored an alliance with England and France against Germany. She steadfastly denied having any accomplices and refused to say who had given her the gun.†

After her interrogation, Kaplan was briefly detained in the same cell at the Lubianka where the Cheka confined Bruce Lockhart, whom it had arrested in the middle of the night on suspicion of complicity: “At six in the morning [of August 31],” he writes,

a woman was brought into the room. She was dressed in black. Her hair was black, and her eyes, set in a fixed stare, had great black rings under them. Her face was colorless. Her features, strongly Jewish, were unattractive. She might have been any age between twenty and thirty-five. We guessed it was Kaplan. Doubtless, the Bolsheviks hoped that she would give us some sign of recognition. Her composure was unnatural. She went to the window and, leaning her chin upon her hand, looked out into the daylight. And there she remained, motionless, speechless, apparently resigned to her fate, until presently the sentries came and took her away.⁵⁷

She was moved from the Lubianka to one of the basement cells in the Kremlin where the most prominent political prisoners were held and from which few emerged alive.

In the meantime, a team of physicians attended Lenin, who was hovering between life and death, but retained enough presence of mind to make certain his doctors were Bolsheviks. The patient’s prospects were not hopeless, even though blood had entered one of his lungs. Bonch-Bruevich, Lenin’s devoted secretary, watching him, had a religious vision: the sight “suddenly reminded me of a famous European painting of the deposition of Christ from the cross, crucified by priests, pontiffs, and the rich.…”* Such religious associations soon became an inseparable element of the Lenin cult which had its beginning with tales of his miraculous survival. It was evident in the reverential description in Pravda on September 1, by its editor, Bukharin: Lenin was “the genius of the world revolution, the heart and the brain of the great worldwide movement of the proletariat,” “the unique leader in the world,” a man whose analytic skills gave him an “almost prophetic ability to predict.” He went on to give a fantastic account of what had happened immediately after the attempt by Kaplan, whom he ridiculed as a latter-day Charlotte Corday, the assassin of Marat:

Lenin, shot through twice, with pierced lungs, spilling blood, refuses help and goes on his own. The next morning, still threatened by death, he reads papers, listens, learns, observes to see that the engine of the locomotive that carries us toward global revolution has not stopped working.

Such images were calculated to appeal to the Russian masses’ belief in the holiness of those who escape certain death.

The official announcement, published on the front page of Izvestiia on August 31, signed by Sverdlov, was decidedly unchristian in tone. It asserted, without providing any proof, that the authorities had “no doubt that here too will be discovered the fingerprints of the Right SRs … of the hirelings of the English and French.” These accusations were made in a document dated 10:40 p.m. on August 30, which was an hour or so before Kaplan underwent her first interrogation. “We call on all comrades,” it went on,

to maintain complete calm and to intensify their work in combating counterrevolutionary elements. The working class will respond to attempts against its leaders with even greater consolidation of its forces, with merciless mass terror against all the enemies of the Revolution.

In the days and weeks that followed, the Bolshevik press (the non-Bolshevik press having been eliminated by then) was filled with similar exhortations and threats, but it provided surprisingly little information either about the murder attempt or about the actual condition of Lenin’s health, apart from regular medical bulletins of which laymen could not make much sense. The impression one gains from reading this material is that the Bolsheviks deliberately underplayed the event to convince the public that whatever happened to Lenin, they were firmly in control.

On September 3, the commandant of the Kremlin, an ex-sailor named P. Malkov, was called to the Cheka and told that it had condemned Fannie Kaplan to death. He was to carry out the sentence at once. As Malkov describes it, he recoiled: “Shooting a person, especially a woman, is no easy task.” He asked about the disposal of the body. He was told to consult Sverdlov. Sverdlov said that Kaplan was not to be interred: “Her remains are to be destroyed without trace.” As the place of execution Malkov chose a narrow courtyard adjoining the Kremlin’s Large Palace and used as a parking lot for military vehicles.

I ordered the commander of the Automobile Combat Detachment to move some trucks from the enclosures and to start the engines. I also gave orders to send a passenger car to the blind alley, turning it to face the gate. Having posted at the gate two Latvians with orders to allow no one in, I went to fetch Kaplan. A few minutes later I was leading her to the courtyard.… “Into the car!” I snapped a sharp command. I pointed to the automobile that stood at the end of the cul-de-sac. Convulsively twisting her shoulders, Fannie Kaplan took one step, then another … I raised the pistol …*

Thus perished a young woman ridiculed as the Russian Charlotte Corday: without the semblance of a trial, shot in the back while the truck engines roared to drown out her screams, her corpse disposed of like so much garbage.

The details of the terrorist plot that led to the attempt on the life of Lenin, and, as it turned out, also on the lives of Trotsky and other Soviet leaders, became known to the Cheka only three years later. The main source of this information was a veteran SR terrorist, G. Semenov (Vasilev). Semenov emigrated abroad but changed his mind and in 1921 returned to Russia, where he turned renegade and denounced his past associates. His testimony, no doubt doctored to some extent, was subsequently used by the Bolshevik prosecutor in the trial of the Socialists-Revolutionaries in 1922.⁵⁸

As best as can be determined, the SR Combat Organization was reactivated in Petrograd at the beginning of 1918, The group, which numbered fourteen people, some of them intellectuals, some workers, for a while shadowed Zinoviev and Volodarskii. In June 1918, one of its members, the worker Sergeev, assassinated Volodarskii. This terrorist underground acted on its own without sanction of the SR Central Committee. In the spring of 1918, after the Bolshevik Government had moved to Moscow, some members of the Combat Organization followed it. They chose Trotsky as their first victim in the belief that his death would have the greatest effect on the Bolshevik cause since he directed the war effort. Lenin was to follow. Adopting methods perfected against tsarist officials, members of the group stalked their victims to determine the pattern of their movements. They learned that Trotsky traveled constantly and unpredictably between Moscow and the front, and hence, “for technical reasons,” as Semenov would later explain, it was decided to dispose of Lenin first.

Before carrying out their mission, the terrorists requested the approval of the SR Central Committee. By this time most SR leaders had moved to Samara, but a branch of the committee remained in Moscow, headed by Abraham Gots. Gots and one other committee member, D. Donskoi, refused to sanction the attempt on Lenin’s life, but said they would not object to it as long as it was done as an “individual” act, without implicating the party. They also promised that the party would not repudiate Lenin’s murder.

While laying his plans, Semenov learned that Fannie Kaplan and two associates were working independently toward the same end. Kaplan impressed him as a resolute “revolutionary terrorist”—in other words, a suicidal type. He invited her to join his group.

To track Lenin’s appearances at worker meetings, Semenov divided Moscow into four districts, to each of which he assigned two members of his organization: one to act as observer (dezhurnyi), the other as “executor” (ispolnitel’). The former was to mix with the crowds to learn when and where Lenin would speak. As soon as he had the information, he was to contact the “executor,” who would wait at a central location within the zone. These preparations took place in August 1918, at the time when the SRs in Samara, taking advantage of the military victories of the Czechs, were laying claim to authority over Russia.

Lenin addressed a gathering of the Moscow Committee of the Party on Friday, August 16, but due to some mishap Semenov’s observer failed to appear. The following Friday, Lenin spoke again, this time at the Polytechnic Museum. Word got around of his appearance and a large crowd turned up. This time everything went according to plan, but the “executor” lost his nerve, for which Semenov expelled him from the Combat Organization. Semenov had intelligence that the following Friday, August 30, Lenin would make one or more appearances in the southern zone. To make certain that nothing would go wrong this time, he assigned to this area his two most trusted agents: an experienced terrorist, the worker Novikov, to act as observer, and Kaplan as executor. In the tradition of SR terrorists, Kaplan was prepared to give up her own life for the one she took: she told Novikov that after shooting Lenin she would surrender. Just in case she changed her mind, however, he hired a hack to stand by.

In the afternoon of August 30, Kaplan took up her post at Serpukhovskii Square. In her purse she carried a loaded Browning; three bullets had crosslike incisions, into which had been rubbed a deadly Indian poison, curare.*

Novikov learned that Lenin would speak at the Mikhelson factory. To make certain that the information was correct, Kaplan questioned Lenin’s chauffeur, after which she entered the building, placing herself near the exit. (Other sources have her waiting in the courtyard.) It was Novikov who staged the accident on the steps leading to the exit, purposely falling to hold back the crowd so as to give Kaplan undisturbed access to her victim. After firing her revolver, Kaplan seems to have forgotten her promise to surrender and instinctively ran away, but then stopped and gave herself up.

On September 6, Pravda carried a brief statement from the Central Committee of the SR Party, disclaiming, on its behalf and that of its affiliates, any connection with the attempt on Lenin’s life. This violated the agreement which Semenov had made with Gots and Donskoi, and considerably dampened the terrorists’ spirits. They made an attempt on the life of Trotsky, as he was departing for the front, but Trotsky eluded them by switching trains at the last moment. To keep the organization going, they carried out several “expropriations” of Soviet institutions, but their morale kept on sinking, especially after the Bolsheviks had regained the initiative against the Whites. Sometime toward the end of 1918, the Combat Organization dissolved.

Lenin recovered remarkably quickly. This attested to his strong constitution and will to live, but to his associates it implied supernatural qualities; it was as if God Himself intended Lenin to live and his cause to triumph. As soon as he regained some strength, he resumed work, but he overexerted himself and suffered a relapse. On September 25, on his physicians’ insistence, he and Krupskaia left for Gorki. Lenin spent three weeks there convalescing; although he kept in touch with events and did some writing, he left the day-today conduct of affairs of state to others. One of the few visitors allowed to see him was Angelica Balabanoff, an old comrade and a Zimmerwald participant. As she recalls it, when she raised the matter of Fannie Kaplan’s execution, Krupskaia became “very upset”; later, when the two women were alone, she shed bitter tears over it. Lenin, Balabanoff felt, preferred not to discuss it.⁵⁹ At this time, the Bolsheviks still felt embarrassment about executing fellow socialists.

Lenin returned to Moscow on October 14. On October 16, he attended a meeting of the Central Committee and the following day a session of the Sovnarkom. To assure the populace that he had fully recovered, motion-picture cameras were brought to the Kremlin courtyard and filmed him in conversation with Bonch-Bruevich. On October 22, Lenin made his first public appearance, after which he returned to full-time work.

The most immediate effect of Kaplan’s attempt was the unleashing of a wave of terror which in its lack of discrimination and number of victims had no historic precedent. The Bolsheviks were thoroughly frightened, and acted exactly as Engels had said frightened people did: to reassure themselves they perpetrated useless cruelties.

The assassination attempt and Lenin’s recovery had another consequence as well, in the long run perhaps no less important: it inaugurated a deliberate policy of deifying Lenin which after his death would turn into a veritable state-sponsored Oriental cult. Lenin’s rapid recovery from a near-fatal injury seems to have stirred among his lieutenants, prone to venerating him even before, a superstitious faith. Bonch-Bruevich cites with approval the remark of one of Lenin’s physicians that “only those marked by destiny can escape death from such a wound.”⁶⁰ Although Lenin’s “immortality” was later exploited for very mundane political ends, to play on the superstitions of the masses, there is no reason to doubt that many Bolsheviks genuinely came to regard their leader as a supernatural being, a latter-day Christ sent to save humanity.*

Until Fannie Kaplan’s attempt on his life, the Bolsheviks had been rather reticent about Lenin. In personal contact, they treated him with a deference in excess of that normally shown political leaders. Sukhanov was struck that in 1917, even before Lenin had taken power, his followers displayed “quite exceptional piety” toward him, like the “knights of the Holy Grail.”⁶¹ Lenin’s stature rose with each of his successes. As early as January 1918, Lunacharskii, one of the better-educated and more levelheaded of the Bolshevik luminaries, reminded Lenin that he no longer belonged to himself but to “mankind.”⁶² There were other early inklings of an incipient cult, and if the process of deification did not unfold as yet, it was because Lenin discouraged it. Thus, he stopped Soviet officials who wanted to enforce on his behalf tsarist laws savagely punishing the defacement of the ruler’s portrait.⁶³ His peculiar vanity dissolved tracelessly in the “movement”: it received complete gratification from its successes without requiring a “personality cult.”

Lenin was exceedingly modest in his personal wants: his living quarters, his food, his clothing were strictly utilitarian. He carried to an extreme the notorious indifference of the Russian intelligentsia for the finer things, leading even at the height of his power an austere, almost ascetic, style of life. He

always wore the same dark-colored suit, with pipelike trousers that seemed a trifle too short for his legs, with a similarly abbreviated, single-breasted coat, a soft white collar, and an old tie. The necktie, in my opinion, was for years the same: black, with little white flowers, one particular spot showing wear.⁶⁴

Such simplicity, emulated by many later dictators, did not, however, preclude—and, indeed, perhaps even encouraged—the rise of a personality cult. Lenin was the first of the modern “demotic” leaders who, even while dominating the masses, in appearance and ostensible lifestyle remained one of them. This has been noted as a characteristic of contemporary dictatorships:

In modern absolutisms the leader is not distinguished, as many former tyrants were, by the difference between himself and his subjects, but is, on the contrary, like the embodied essence of what they all have in common. The 20th-century tyrant is a “popular star” and his personal character is obscured …⁶⁵

Russian literature on Lenin published in 1917 and the first eight months of 1918 is surprisingly sparse.⁶⁶ In 1917 most of what was written about him came from the pen of his opponents, and although the Bolshevik censorship soon put a stop to such hostile literature, the Bolsheviks themselves wrote little on their leader, who was hardly known outside the narrow circles of the radical intelligentsia. It was Fannie Kaplan’s shots that opened the floodgates of Leninist hagiography. As early as September 3–4, 1918, a paean to Lenin by Trotsky and Kamenev came out in an edition of one million copies.⁶⁷ Zino-viev’s eulogy, around the same time, had a printing of 200,000, and a brief popular biography came out in 300,000 copies. According to Bonch-Bruevich, Lenin terminated this outpouring as soon as he recovered,⁶⁸ although he allowed it to resume on a more modest scale in 1920, in connection with his fiftieth birthday and the end of the Civil War. By 1923, however, when Lenin’s health forced him to withdraw from active politics, Leninist hagiography turned into an industry, employing thousands, much as did the painting of religious ikons before the Revolution.

On the present-day reader this literature makes an odd impression: its sentimental, mawkish, worshipful tone contrasts sharply with the brutal language which the Bolsheviks liked to affect in other walks of life. The image of the Christ-like savior of mankind, descended from the cross and then resurrected, is difficult to reconcile with the theme of a “merciless struggle” against his enemies. Thus Zinoviev, who had mocked the “bourgeoisie” as fit to eat straw, could describe Lenin as the “apostle of world communism” and “leader by the grace of God,” much as Mark Antony in his funeral oration for Caesar had extolled him as a “god in the sky.”⁶⁹ Other Communists exceeded even this hyperbole, one poet calling Lenin “the invincible messenger of peace, crowned with the thorns of slander.” Such allusions to the new Christ were common in Soviet publications in late 1918, which the authorities distributed in massive editions while massacring hostages by the thousands.⁷⁰

There was, of course, no formal deification of the Soviet leader, but the qualities attributed to him in official publications and pronouncements—omniscience, infallibility, and virtual immortality—amounted to nothing less. The “cult of genius” went further in Soviet Russia in regard to Lenin (not to speak of Stalin later on) than the subsequent adoration of Mussolini and Hitler, for which it provided the model.

Why this quasi-religious cult of a politician by a regime espousing materialism and atheism? To this question there are two answers, one having to do with the internal needs of the Communist Party, the other with the relationship of that party to the people whom it ruled.

Although they claimed to be a political party, the Bolsheviks were really nothing of the kind. They resembled rather an order or cohort gathered around a chosen leader. What held them together was not a program or a platform—these could change from one day to the next in conformity with the leader’s wishes—but the person of the leader. It was his intuition and his will that guided the Communists, not objective principles. Lenin was the first political figure of modern times to be addressed as “leader” (vozhd’). He was indispensable, for without his guidance the one-party regime had nothing to hold it together. Communism repersonalized politics, throwing it back to the times when human will rather than law directed state and society. This required its leader to be immortal, if not literally then figuratively: he had to lead in person, and after he was gone, his followers had to be able to rule in his name and claim to receive direct inspiration from him. The slogan “Lenin Lives!” launched after Lenin’s death was, therefore, no mere propagandistic catch-phrase, but an essential ingredient of the Communist system of government.

This accounts in good measure for the need to deify Lenin, to raise him above the vagaries of ordinary human existence, to make him immortal. His cult began the instant he was believed to stand on the threshold of death and became institutionalized five years later when he actually died. Lenin’s inspiration was essential to maintain the vitality and indestructibility of the party and the state which he had founded.

The other consideration had to do with the regime’s lack of legitimacy. This had not been a problem in the first months of the Bolshevik regime when it had acted as a catalyst of world revolution. But once it became clear that there would be no world revolution anytime soon and that the Bolshevik regime would have to assume responsibility for administering a large, multinational empire, the requirements changed. At this point, the loyalty of Soviet Russia’s seventy-odd million inhabitants under its control became a matter of grave concern. This loyalty the Bolsheviks could not secure by ordinary electoral procedures: at the height of their popularity, in November 1917, they won less than one-quarter of the vote, and they certainly would have gained only a fraction of that later on, after disenchantment had set in. In their hearts, the Bolsheviks knew that their authority rested on physical force embodied in a thin layer of workers and soldiers of questionable commitment and staying power. It could not escape them that in July 1918, when their regime came under assault from the Left SRs, the workers and soldiers in the capital city declared “neutrality” and refused to help.

Under these conditions, the deification of the founding father served the Bolsheviks as the next-best thing to true legitimacy and a surrogate for the missing popular mandate. Historians of antiquity have noted that in the Middle East, institutionalized cults of rulers began on a large scale only after Alexander of Macedon had conquered diverse non-Greek peoples over whom he could not claim legitimate authority, and who, furthermore, were bound neither to the Macedonians nor to each other by bonds of ethnic identity. Alexander, and even more so his successors, as well as the Roman emperors, had recourse to self-deification as a device for securing with appeals to celestial authority that which terrestrial authority refused to grant them:

The successors of Alexander were Greek Macedonians who occupied, by right of conquest and force of arms, thrones usurped from autochthonous sovereigns. In these countries of ancient and refined civilization, the power of the sword was not everything and the law of the stronger might not have provided adequate legitimation. For sovereigns, in general, love to legitimize themselves, because this often means reinforcing their position. Was it not wise on their part to present themselves as the titled heirs of these powers based on divine right, the heritage of which they had captured? To identify themselves as gods—was this not a way, presumed clever, to reap the veneration of their subjects, to unite their disparate populations under the same banner, and, in the ultimate analysis, to consolidate their dynastic position?⁷¹

To a dynasty … deification meant legitimacy, the regularizing of right acquired by the sword. It meant, further, the elevation of the royal family above the ambition of men who had recently been their peers, the strengthening of the rights of sovereigns by fusing them in a single whole with the prerogatives of their divine predecessors, the presentation to subjects everywhere of a symbol round which they might, perchance, rally through religious sentiment since they could not do so through their national sentiment.⁷²

How conscious the Bolsheviks were of these precedents and how aware of the conflict between their pretense at being “scientific” and their appeals to the most primitive craving for idol worship, it is difficult to tell. The chances are that they acted instinctively. If so, their instincts served them well, for these appeals proved much more successful in winning them mass support than all the talk of “socialism,” “class struggle,” and the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” To the people of Russia “dictatorship” and “proletariat” were meaningless foreign words that most of them could not even pronounce. But the tales of the miraculous rise from the dead of the country’s ruler evoked an instant emotional response and created something of a bond between the government and its subjects. This is why the cult of Lenin would never be abandoned, even if, for a time, it would be eclipsed by the state-fostered cult of another deity, Stalin.*

The Bolsheviks had practiced terror from the day they seized power, intensifying it as their power grew and their popularity declined. The arrest of the Kadets in November 1917, followed by the unpunished murder of the Kadet leaders Kokoshkin and Shingarev had been acts of terror, as was the closing of the Constituent Assembly and the shooting of the demonstrators marching in its support. The Red Army troops and Red Guards who in the spring of 1918 dispersed and manhandled, in one city after another, the soviets that had voted the Bolsheviks out of power, perpetrated acts of terror. The executions, mainly carried out by provincial and district Chekas under the mandate given them by Lenin’s decree of February 22, 1918, pushed terror to a still higher level of intensity: the historian S. Melgunov, then residing in Moscow, compiled from the press evidence of 882 executions in the first six months of 1918.⁷³

Early Bolshevik terror, however, was unsystematic, rather like the terror of the Whites later on in the Civil War, and many of its victims were ordinary criminals as well as “speculators.” It began to assume a more systematic political character only in the summer of 1918, when Bolshevik fortunes sank to their lowest. Following the suppression of the Left SR uprising on July 6, the Cheka carried out its first mass executions, the victims of which were members of Savinkov’s secret organization, arrested the previous month, and some participants in the Left SR uprising. The expulsion of the Left SRs from the Cheka Collegium in Moscow removed the last restraints on the political police. In the middle of July, many officers who had taken part in the Iaroslavl uprising were shot. Frightened of military conspiracies, the Cheka now began to hunt down officers of the old army and execute them without trial. According to Melgunov’s records, in the month of July 1918 alone, the Bolshevik authorities, mainly the Cheka, carried out 1,115 executions.⁷⁴

The murder of the Imperial family and their relatives represented a further escalation of terror. Cheka agents now arrogated to themselves the right to shoot prisoners and suspects at will, although judging by subsequent complaints from Moscow, the provincial authorities did not always make use of their powers.

Notwithstanding this intensification of government terror, Lenin was still dissatisfied. He wanted to involve the “masses” in such action, presumably because pogroms which involved both agents of the government and the people helped bring the two closer together. He kept on badgering Communist officials and the citizenry to act more resolutely and rid themselves of all inhibitions against killings. How else could “class war” turn into reality? As early as January 1918, he complained that the Soviet regime was “too gentle”: he wanted “iron power,” whereas it was “inordinately soft, at every step more like jelly than iron.”⁷⁵ When told in June 1918 that party officials in Petrograd had restrained workers from carrying out a pogrom to avenge the assassination of Volodarskii, he fired off an indignant letter to his viceroy there. “Comrade Zinoviev!” he wrote:

The Central Committee has learned only today that in Petrograd workers wanted to react to the murder of Volodarskii with mass terror and that you (not you personally but the Petrograd Central Committee or Regional Committee) held them back. I protest decisively! We compromise ourselves: even in Soviet resolutions we threaten mass terror, and when it comes to action, we impede the entirely correct revolutionary initiative of the masses. This is im-per-mis-si-ble!⁷⁶

Two months later, Lenin instructed the authorities in Nizhnii Novgorod to “introduce at once mass terror, execute and deport hundreds of prostitutes, drunken soldiers, ex-officers, etc.”⁷⁷ These terribly imprecise three letters—“etc.”—gave agents of the regime a free hand in selecting their victims: it was to be carnage for the sake of carnage as an expression of the indomitable “revolutionary will” of the regime, which was fast losing ground under its feet.

Terror spread to the countryside in connection with the government’s declaration of war on the village. We have cited Lenin’s exhortations to the workers to kill “kulaks.” It is impossible to form even an approximate notion of the number of peasants who perished in the summer and fall of 1918 trying to save their grain from food detachments: given that the victims on the government side ran into the thousands, they were unlikely to have been smaller.

Lenin’s associates now vied with each other in using language of explicit brutality to incite the population to murder and to make murder committed for the cause of the Revolution appear noble and uplifting. Trotsky, for instance, on one occasion warned that if any of the ex-tsarist officers whom he drafted into the Red Army behaved treasonably, “nothing will remain of them but a wet spot.”⁷⁸ The Chekist Latsis declared that the “law of the Civil War [was] to slaughter all the wounded” fighting against the Soviet regime: “It is a life-and-death struggle. If you do not kill, you will be killed. Therefore kill that you may not be killed.”⁷⁹

No such exhortation to mass murder was heard either in the French Revolution or on the White side. The Bolsheviks deliberately sought to brutalize their citizens, to make them look on some of their fellow citizens just as frontline soldiers look on those wearing enemy uniforms: as abstractions rather than human beings.

This murderous psychosis had already attained a high pitch of intensity by the time bullets struck down Uritskii and Lenin. These two terrorist acts—as it turned out, unrelated, but at the time seen as part of an organized plot—unleashed the Red Terror in its formal sense. The majority of its victims were hostages chosen at random, mainly because of their social background, wealth, or connections with the old regime. The Bolsheviks considered these massacres necessary not only to suppress concrete threats to their regime but also to intimidate the citizens and force them into psychic submission.

The Red Terror was formally inaugurated with two decrees, issued on September 4 and 5, over the signatures of the commissars of the Interior and of Justice.

The first instituted the practice of taking hostages.* It was a barbarian measure, a reversion to the darkest of ages, which international tribunals after World War II would declare a war crime. The Cheka hostages were to be executed in reprisal for future attacks on Bolshevik leaders or any other active opposition to Bolshevik rule. In fact, they were lined up before firing squads around the clock. The official sanction for these massacres was given in the “Order Concerning Hostages” signed by Grigorii Petrovskii, the Commissar of the Interior, on September 4, 1918, one day before the Red Terror decree, and cabled to all provincial soviets:

The killing of Volodarskii, the killing of Uritskii, the attempt to kill and the wounding of the chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, Vladimir Ilich LENIN, the mass executions of tens of thousands of our comrades in Finland, in the Ukraine, on the Don, and in [areas controlled by] the Czechoslovaks, the continuous discovery of conspiracies in the rear of our armies, the open admission by Right SRs and other counterrevolutionary scum [of their involvement] in these conspiracies, and, at the same time, the exceedingly insignificant number of serious repressions and mass executions of White Guardists and bourgeois by the soviets, show that, notwithstanding the constant talk of mass terror against the SRs, White Guardists, and bourgeoisie, the terror, in fact, does not exist.

This situation must be decisively ended. An immediate stop must be put to slackness and pampering. All Right SRs known to local soviets must be immediately arrested. It is necessary to take from among the bourgeoisie and officers numerous hostages. In the event of the least attempts at resistance or the least stir in White Guard circles, resort must be had at once to mass executions. Executive Committees of local provincial soviets ought to display in this regard particular initiative.

Administrative offices, using the militia and Chekas, must take all measures to identify and arrest all those who hide behind false names. All persons involved in White Guard work are subject to mandatory execution.

All indicated measures are to be carried out immediately.

All indecisive action in this regard by one or another organ of local soviets must be instantly communicated … to the People’s Commissariat of the Interior.

The rear of our armies must be finally completely rid of all White Guardists and all vile conspirators against the authority of the working class and the poorer peasantry. Not the slightest hesitation, not the slightest indecisiveness, in the application of mass terror.

Confirm acceptance of the aforesaid telegram. Pass on to uezd soviets.

Commissar of the Interior, Petrovskii.⁸⁰

This extraordinary document not only permitted but required indiscriminate terror under the threat of punishment for what it termed displays of “slackness and pampering”—in other words, humaneness—toward its designated victims. Soviet officials were required to perpetrate mass murder or else risk being charged with complicity in the “counterrevolution.”

The second decree instituted the Red Terror with the adoption on September 5, 1918, of a “Resolution” approved by the Sovnarkom and signed by the Commissar of Justice, D. Kurskii.⁸¹ It stated that the Sovnarkom, having heard a report from the director of the Cheka, decided that it was imperative to intensify the policy of terror. “Class enemies” of the regime were to be isolated in concentration camps and all persons with links to “White Guard organizations, conspiracies, and seditious actions [miatezh]” were subject to immediate execution.

Communist documentary and historical literature passes over in silence the origins of these orders: they are not to be found in collections of Soviet decrees. Lenin’s name has been scrupulously disassociated from them, although he is known to have insisted on hostage-taking as essential to class war.⁸² Who, then, was the author of these decrees? On the face of it, Lenin was at the time too weak from the loss of blood to take part in affairs of state. Yet it is difficult to believe that measures of such importance could have been taken by two commissars without his explicit approval. The suspicion that Lenin authorized the two decrees that launched the Red Terror receives support from the fact that on September 5 he managed to affix his signature to a very minor decree dealing with Russo-German relations.⁸³ If its existence does not conclusively prove Lenin’s personal involvement, then at least it removes physical disability as a counterargument.

On August 31, even before official instructions to this effect had been issued, the Cheka at Nizhnii Novgorod rounded up 41 hostages identified as from the “enemy camp” and had them shot. The list of victims indicated that they consisted mainly of ex-officers, “capitalists,” and priests.⁸⁴ In Petrograd, Zinoviev, as if wishing to make up for the “softness” for which Lenin had reprimanded him, ordered the summary execution of 512 hostages. This group included many individuals associated with the ancien régime who had spent months in jail and therefore could have had no connection with the terrorist assaults on the Bolshevik leaders.⁸⁵ In Moscow, Dzerzhinskii ordered the execution of several high officials of the tsarist government held in prison since 1917: among them, one minister of justice (I. G. Shcheglovitov), three ministers of the interior (A. N. Khvostov, N. A. Maklakov, and A. D. Protopopov), one director of the Police Department (S. P. Beletskii), and a bishop. All were has-beens of no threat whatever to the regime. One cannot, therefore, escape the impression that their murder was Dzerzhinskii’s personal revenge for the many harsh years he had spent in prison while these men had been in charge of justice and the police.*

Cheka agents now were told they could deal with enemies of the regime as they saw fit. According to Cheka Circular No. 47, signed by Peters: “In its activity, the Cheka is entirely independent, conducting searches, arrests, and executions, accounts of which it renders subsequently to the Sovnarkom and Central Executive Committee.”⁸⁶ With this power, and spurred by Moscow’s threats, provincial and district Chekas all over Soviet Russia now energetically went to work. During September, the Communist press published a running account from the provinces on the progress of the Red Terror, column after column of reports of executions. Sometimes only the number of those executed was given, sometimes also their last names and occupations, the latter of which often included the designation “kr,” or “counterrevolutionary.” At the end of September, the Cheka came out with a house organ, the Cheka Weekly (Ezhenedel’nik VChK), to assist the brotherhood of Chekists in their work through the exchange of information and experience. It regularly carried summaries of executions, neatly arranged by provinces, as if they were the results of regional football matches.

It is difficult to convey the vehemence with which Communist leaders at this time called for the spilling of blood. It was as if they vied to prove themselves less “soft,” less “bourgeois” than the next man. The Stalinist and Nazi holocausts were carried out with much greater decorum. Stalin’s “kulaks” and political undesirables, sentenced to die from hunger and exhaustion, would be sent to “correction camps,” while Hitler’s Jews, en route to gas chambers, would be “evacuated” or “relocated.” The early Bolshevik terror, by contrast, was carried out in the open. Here there was no flinching, no resort to euphemisms, for this nationwide Grand Guignol was meant to serve “educational” purposes by having everyone—rulers as well as ruled—bear responsibility and hence develop an equal interest in the regime’s survival.

Here is Zinoviev addressing a gathering of Communists two weeks after the launching of the Red Terror: “We must carry along with us 90 million out of the 100 million of Soviet Russia’s inhabitants. As for the rest, we have nothing to say to them. They must be annihilated.”⁸⁷ These words, by one of the highest Soviet officials, was a sentence of death on 10 million human beings. And here is the organ of the Red Army inciting the populace to pogroms:

Without mercy, without sparing, we will kill our enemies by the scores of hundreds, let them be thousands, let them drown themselves in their own blood. For the blood of Lenin and Uritskii … let there be floods of blood of the bourgeoisie—more blood, as much as possible.⁸⁸

Karl Radek applauded these massacres, referring to the guiltless victims of the terror as persons who did “not participate directly in the White movement.” He spoke of their punishment as self-evident: “It is understood that for every Soviet worker, for every leader of the worker revolution who falls at the hands of agents of the counterrevolution, the latter will pay with tens of heads.” His only complaint was that the public was still insufficiently involved:

Five hostages taken from the bourgeoisie, executed on the basis of a public sentence announced by the plenum of the local soviet of workers, peasants, and Red Army deputies, in the presence of thousands of workers who approve of this act, is a more powerful act of mass terror than the execution of 500 persons by decision of the Cheka without the participation of the working masses.⁸⁹

Such was the moral climate of the time that, according to one prisoner of the Cheka, Radek’s article calling for “participatory terror” was hailed by prison inmates, many of them hostages, as a humanitarian gesture.⁹⁰

Not one of the leaders of the Bolshevik Party and Government, including those later eulogized as the “conscience of the Revolution,” objected publicly to these atrocities, let alone resigned in protest. Indeed, they gave them support: thus, on the Friday following the shooting of Lenin, the top Bolshevik leaders fanned out over Moscow to defend the government’s policies. Such expressions of concern and disgust at the carnage and such attempts to save human lives as were made came from Bolsheviks of the second rank, among them M. S. Olminskii, D. B. Riazanov, and E. M. Iaroslavskii, who had little influence on the course of events.*

A curious aspect of the Red Terror in this early phase was that it did not strike at that political party which the Bolsheviks from the outset had identified as the main culprit of the anti-regime violence: the Socialists-Revolutionaries. Whether Moscow did not proceed against them because of their popularity with the peasantry, or because it needed their support in the struggle against the Whites, or because it feared the SRs unleashing a wave of terror against Bolshevik leaders, it never carried out the threat to arrest and shoot masses of SR hostages. During these so-called Lenin Days of the Red Terror, only one SR was executed in Moscow.⁹¹ The great majority of the Cheka’s victims were men of the ancien régime and ordinary well-to-do citizens, many of whom approved of the harsh repressions of the Bolsheviks. There is evidence of conservative bureaucrats and tsarist officers applauding, while in jail, Bolshevik repression, in the belief that such draconian measures would bring Russia out of chaos and restore her as a great power.⁹² We have noted the conciliatory tone adopted in the spring of 1918 toward the Communist regime by the monarchist Vladimir Purishkevich, who praised it for being much “firmer” than the Provisional Government.⁹³ The fact that the Cheka selected its victims mainly from these groups—politically harmless and in some ways even supportive—confirms that the purpose of the Red Terror was not so much to destroy a specific opposition as to create an atmosphere of general intimidation, for which purpose the attitudes and activities of the terror’s victims were a secondary consideration. In a sense the more irrational the terror, the more effective it was, because it made the very process of rational calculation irrelevant, reducing people to the status of a cowed herd. As Krylenko put it: “We must execute not only the guilty. Execution of the innocent will impress the masses even more.”⁹⁴

In recent years, the Soviet political police seems to have felt a strong urge to glorify its prototype, the Cheka. In the literature which it lavishly subsidizes, Chekists are depicted as heroes of the Revolution who carried out harsh and unpleasant duties without sacrificing their moral integrity. The typical Chekist is portrayed as uncompromisingly severe in his actions and yet sentimentally tender in his feelings, a spiritual giant with the rare courage and discipline to stifle in himself an inborn humanitarianism in order to accomplish a vital mission on humanity’s behalf. Few deserved to join its ranks. As one reads this literature, one cannot help recall a speech by Himmler in 1943 to SS officers in which he hailed them as a superior breed because while massacring thousands of Jews they managed to retain their “decency.” The effect of such remarks is to make terror seem harder on the perpetrators than on its victims.*

What it was really like and what kind of people the Cheka attracted can be reconstructed from the testimony of Chekists who either defected to the Whites or fell into their hands.

The procedures followed in taking and executing hostages was described by an ex-Chekist named F. Drugov.⁹⁵ According to his testimony, the Cheka initially had no method: it seized hostages for such diverse reasons as occupying important positions under tsarism (especially in the Corps of Gendarmes), holding high rank in the armed forces, owning property or criticizing the new regime. If something happened that in the opinion of the local Cheka office called for the “application of mass terror,” an arbitrarily set number of such hostages were taken out of their prison cells and shot. There is evidence to support Drugov’s account from one provincial city. In October 1918, in response to the killing of several Soviet officials in Piatigorsk, a North Caucasian city in which many notables of the old regime had taken refuge, the Cheka executed fifty-nine hostages. The published list of the victims (which provided neither first names nor patronymics) included General N. V. Ruzskii, who had played an important role in the abdication of Nicholas II, S. V. Rukhlov, the wartime Minister of Transport, and six titled aristocrats. The remainder were mainly generals and colonels of the Imperial Army, with a smattering of others, including a woman identified only as “the daughter of a colonel.”⁹⁶

A more systematic approach in dealing with hostages was adopted in the summer of 1919 in connection with Denikin’s advance toward Moscow and the need to evacuate prisoners and hostages to prevent their falling into White hands. At this time, according to Drugov, Soviet Russian jails held 12,000 hostages. Dzerzhinskii instructed his staff to work out priorities to establish the order in which hostages would be shot as the need arose. With the help of a certain Dr. Kedrov, Latsis and his fellow Chekists divided the hostages into seven categories, the principal criterion being the victim’s personal wealth. The richest hostages, to whom were added ex-officials of the tsarist police, were placed in Category 7; they were to be executed first.

Unlike the mass murder of Jews by the Nazis, every aspect of which is known in sickening detail, even the general course of the Communist holocaust of 1918–20 remains concealed. The executions were often made public, but they were invariably carried out in secret. Of the few available accounts, some of the best are by German journalists in Russia, especially those published in the Berlin Lokalanzeiger in defiance of pressure from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to suppress such information. The following description comes from the Lokalanzeiger by way of The Times of London:

Details of these wholesale nocturnal executions are kept secret. It is said that on [Petrovskii] Square, brilliantly lighted with arc lamps, a squad of Soviet soldiers are kept always in readiness to receive victims from the great prison. No time is wasted and no pity expended. Anyone who does not place himself willingly on the place of execution and range himself according to order in the ranks of those about to be executed is simply dragged there.

These practices recall authenticated accounts from Nazi extermination camps. As for the executioners, the correspondent had this to say:

It is related of some sailors who participated in the executions almost every night that they contracted the execution habit, executions having become necessary to them, just as morphia is to morphia maniacs. They volunteer for the service and cannot sleep unless they have shot some one dead.

Families were not notified of pending or completed executions.*

The worst bestialities were committed by some of the provincial Chekas—which operated at a distance from the eyes of central organs and had no fear of being reported on by foreign diplomats or journalists. There exists a detailed description of the operations of the Kiev Cheka in 1919 by one of its staff, M. I. Belerosov, a former law student and tsarist officer, which he gave to General Denikin’s investigators.⁹⁷

According to Belerosov, at first (fall and winter of 1918–19) the Kiev Cheka went on a “continuous spree” of looting, extortion, and rape. Three-quarters of the staff were Jews, many of them riffraff incapable of any other work, cut off from the Jewish community although careful to spare fellow Jews.* This “cottage industry” phase in the Kiev Cheka’s Red Terror, as Belerosov calls it, later gave way to “factorylike” procedures dictated from Moscow. At its height, in the summer of 1919, before the city fell to the Whites, the Kiev Cheka had 300 civilian employees and up to 500 armed men.

Death sentences were meted out arbitrarily: people were shot for no apparent reason and equally capriciously released. While in Cheka prisons they never knew their fate until that dreaded moment at night when they were called out for “questioning”:

If a prisoner kept in the Lukianov jail was suddenly summoned to the “Cheka,” then there could be no doubt as to the reason for the haste. Officially, the inmate learned of his fate only when—usually at 1 a.m., the time of executions—the cell resounded with a shouted roster of those wanted “for questioning.” He was taken to the prison department, the chancery, where he signed in the appropriate place a registration card, usually without reading what was on it. Usually, after the doomed person had signed, it was added: so-and-so has been informed of his sentence. In fact, this was something of a lie because after the prisoners had left their cells they were not treated “tenderly” and told with relish what fate awaited them. Here the inmate was ordered to undress and then was led out for the sentence to be executed.… For executions there was set up a special garden by the house at 40 Institute Street … where the Provincial Cheka had moved … [T]he executioner—the commandant, or his deputy, sometimes one of his assistants, and occasionally a Cheka “amateur”—led the naked victim into this garden and ordered him to lie flat on the ground. Then with a shot in the nape of the neck he dispatched him. The executions were carried out with revolvers, usually Colts. Because the shot was fired at such close range, the skull of the victim usually burst into pieces. The next victim was brought in a like manner, laid by the side of the previous one, who was usually in a state of agony. When the number of victims became too large for the garden to hold, fresh victims were placed on top of the previous ones or else shot at the garden’s entrance … The victims usually went to the execution without resisting. What they went through cannot be imagined even approximately … Most of the victims usually requested a chance to say goodbye; and because there was no one else, they embraced and kissed their executioners.*

It is one of the striking features of the Red Terror that its victims almost never resisted or even attempted to flee: they bowed to it as to the inevitable. They seemed to have been under the illusion that by obeying and cooperating they would save their lives, apparently quite unable to realize—for the idea, indeed, defies reason—that they were being victimized not for what they did but for what they were, mere objects whose function it was to teach a lesson to the rest of the population. But there was at work here also a certain ethnic characteristic. Charles de Gaulle, serving in Poland during the Russo-Polish war of 1920, observed that the greater the danger, the more apathetic Slavs tend to become.⁹⁸

As the Red Terror entered its second month, a revulsion made itself felt in middle-level Bolshevik ranks. It intensified during the winter of 1918–19, forcing the government to issue in February 1919 a set of regulations that restricted the Cheka’s powers. These restraints, however, remained largely on paper. In the summer of 1919, as the Red armies were falling back before Denikin’s offensive and the capture of Moscow seemed imminent, the frightened Bolshevik leadership restored to the Cheka the full freedom to terrorize the population.

Criticism of the Cheka inside the Communist apparatus was inspired less by humanitarian impulses than by annoyance at its independence and fear that unless it was brought under control it would soon threaten loyal Communists. The carte blanche that the Red Terror gave the Cheka endowed it with powers which, by implication, extended over the very leadership of the party. One can imagine the feelings of ordinary party members on hearing Chekists boast that if “they felt like it” they could arrest the Sovnarkom, even Lenin himself, because their only loyalty was to the Cheka.⁹⁹

The first official to say what was on the minds of many rank-and-file Bolsheviks was Olminskii, a member of the Pravda editorial staff. In early October 1918 he accused the Cheka of considering itself to be above the party and the soviets.¹⁰⁰ Officials of the Commissariat of the Interior, who were supposed to supervise the provincial administration, expressed displeasure that provincial and uezd Chekas ignored the local soviets. In October 1918, the commissariat sent out an inquiry to the provincial and uezd soviets asking how they envisioned their relationship with the local Chekas. Of the 147 soviets that responded, only 20 were content to have the local Cheka acting independently; the remaining 127 (85 percent) wanted them to operate under their supervision.¹⁰¹ No less annoyed was the Commissariat of Justice, which saw itself eliminated from the process of trying and sentencing political offenders. Its head, N. V. Krylenko, was an enthusiastic proponent of terror, an advocate of executing even innocents, and later a leading prosecutor at Stalin’s show trials. But he quite naturally wanted his commissariat to have a hand in the killings. In December 1918 he presented the party’s Central Committee with a project which called for the Cheka to confine itself to its original function—namely, investigation—and leave to the Commissariat of Justice the task of trying and sentencing.¹⁰² For the time being, the Central Committee shelved this proposal.

Criticism of the Cheka continued in the winter of 1918–19. There was widespread revulsion at the publication in the Cheka Weekly, without editorial comment, of a letter from a group of provincial Bolshevik officials expressing anger that Bruce Lockhart, whom the authorities had accused of complicity in the attempt on Lenin’s life, had been released instead of being subjected to the “most refined tortures.”¹⁰³ Olminskii returned to the fray in February 1919. One of the few prominent Bolsheviks to protest the executions of innocents, he wrote: “One can hold different opinions of the Red Terror. But what now goes on in the provinces is not Red Terror at all, but crime, from beginning to end.”¹⁰⁴ Moscow gossip had it that the motto of the Cheka was: “Better execute ten innocent people than spare one who is guilty.”¹⁰⁵

The Cheka fought back. The task fell to Dzerzhinskii’s Latvian deputies, Latsis and Peters, for early in October Dzerzhinskii left for a one-month vacation in Switzerland. He had been back on the job for six weeks, supervising the Lenin Days of the Red Terror, when something happened to him. He shaved off his beard and quietly slipped out of Moscow. Traveling by way of Germany to Switzerland, he joined his wife and children, whom he had settled in the Soviet mission in Berne. There exists a photograph of him, taken in October 1918, at the height of the Red Terror, posing in elegant mufti with family on the shores of Lake Lugano.¹⁰⁶ His apparent inability to stand the carnage is the best thing known of this grand master of terror: he would never again display such un-Bolshevik weakness.

In responding to the criticism, Cheka spokesmen defended their organization but also counterattacked. They called the critics “armchair” politicians who had no practical experience in combating the counterrevolution and failed to understand the necessity of conceding the Cheka unrestrained freedom of action. Peters charged that behind the anti-Cheka campaign stood “sinister” elements, “hostile to the proletariat and the Revolution,” a hint that criticizing the Cheka could bring charges of treason.¹⁰⁷ To those who claimed that by acting independently of the soviets the Cheka violated the Soviet Constitution, the editorial board of the Cheka Weekly responded that the constitution could take effect only “after the bourgeoisie and counterrevolution have been totally crushed.”*

But the Cheka apologists did not confine themselves to defending their institution: they glorified it as essential to the triumph of “proletarian dictatorship.” Developing Lenin’s theme of “class war” as a conflict that knew no frontiers, they depicted themselves as a counterpart of the Red Army, the sole difference between the two being that whereas the Red Army fought the class enemy outside Soviet boundaries, the Cheka and its armed forces combated him on the “domestic front.” The notion of the Civil War as “war on two fronts” became one of the favorite themes of the Cheka and its supporters: those who served in the Red Army and those who served in the Cheka were said to be comrades-in-arms, fighting, each in his own way, the “international bourgeoisie.”¹⁰⁸ This analogy allowed the Cheka to claim that its license to kill within Soviet territory paralleled the right, indeed the duty, of army personnel to kill on sight enemy soldiers at the front. War was not a court of justice: in the words of Dzerzhinskii (as reported by Radek), innocents died on the home front just as innocents died on the field of battle.¹⁰⁹ It was a position deduced from the premise that politics was warfare. Latsis pushed the analogy to its logical conclusion:

The Extraordinary Commission [Cheka] is not an investigatory commission, nor is it a court or a tribunal. It is an organ of combat, active on the internal front of the Civil War. It does not judge the enemy: it smites him. It does not pardon those on the other side of the barricade but incinerates them.¹¹⁰

This analogy between police terror and military combat ignored, of course, the critical difference between the two—namely, that a soldier fights other armed men at the risk of his life, whereas Cheka personnel killed defenseless men and women at no risk to themselves. The “courage” which the Chekist had to display was not physical or moral courage, but the willingness to stifle his conscience: his “toughness” lay in the ability not to bear suffering but to inflict it. Nevertheless, the Cheka grew very fond of this spurious analogy, with which it sought to rebut criticism and overcome the loathing with which Russians regarded it.

Lenin had to step into the fray. He liked the Cheka and approved of its brutality, but agreed that some of its most egregious abuses had to be curbed, if only to improve its public image. Appalled by the item in the Cheka Weekly demanding the application of torture, he ordered this organ of Latsis’s closed even as he called Latsis an outstanding Communist.† On November 6, 1918, the Cheka was instructed to release all prisoners who had not been charged or against whom charges could not be brought within two weeks. Hostages were also to be let go, except “where needed.”* The measure was hailed by Communist organs as an “amnesty” although it was nothing of the kind, since it applied to individuals who not only had not been tried and sentenced but had not even been charged. These rules remained a dead letter: in 1919 Cheka jails continued to overflow with prisoners incarcerated for no stated reason, many of them hostages.

Toward the end of October 1918, the government moved halfheartedly to limit the Cheka’s independence by bringing it into a closer relationship with other state institutions. The Moscow headquarters of the Cheka was ordered to admit representatives of the commissariats of Justice and of the Interior; provincial soviets were authorized to appoint and dismiss local Cheka officials.¹¹¹ The only meaningful curtailment of police abuses, however, was the dissolution, on January 7, 1919, of the Chekas in the uezdy, the smallest administrative entities, which had acquired notoriety for committing the worst atrocities and engaging in large-scale extortion.¹¹²

The authorities were finally shaken from their complacency by signs of disaffection in the Moscow Committee of the Party, whose meeting on January 23, 1919, heard strong protests against the uncontrolled operations of the Cheka. A motion was introduced to abolish the Cheka: it was defeated as “bourgeois,” but a point had been made.¹¹³ A week later, the same committee, the country’s most important, voted with a plurality of 4 to 1 to deprive the Cheka of the right to act as tribunal and to limit it to its original function of an investigatory body.¹¹⁴

Responding to this dissatisfaction, the Central Committee on February 4 reviewed Krylenko’s December 1918 proposal. Dzerzhinskii and Stalin were asked to prepare a report. In recommendations presented a few days later, they proposed that the Cheka retain the double power of investigating sedition and suppressing armed rebellion, but that the sentencing for crimes against the state be reserved for Revolutionary Tribunals. An exception to this rule was to be made for areas under martial law, which happened to encompass large stretches of the country: here the Cheka should be allowed to operate as before and retain the right to mete out capital punishment.¹¹⁵ The Central Committee approved this recommendation and forwarded it to the Central Executive Committee (CEC) for endorsement.

At the CEC session of February 17, 1919, Dzerzhinskii delivered the principal report.† During the first fifteen months of its existence, he said, the Soviet regime had had to wage a “pitiless” struggle against organized resistance from all quarters. Now, however, in good measure thanks to the work of the Cheka, “our internal enemies, ex-officers, the bourgeoisie and tsarist bureaucracy, are defeated, dispersed.” Henceforth, the principal threat would come from counterrevolutionaries who had infiltrated the Soviet apparatus in order to carry out “sabotage” from inside. This called for different methods of struggle. The Cheka no longer needed to wage mass terror: henceforth it would furnish the evidence to the Revolutionary Tribunals, which would try and sentence the offenders.

102. Dzerzhinskii and Stalin in a jovial moment.

On the face of it, this marked the end of an era: some contemporaries hailed the reform, which the CEC routinely approved on February 17, as proof that the “proletariat,” having crushed the enemy, no longer needed the weapon of terror.¹¹⁶ But this was no Russian Thermidor: Soviet Russia did not dispense with terror either then or afterward. In 1919, 1920, and the years that followed, the Cheka and its successor, GPU, continued to arrest as well as try, sentence, and execute prisoners and hostages, without reference to the Revolutionary Tribunals. Indeed, as Krylenko explained, this did not matter since “qualitatively” there should have been no difference between the courts and the police.¹¹⁷ His comment was correct in view of the fact, noted above, that as of 1920 judges could sentence defendants without the customary judiciary procedures if their guilt appeared “obvious,” which is exactly what the Cheka did. In October 1919, the Cheka established its own “Special Revolutionary Tribunal.”¹¹⁸ The abortive efforts at reform, nevertheless, deserve to be remembered if only because they show that at least some Bolsheviks had a premonition as early as 1918–19 that the security police threatened not only the enemies of the regime, but also them, its friends.

By 1920, Soviet Russia had become a police state in the sense that the security police, virtually a state within the state, spread its tentacles to all Soviet institutions, including those that managed the economy. In a remarkably short time, the Cheka had transformed itself from an organ responsible for investigating and rendering harmless political dissent into a super-government which not only decided who lived and who died but supervised the day-to-day activities of the entire state apparatus. The development was inevitable. Having laid claim to running the country entirely on its own, the Communist regime had no choice but to engage hundreds of thousands of professionals—“bourgeois specialists” who, by its own definition, were a “class enemy.” As such, they required close supervision. This had to be the responsibility of the Cheka, since it alone had the requisite apparatus—a responsibility that enabled the Cheka to insinuate itself into every facet of Soviet life. In his report of February 1919 to the CEC on the new functions of the Cheka Dzerzhinskii said:

There is no longer any need to make short shrift of mass groupings. Now our enemies have changed the method of combat. Now they are endeavoring to worm themselves into Soviet institutions, so as to sabotage work from within our ranks, until the moment when our external enemies have broken us, and then, seizing the organs and machinery of power, turn them against us…, This struggle, if you will, is more individualistic [edinichnaia], more subtle. Here one must search; here it is not enough to stay put.… We know that in almost all our institutions there sit our enemies, but we cannot destroy our institutions: we must find the threads and catch them. And in this sense the methods of combat now must be entirely different.¹¹⁹

The Cheka used this excuse to penetrate all Soviet organizations. And because it retained unlimited power over human lives, its administrative supervision became yet another form of terror, which no Soviet wage earner, Communist or not, could escape. It was natural, therefore, that in March 1919 Dzerzhinskii, while retaining the directorship of the Cheka, was appointed Commissar of the Interior.

In line with its expanded mandate, in mid-1919 high Cheka officials acquired the authority preventively to arrest any citizen and to inspect any and all institutions. What these powers meant in practice can be gathered from the credentials issued to members of the Cheka Collegium. These empowered the bearers to: (1) detain any citizen whom they knew to be guilty or suspected of being guilty of counterrevolutionary activity, speculation, or other crimes, and turn him over to the Cheka; and (2) to have free entry into all state and public offices, industrial and commercial enterprises, schools, hospitals, communal apartments, theaters, as well as railroad and steamship terminals.¹²⁰

The Cheka gradually took over the management and supervision of a broad variety of activities which would not normally be regarded as affecting state security. To enforce ordinances against “speculation”—that is, private trade—in the second half of 1918 the Cheka assumed control over railroads, waterways, highways, and the other means of transport. To carry out these responsibilities efficiently, Dzerzhinskii was appointed, in April 1921, Commissar of Communications.¹²¹ The Cheka supervised and enforced all forms of compulsory labor and enjoyed wide discretionary powers to punish those who evaded this obligation or performed it unsatisfactorily. Execution by shooting was a common method used to this end. We have a valuable insight into the methods the Cheka employed to enhance economic performance from an eyewitness, a Menshevik timber specialist in Soviet employ who happened to be present when Lenin and Dzerzhinskii decided on the means to increase the production of lumber:

A Soviet decree was then made public, obliging every peasant living near a government forest to prepare and transport a dozen cords of wood. But this raised the question of what to do with the foresters—what to demand of them. In the eyes of the Soviet authorities, these foresters were part and parcel of that sabotaging intelligentsia to whom the new government gave short shrift.

The meeting of the Council of Labor and Defense, discussing this particular problem, was attended by Felix Dzerzhinsky, among other commissars.… After listening a while, he said: “In the interests of justice and equality I move: That the foresters be made personally responsible for the fulfilment of the peasants’ quota. That, in addition, each forester is himself to fulfil the same quota—a dozen cords of wood.”

A few members of the council objected. They pointed out that foresters were intellectuals not used to heavy manual labor. Dzerzhinsky replied that it was high time to liquidate the age-old inequality between the peasants and the foresters.

“Moreover,” the Cheka head declared in conclusion, “should the peasants fail to deliver their quota of wood, the foresters responsible for them are to be shot. When a dozen or two of them are shot, the rest will tackle the job in earnest.”

It was generally known that the majority of these foresters were anti-Communist. Still, one could feel an embarrassed hush in the room. Suddenly I heard a brusque voice: “Who’s against this motion?”

This was Lenin, closing the discussion in his inimitable way. Naturally, no one dared to vote against Lenin and Dzerzhinsky. As an afterthought, Lenin suggested that the point about shooting the foresters, although adopted, be omitted from the official minutes of the session. This, too, was done as he willed.

I felt ill during the meeting. For more than a year, of course, I had known that executions were decimating Russia—but here I myself was present while a five-minute discussion doomed scores of totally innocent men. I was shaken to my innermost being. A cough was choking me, but it was more than the cough of one of my winter colds.

It was plain to me that, when within a week or two the executions of those foresters took place, their deaths would not have moved things forward one single iota. I knew that this terrible decision stemmed from a feeling of resentment and revenge on the part of those who invoked such senseless measures.¹²²

There must have been many such decisions which left no trace in the documentation.

The Cheka steadily expanded its military force. In the summer of 1918 its Combat Detachments were formed into an organization separate from the Red Army, designated as Korpus Voisk VChK (Corps of Armies of the AU-Russian Cheka).¹²³ This security force, modeled on the tsarist Corps of Gendarmes, grew into a regular army for the “home front.” In May 1919, on the initiative of Dzerzhinskii in his new capacity as Commissar of the Interior, the government combined all these units into Armies of the Internal Security of the Republic (Voiska Vnutrennei Okhrany Respubliki), placing them under the supervision not of the Commissar of War but of the Commissar of the Interior.¹²⁴ At this time, this internal army consisted of 120,000–125,000 men. By the middle of 1920, it doubled, totaling nearly a quarter of a million men who protected industrial establishments and transport facilities, helped the Commissariat of Supply obtain food, and guarded forced labor and concentration camps.¹²⁵

Last but not least, the Cheka formed a bureau of counterintelligence for the armed forces, known as the Osobyi Otdel (Special Department).

By virtue of these functions and the powers which they carried, the Cheka became by 1920 the most powerful institution in Soviet Russia. The foundations of the police state thus were laid while Lenin was in charge and on his initiative.

Among the Cheka’s most important responsibilities was organizing and operating “concentration camps,” an institution which the Bolsheviks did not quite invent but which they gave a novel and most sinister meaning. In its fully developed form, the concentration camp, along with the one-party state and the omnipotent political police, was Bolshevism’s major contribution to the political practices of the twentieth century.

The term “concentration camp” originated at the end of the nineteenth century in connection with colonial wars.* The Spaniards first instituted such camps during the campaign against the Cuban insurrection. Their camps are estimated to have held up to 400,000 inmates. The United States emulated the Spaniards while fighting the Philippine insurrection of 1898; so did Britain during the Boer War. But apart from the name, these early prototypes had little in common with the concentration camps introduced by the Bolsheviks in 1919 and later copied by the Nazis and other totalitarian regimes. The Spanish, American, and British concentration camps were emergency measures adopted during campaigns against colonial guerrillas: their purpose was not punitive but military—namely, the isolation of armed irregulars from the civilian population. Conditions in these early camps admittedly were harsh—as many as 20,000 Boers are said to have perished in British internment. But here there was no deliberate mistreatment: the suffering and deaths were due to the haste with which these camps had been set up, which resulted in inadequate housing, provisioning, and medical care. The inmates of these camps were not made to perform forced labor. In all three cases, the camps were dismantled and the inmates released on the termination of hostilities.

Soviet concentration and forced labor camps (kontsentratsionnye lageri and lageri prinuditel’nykh rabot) were from the outset different in organization, operation, and purpose:

1. They were permanent: introduced during the Civil War, they did not disappear with the end of hostilities in 1920, but remained in place under various designations, swelling to fantastic proportions in the 1930s, when Soviet Russia was at peace and ostensibly “constructing socialism.”

2. They did not hold foreigners suspected of assisting guerrillas, but Russians and other Soviet citizens suspected of political opposition: their primary mission was not to help subdue militarily a colonial people, but to suppress dissent among the country’s own citizens.

3. Soviet concentration camps performed an important economic function: their inmates had to work where ordered, which meant that they were not only isolated but also exploited as slave labor.

Talk of concentration camps was first heard in Soviet Russia in the spring of 1918 in connection with the Czech uprising and the induction of former Imperial officers.* At the end of May, Trotsky threatened Czechs who refused to surrender arms with confinement to concentration camps.† On August 8, he ordered that, for the protection of the railroad line from Moscow to Kazan, concentration camps be constructed at several nearby localities to isolate such “sinister agitators, counterrevolutionary officers, saboteurs, parasites and speculators” as were not executed “on the spot” or given other penalties.¹²⁶ Thus, the concentration camp was conceived of as a place of detention for citizens who could not be specifically charged but whom, for one reason or another, the authorities preferred not to execute. Lenin used the term in this sense in a cable to Penza of August 9, in which he ordered that mutinous “kulaks” be subjected to “merciless mass terror”—that is, executions—but “dubious ones incarcerated in concentration camps outside the cities.”^‡ These threats acquired legal and administrative sanction on September 5, 1918, in the “Resolution on Red Terror,” which provided for the “safeguarding of the Soviet Republic from class enemies by means of isolating them in concentration camps.”

It seems, however, that few concentration camps were built in 1918 and that those which were owed their existence to the initiative of the provincial Chekas or of the military command. The construction of concentration camps began in earnest in the spring of 1919 on the initiative of Dzerzhinskii. Lenin did not want his name linked with these camps, and the decrees establishing them and detailing their structure and operations came out in the name not of the Council of People’s Commissars but of the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets and its chairman, Sverdlov. They implemented recommendations contained in the report by Dzerzhinskii of February 17, 1919, on the reorganization of the Cheka. Dzerzhinskii argued that the existing judiciary measures to combat sedition were not sufficient:

Along with sentencing by courts it is necessary to retain administrative sentencing—namely, the concentration camp. Even today the labor of those under arrest is far from being utilized in public works, and so I recommend that we retain these concentration camps for the exploitation of labor of persons under arrest: gentlemen who live without any occupation [and] those who are incapable of doing work without some compulsion; or, in regard to Soviet institutions, such a measure of punishment ought to be applied for unconscientious attitude toward work, for negligence, for lateness, etc. With this measure we should be able to pull up even our very own workers.¹²⁷

Dzerzhinskii, Kamenev, and Stalin (the co-drafters of this decree) conceived of the camps as a combination “school of work” and pool of labor. In accord with their recommendation, the CEC adopted the following resolution:

The All-Russian Extraordinary Commission [Cheka] is empowered to confine to concentration camps, under the guidance of precise instructions concerning the rules of imprisonment in a concentration camp approved by the All-Russian Central Executive Committee.¹²⁸

For reasons that are not clear, in 1922 and subsequently, the term “concentration camps” was replaced by “camps of forced labor” (lageri prinuditel’nykh rabot).

On April 11, 1919, the CEC issued a “Decision” concerning the organization of such camps. It provided for the establishment of a network of forced labor camps under the authority of the Commissariat of the Interior—now headed by Dzerzhinskii:

Subject to internment in the camps of forced labor are individuals or categories of individuals concerning whom decisions had been taken by organs of the administration, Chekas, Revolutionary Tribunals, People’s Courts, and other Soviet organs authorized to do so by decrees and instructions.¹²⁹

Several features of this landmark decree call for comment. Soviet concentration camps, as instituted in 1919, were meant to be a place of confinement for all kinds of undesirables, whether sentenced by courts or by administrative organs. Liable to confinement in them were not only individuals but also “categories of individuals”—that is, entire classes: Dzerzhinskii at one point proposed that special concentration camps be erected for the “bourgeoisie.” Living in forced isolation, the inmates formed a pool of slave labor on which Soviet administrative and economic institutions could draw at no cost. The network of camps was run by the Commissariat of the Interior, first through the Central Administration of Camps and later through the Main Camp Administration (Glavnoe Upravlenie Lageriami), popularly known as Gulag. One can perceive here, not only in principle but also in practical detail, Stalin’s concentration camp empire: it differed from Lenin’s only in size.

The CEC resolutions approving the creation of concentration camps called for detailed instructions to guide their operations. A decree issued on May 12, 1919,¹³⁰ spelled out in meticulous bureaucratic language the constitution of the camps: how they were to be organized, what were the duties and putative rights of the inmates. The decree ordered every provincial capital city to construct a forced labor camp capable of holding 300 or more inmates. Since Soviet Russia had (depending on the shifting fortunes of the Civil War) about thirty-eight provinces, this provision called for facilities for a minimum of 11,400 prisoners. But this figure could be greatly expanded, for the decree authorized also district capital cities to construct concentration camps, and these numbered in the hundreds. Responsibility for organizing the camps was given to the Cheka; after they were in place, authority over them was to pass to the local soviets. This provision, one of many in Bolshevik legislation meant to keep alive the myth that the soviets were “sovereign” organs, was rendered inoperative by the assignment of responsibility for the “general administration” of the camps in Soviet Russia to a newly formed Department of Forced Labor (Otdel Prinuditel’nykh Rabot) of the Commissariat of the Interior, which, as noted, happened to have been headed by the same individual who directed the Cheka.

Russian governments had an old tradition of exploiting convict labor: “In no other country has the utilization of forced labor in the economy of the state itself played as significant a role as in the history of Russia.”¹³¹ The Bolsheviks revived this tradition. Inmates of Soviet concentration camps, from their birth in 1919, had at all times to perform physical labor either inside or outside the place of confinement. “Immediately upon their arrival in the camp,” the instruction read, “all inmates are to be assigned to work and they are to occupy themselves with physical labor throughout their stay.” To encourage camp authorities to exploit prison labor to the fullest, as well as to save the government money, it was stipulated that the camps had to be fully self-supporting:

The costs of running the camp and the administration, when there is a full complement of inmates, must be covered by the inmates’ labor. The responsibility for deficits will be borne by the administration and the inmates in accord with rules stipulated in a separate instruction.*

Attempts to escape from the camps were subject to severe punishments: for a first attempt, a recaptured prisoner could have his sentence prolonged as much as ten times; for a second, he was to be turned over to a Revolutionary Tribunal, which could sentence him to death. To further discourage escapes, the camp authorities were empowered to institute “collective responsibility” (krugovaia poruka), which made fellow inmates accountable for each other. In theory, an inmate had the right to complain of mistreatment in a book kept for the purpose.

Thus, the modern concentration camp was born—an enclave within which human beings lost all rights and became slaves of the state. In this connection, the question may arise as to the difference between the status of an inmate in a concentration camp and that of an ordinary Soviet citizen. After all, no one in Soviet Russia enjoyed personal rights or had recourse to law, and everyone could be ordered, under decrees providing for compulsory labor, to work wherever the state wanted. The line separating freedom from imprisonment in the Soviet Russia of that time was indeed blurred. For example, in May 1919, Lenin decreed the mobilization of labor for military construction on the southern front.¹³² He stipulated that the mobilized work force was to consist “primarily of prisoners as well as citizens confined to concentration camps and sentenced to hard labor.” But if these were insufficient, the decree called for pulling “into the labor obligation also local inhabitants.” Here, camp inmates were distinguished from ordinary, “free” citizens only by being the first to be drafted for forced labor. Even so, significant differences separated the two categories. Citizens not confined to camps normally lived with their families and had access to the free market to supplement their rations, whereas camp inmates could have only occasional visits from relatives and were forbidden to receive food packages. Ordinary citizens did not live, day in and day out, under the watchful eyes of the commandant and his assistants (often Communist trusties), who were held responsible for squeezing enough labor from their charges to cover their own salaries as well as the costs of running the camp. Also, they were not quite so liable to be punished, under the practice of “collective responsibility,” for the actions of others.

At the end of 1920, Soviet Russia had eighty-four concentration camps with approximately 50,000 prisoners; three years later (October 1923), the number had increased to 315 camps with 70,000 inmates.¹³³

Information on conditions in the early Soviet concentration camps is sparse and few scholars have shown an interest in the subject.¹³⁴ The occasional testimonies smuggled out by inmates or provided by survivors paint a picture that to the smallest detail resembles descriptions of Nazi camps: so much so that were it not that they had been published two decades earlier, one might suspect them to be recent forgeries. In 1922, Socialist-Revolutionary émigrés brought out in Germany, under the editorship of Victor Chernov, a volume of reports by survivors of Soviet prisons and camps. Included was a description of life in a concentration camp at Kholmogory, near Archangel, written in early 1921 by an anonymous female prisoner. The camp had four compounds holding 1,200 inmates. The prisoners were housed in an expropriated cloister whose accommodations were relatively comfortable and well heated. The author describes it nevertheless as a “death camp.” Hunger was endemic: food packages, some sent by American relief organizations, were immediately confiscated. The commandant, who bore a Latvian name, had prisoners shot for the most trifling offenses: if a prisoner, while working in the fields, dared to eat a vegetable that he had dug up, he was killed on the spot and then reported as having tried to escape. The flight of a prisoner automatically led to the execution of nine others, bound to him by “collective responsibility,” as provided for by law; a recaptured escapee was killed as well, sometimes by being buried alive. The administration regarded the inmates as ciphers, whose survival or death was a matter of no consequence.¹³⁵

Thus came into existence a central institution of the totalitarian regime:

Trotsky and Lenin were the inventors and the creators of the new form of the concentration camp. [This means not only] that they created establishments called “concentration camps.” … The leaders of Soviet communism also created a specific method of legal reasoning, a network of concepts that implicitly incorporated a gigantic system of concentration camps, which Stalin merely organized technically and developed. Compared with the concentration camps of Trotsky and Lenin, the Stalinist ones represented merely a gigantic form of implementation [Ausfiihrungsbestimmung]. And, of course, the Nazis found in the former as well as the latter ready-made models, which they merely had to develop. The German counterparts promptly seized upon these models. On March 13, 1921, the then hardly known Adolf Hitler wrote in the Völkischer Beobachter: “One prevents the Jewish corruption of our people, if necessary, by confining its instigators to concentration camps.” On December 8 of that year, in a speech to the National Club in Berlin, Hitler expressed his intention of creating concentration camps upon taking power.¹³⁶

The Red Terror had many aspects, but the historian’s first and foremost concern must be with its victims. Their number cannot be determined, and it is unlikely that it ever will be, for it is almost certain that Lenin ordered the Cheka archives destroyed.¹³⁷ The closest to an official Soviet figure for the number executed between 1918 and 1920, furnished by Latsis, is 12,733. This figure, however, has been challenged as a vast underestimation on the grounds that, according to Latsis’s own admission, in the twenty provinces of central Russia in a single year (1918) there were 6,300 executions, 4,520 of whose victims had been shot for counterrevolutionary activity.¹³⁸ Latsis’s figures are entirely disproportionate to the statistics available for some of the major cities. Thus, William Henry Chamberlin had seen at the Prague Russian Archive (now in Moscow) a report of the Ukrainian Cheka for the year 1920—by which time the death penalty had been formally abolished—listing 3,879 executions, 1,418 of them in Odessa and 538 in Kiev.¹³⁹ Inquiries into Bolshevik atrocities in Tsaritsyn came up with an estimate of 3,000 to 5,000 victims.¹⁴⁰ According to Izvestiia, between May 22 and June 22, 1920, the Revolutionary Tribunals alone—that is, without Cheka victims being taken into account—condemned to death 600 citizens, including 35 for “counterrevolution,” 6 for spying, and 33 for dereliction of duty.* Using such figures, Chamberlin estimates a total of 50,000 victims of the Red Terror, and Leggett, 140,000.¹⁴¹ All one can say with any assurance is that if the victims of Jacobin terror numbered in the thousands, Lenin’s terror claimed tens if not hundreds of thousands of lives. Victims of the next wave of terror, launched by Stalin and Hitler, would be counted in the millions.

To what purpose this carnage?

Dzerzhinskii, supported by Lenin, was given to boasting that terror and its instrument, the Cheka, had saved the Revolution. This appraisal is probably correct, as long as “the Revolution” is identified with the Bolshevik dictatorship. There exists solid evidence that by the summer of 1918, when the Bolsheviks launched the terror, they were rejected by all strata of the population except for their own apparatus. Under these circumstances, “merciless terror” was indeed the only way of preserving the regime.

This terror had to be not only “merciless” (can one even conceive of “merciful” terror?) but also indiscriminate. If the opponents of the Bolshevik dictatorship had been an identifiable minority, then one could have targeted them for surgical removal. But in Soviet Russia it was the regime and its supporters that were a minority. To stay in power, the dictatorship had first to atomize society and then destroy in it the very will to act. The Red Terror gave the population to understand that under a regime that felt no hesitation in executing innocents, innocence was no guarantee of survival. The best hope of surviving lay in making oneself as inconspicuous as possible, which meant abandoning any thought of independent public activity, indeed any concern with public affairs, and withdrawing into one’s private world. Once society disintegrated into an agglomeration of human atoms, each fearful of being noticed and concerned exclusively with physical survival, then it ceased to matter what society thought, for the government had the entire sphere of public activity to itself. Only under these conditions could a small minority subjugate millions.

But the price of such a regime was not cheap, either for its victims or for its practitioners. To stay in power against the wishes of the overwhelming majority, the Bolsheviks had to distort that power beyond all recognition. Terror may have saved communism, but it corroded its very soul.

Isaac Steinberg noted with a keen eye the devastating impact of the Red Terror on both the citizens and the authorities. Traveling in a streetcar in 1920, he was struck by an analogy between that packed vehicle and the country at large:

Does not our land resemble today’s streetcars, which drag themselves along Moscow’s dreary streets, worn out and creaking from old age, weighed down with people hanging on to it? How tightly these people are squeezed, how difficult it is to breathe here, as if after an exhausting fight. How hungry is the look in their eyes! See how shamelessly they steal seats from one another, how this mass of humanity, accidentally chained together, seems to lack all sense of mutual sympathy and understanding, how everyone sees in his fellow man only a rival! … Mindless hatred for the streetcar conductor—this expresses the feeling of this casual mass toward the government, the state, the organization. Indifference and irony toward those who crowd at the car’s entrance hoping to get in—this is their attitude toward the community, toward solidarity. When one observes them more intently one realizes that at bottom they are close to one another: the same thought, the same spark shines fraternally in their hostile eyes; the same pain weeps in them all. But now, here, they are pitiless enemies.¹⁴²

But he also notes the effect of terror on its perpetrators:

When the terror strikes the class enemy, the bourgeois, when it tramples his self-esteem and the feeling of love, when it separates him from his family or confines him to his family, when it torments his spirit and causes it to wilt—whom does this terror strike? Only the class nature of the enemy, unique only to him and destined to disappear along with him? Or does it also, at the same time, strike something general, something that concerns all mankind, namely man’s human nature? The feelings of pity and suffering, the longing for the spirit and for freedom, the attachment to the family, and the yearning for the far away—all that which makes “men” out of men—these things, after all, are known and common to both camps. And when the terror stamps out, banishes, and exposes to ridicule feelings common to mankind in one group, then it does the same everywhere, in all souls.… The sense of dignity violated in the camp of the enemy, the suppressed feelings of pity for the enemy, the pain inflicted on some enemy, rebound, through a psychological reflex, back to the camp of the victors.… Slavery produces the same effect in the soul of the victor as in that of the vanquished.¹⁴³

The outside world heard muffled reverberations of the Bolshevik terror from newspaper accounts, reports of visitors, and Russian refugees. Some reacted with revulsion, a few with sympathy: but the prevalent response was one of indifference. Europe preferred not to know. It had just emerged from a war that had claimed millions of lives. It desperately wanted to return to normalcy; it felt incapable of absorbing still more stories of mass death. So it lent a willing ear to those who assured it, sometimes sincerely, sometimes deceptively, that things in Red Russia were not as bad as depicted, that the terror was over, and that, in any event, it had no bearing on its own destiny. It was, after all, the exotic, cruel Russia of Ivan the Terrible, Dostoevsky’s “underground men,” and Rasputin.

It was easy to be misled. The Soviet disinformation machine minimized the casualties of the terror and magnified its alleged provocations. It was especially effective with well-meaning foreign visitors, such as the rich American dilettante William Bullitt, who breezed through Soviet Russia in February 1919 on a mission for President Wilson. On his return, he informed the U.S. Congress that the tales of bloody terror had been wildly exaggerated. “The red terror is over,” he assured his listeners, stating that the Cheka had executed in all of Russia “only” 5,000 people. “Executions are extremely rare.”* Lincoln Steffens reported on his visit to Soviet Russia that “the Bolshevik leaders regret and are ashamed of their red terror.”¹⁴⁴

Although Bullitt and Steffens minimized the terror, at least they admitted it. But what is one to make of a “witness” like Pierre Pascal, a young French ex-officer posted in Russia turned Communist, later a professor at the Sorbonne, who denied it and mocked its victims? “The terror is finished,” he wrote in February 1920:

To tell the truth, it never existed. This word “terror,” which for a Frenchman corresponds to a precise idea, has always made me laugh here, on seeing the moderation, the sweetness, the good nature of this terrible Extraordinary Commission [Cheka] charged with its enforcement.¹⁴⁵

Others yet found consolation in the thought that if one kind of terror ravaged Soviet Russia, then another kind, said to be no less dreadful, afflicted Western Europe and the United States. In 1925, a group calling itself the International Committee for Political Prisoners published a collection of smuggled testimonies from prisoners in Soviet jails and camps. No one questioned their authenticity. Yet when the editor, Isaac Don Levine, asked some of the world’s leading intellectuals what they thought of this appalling evidence, the responses ranged from mildly shocked to snide and cynical. Few saw the significance of this material, as did Albert Einstein, in the “tragedy of human history in which one murders for fear of being murdered.” Romain Rolland, the author of Jean Christophe, made light of the evidence on the grounds that “almost identical things [were] going on in the prisons of California where they [were] martyring the workingmen of the I.W.W.” Upton Sinclair seconded him by professing sham surprise that the treatment of Soviet prisoners was “about the same as the conditions of prisoners in the state of California.” Bertrand Russell went one better: he “sincerely hoped” that the publication of these documents would contribute toward “the promotion of friendly relations” between Soviet and Western governments on the grounds that both engaged in similar practices.¹⁴⁶

*PR, No. 10/33 (1924), 10. Peters served as deputy director, and, in July–August 1918, as acting director of the Cheka.

*Compare this with Heinrich Himmler’s exhortation to the SS in a 1943 speech in Poznan: “Whether during the construction of a tank trap 10,000 Russian women die of exhaustion or not interests me only insofar as the tank trap for Germany has been constructed.… When someone comes to me and says: ‘I cannot build tank traps with women and children, that is inhuman, they will die,’ I shall say to him: ‘You are the murderer of your own blood, because if the tank trap is not built, German soldiers shall die.’ ”

*By 1919–20, Lenin had many socialists in jail. When Fritz Platten, his Swiss friend, protested that surely they were not counterrevolutionaries, Lenin responded: “Of course not.… But that’s exactly why they are dangerous—just because they are honest revolutionists. What can one do?”: Isaac Steinberg, In the Workshop of the Revolution (London, 1955), 177.

*I. Steinberg, Gewalt und Terror in der Revolution (Berlin, 1974), 22–25. The book, written between 1920 and 1923 (first published in 1931), describes Leninist, not Stalinist, Russia.

*Steinberg, In the Workshop, 145. Steinberg mistakenly attributes the authorship of this decree to Trotsky.

*Even pre-revolutionary Russian law operated with such subjective concepts as “goodwill” and “conscience.” The statutes that defined the procedures for conciliation courts, for example, instructed judges to mete out sentences “in accord with [their] conscience,” a formula used also in some criminal proceedings. This Slavophile legacy in Imperial statutes had been criticized by one of Russia’s leading legal theorists, Leon Petrazhitskii. See Andrzej Walicki, Legal Philosophies of Russian Liberalism (Oxford, 1987), 233.

*Iz istorii Vserossiiskoi Chrezvychainoi Kommissii, 1917–1921 gg. (Moscow, 1958), 78–79. Under pressure of the Peasants’ Congress, which on November 14 passed a resolution to this effect, the Bolsheviks dissolved the Military-Revolutionary Committee (Revoliutsiia, VI, 144). The Cheka was its successor.

*“The institution was introduced so surreptitiously that historians to this day have not been able to locate the decree authorizing its establishment or even to determine the approximate date when it might have been issued”: Richard Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime (London, 1974). 130.

*“Their confusion may have been partly due to the fact, reported on by many contemporaries, that many Cheka employees, including jailers, had served in the same capacities under tsarism.

†PR, No. 9 (1926), 55. Later on, Lenin would charge him and the Georgian Stalin with Russian chauvinism.

*Grigorii Aronson, Na zare krasnogo terrora (Berlin, 1929), 32. G. Leggett, therefore, is not correct when, following Latsis, he says that until July 6, 1918, the Cheka “executed only criminals and spared political adversaries”: The Cheka: Lenin’s Political Police (Oxford, 1986), 58.

*The protocols of these interrogations were published in PR, No. 6–7 (1923), 282–85. According to Peters, the principal interrogator, the existing dossier on the case is “very incomplete,” whatever this may mean: Izvestiia, No. 194/1, 931 (August 30, 1923), 1.

†That gun, a Browning, disappeared from the scene of the crime: on September 1, 1918, Izvestiia (No. 188/452, 3) carried a Cheka announcement requesting information on its whereabouts.

*V. Bonch-Bruevich, Tri Pokusheniia na V. I. Lenina (Moscow, 1924), 14. This passage was removed from subsequent editions of Bonch-Bruevich’s memoirs. Klara Zetkin, in 1920, saw in Lenin’s face a resemblance to Grünewald’s Christ: Reminiscences of Lenin (London, 1929), 22.

*P. Malkov, Zapiski komendanta Moskovskogo Kremlia (Moscow, 1959), 159–61. In the second edition, published in 1961, this passage is omitted. Here, Malkov is merely made to say: “We ordered Kaplan to go into the car, which had been previously prepared” (p. 162). A brief announcement of her execution appeared in Izvestiia on September 4 (No. 190/454, 1).

*This was confirmed in April 1922 when physicians removed the bullet from Lenin’s neck and found on it an incision shaped like a cross: P. Posvianskii, ed., Pokushenie na Lenina 30 avgusta 1918 g., 2nd ed. (Moscow, 1925), 64. The poison, however, seems to have lost its effectiveness, since it was not mentioned in the medical bulletins.

*The evolution of the Lenin cult is the subject of Nina Tumarkin’s Lenin Lives! (Cambridge, Mass., 1983).

*For all the attention paid to Lenin by Soviet propaganda after August 30, 1918, apparently not everyone knew who he was. Angelica Balabanoff recalls an incident which occurred in early 1919, when Lenin went to visit Krupskaia in a sanatorium outside Moscow. The car in which he and his sister were riding was stopped by two men. “One pointed a gun and said: ‘Your money or your life!’ Lenin took out his identification card and said: ‘I am Ulianov Lenin.’ The aggressors did not even look at the card and repeated: ‘Your money or your life!’ Lenin had no money. He took off his coat, got out of the car, and without letting go of the bottle of milk for his wife, proceeded on foot.”: Impressions of Lenin (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1964), 65.

*The earliest mention of hostages was in a speech by Trotsky on November 11, 1917, in which he said that military cadets taken prisoner would be held hostage: “if our men fall into the hands of the enemy … for every worker and for every soldier we shall demand five cadets”: Izvestiia, No. 211 (November 12, 1917), 2.

*A similar phenomenon would be observed in Germany fifteen years later. When the Nazis came to power, members of the SA would often select for beating and torture personal enemies, including judges who had tried them under the Weimar Republic: Andrzej Kaminski, Konzentrationslager 1896 bis heute: eine Analyse (Stuttgart, 1982), 87–88.

*In November 1918 the venerable anarchist theoretician Peter Kropotkin met with Lenin to protest the terror: Lenin, Khronika, VI, 195. In 1920 he wrote an impassioned plea against the “medieval” practice of taking hostages: G. Woodcock and I. Avakumovic, The Anarchist Prince (London-New York, 1950), 426–27.

*An example of such self-pity can be found in the following 1919 statement of a group of Chekists: “Working under … incredibly difficult conditions which demand unyielding will and great inner strength, those employees [of the Cheka] who, despite false slander and the swill which is maliciously poured on their heads, continue their work without blemish,” etc.: V. P. Antonov-Saratovskii, Sovety v epokhu voennogo kommunizma, I (Moscow, 1928), 430–31.

*The Times, September 28, 1918, p. 5a. Petrovskii Park, which served as a major slaughter area, subsequently became the locale of the Dynamo football stadium. It was close to Butyrki Prison, where most of the Moscow Cheka’s prisoners—usually around 2,500—were incarcerated. Another execution field was located on the opposite, eastern end of Moscow, at Semenovskaia Zastava.

*The Cheka, on Dzerzhinskii’s instructions, took few Jewish hostages. This was not out of preference to Jews. One of the purposes in taking hostages was to restrain the Whites from executing captured Communists. Since the Whites were not expected to care about Jewish lives, taking Jews hostage, according to Dzerzhinskii, would serve no useful purpose: M. V. Latsis, Chrezvychainye Kommissii po bor’be’s kontr-revoliutsiei (Moscow, 1921), 54. According to Belerosov (p. 137) this policy was reversed in May 1919, when the Kiev Cheka received orders to “shoot some Jews” “for agitational purposes” and keep them from top positions.

*NChS, No. 9 (1925), 131–32. The Pictorial Archive at the Hoover Institution has a collection of slides, apparently taken by the Whites after capturing Kiev, which shows the local Cheka headquarters and in its garden shallow mass graves containing decomposed naked corpses. In December 1918, the Whites appointed a commission to study Bolshevik crimes in the Ukraine. Its materials were deposited in the Russian Archive in Prague, which the Czech Government, after World War II, turned over to Moscow. There it has been inaccessible to foreign scholars. Some of this commission’s published reports can be found in the Melgunov Archive at the Hoover Institution, Box n, and in the Bakhmeteff Archive, Columbia University, Denikin Papers, Box 24.

*Pravda, No. 229 (October 23, 1918), 1. Much material on the Cheka controversy of this period is filed in the Melgunov Archive, Box 2, Folder 6, Hoover Institution. See further Leggett, Cheka, 121–57.

†On November 7, 1918, addressing a “meeting-concert” of Chekists, Lenin defended the Cheka from its critics. He spoke of its “difficult work” and dismissed complaints about it as “wailing” (vopli). Among the qualities of the Cheka he singled out decisiveness, speed, and, above all, “loyalty” (vernost’ (Lenin, PSS, XXXVII, 173). It will be recalled that the device of Hitler’s SS was: “Unsere Ehre heisst Treue” (“Our honor is called loyalty”).

*Dekrety, III, 529–30. This was a response to the request of the Presidium of the Moscow Soviet in early October that the Cheka do something about the numerous prisoners whom it was holding without charges: Severnaia Kommuna, No. 122 (October 18, 1918), 3.

†It was first published thirty-nine years later in IA, No. 1 (1958), 6–11.

*The best history of this institution is Kaminski’s Konzentrationslager. The subject has been surprisingly neglected by historians.

*The most comprehensive account of Soviet concentration camps is Mikhail Geller’s Kontsen-tratsionnyi mir i sovetskaia literatura (London, 1974), of which there exist German, French, and Polish translations, but not an English one.

†L. D. Trotskii, Kak vooruzhalas’ revoliutsiia, I (Moscow, 1923), 214, 216. According to Geller (Kontsentratsionnyi mir, 73), this is the earliest use of the term in Soviet sources.

‡Lenin, PSS, L, 143–44. Peters, in his capacity as deputy director of the Cheka, said that all those caught with arms would be “shot on the spot” and those who agitated against the government confined to concentration camps: Izvestiia, No. 188/452 (September 1, 1918), 3.

*It is incorrect, therefore, to argue, as is done by some authorities, that initially the Soviet concentration camps served to terrorize the population, acquiring economic significance only in 1927 under Stalin. In fact, the practice of having penal labor pay for itself and even bring the state income went back to tsarist days; thus, in 1886 the Ministry of the Interior instructed the administration of hard labor installations to make certain that convict labor showed a profit: Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime, 310.

*Izvestiia, No. 155/1,002 (July 16,1920), 2. The largest number of victims (273) were executed for desertion and self-inflicted wounds to avoid military service.

*The Bullitt Mission to Russia (New York, 1919), 58, 50. Bullitt at the time favored U.S. recognition of the U.S.S.R. In 1933 he became America’s first ambassador to that country. Later in his life he turned passionately anti-Communist.