The Red Terror

David Shub who knew Lenin well believed he was willing to use extreme methods to maintain power. When he discovered that Lev Kamenev had abolished capital punishment for desertion in the Russian Army he was furious. "How can one make revolution without executions?" When he attempted to defend his decision Kamenev was told that he was expressing "an unpardonable weakness". Lenin once asked Leon Trotsky: "Do you really think that we shall be victorious without using the most cruel terror?" (1)

In December, 1917, Felix Dzerzhinsky was appointed by Lenin as Commissar for Internal Affairs and head of the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage (Cheka). As Dzerzhinsky later commented: "In the October Revolution, I was a member of the Military Revolutionary Committee, and then I was entrusted with the task of organizing the Extraordinary Commission for the Struggle against Sabotage and Counterrevolution I was appointed its Chairman, holding at the same time the post of Commissar for Internal Affairs." (2)

A few days later he told senior members of Cheka: "Our Revolution is in serious danger. We tolerate too good-naturedly what is transpiring around us. The forces of our enemies are organizing. The counter-revolutionaries are at work and are organizing their groups in various sections of the country. The enemy is encamped in Petrograd, at our very hearth! We have indisputable evidence of this and we must send to this front the most stern, energetic, hearty and loyal comrades who are ready to do all to defend the attainments of our Revolution. Do not think that I am on the look-out for forms of revolutionary justice. We have no need for justice now. Now we have need of a battle to the death! I propose, I demand the initiation of the Revolutionary sword which will put an end to all counter-revolutionists." (3)

Like most Bolshevik leaders, Dzerzhinsky did not come from the working class. He was the son of a rich Polish landowner. "He was fair, slightly round-shouldered, with a short pointed beard and transparent eyes with dilated pupils. There were moments when his friendly smile gave way to icy sternness. At such times his eyes and ascetic bloodless lips revealed a demoniac fanaticism. Rigorous self-denial, incorrigible honesty, and a frigid indifference to the the opinions of others completed his make-up. His natural modesty, unassuming air and quiet manners set him apart. He was the great puritan, the 'saint' of the upheaval. Frail and given to occasional fits of melancholy, he sought retirement in unceasing labour behind closed doors, away from the multitude and party comrades alike. For most of the latter he had little respect; nearly all of them came to fear him, some distrusted him, and few mourned him when he died... In his bleak asceticism, complete devotion to Lenin, personal unselfishness, and utter lack of feeling towards political opponents, he had no equal." (4)

In an interview in the Bolshevik newspaper, Novaya Zhizn, Dzerzhinsky admitted: "We stand for organized terror - this should be frankly admitted. Terror is an absolute necessity during times of revolution. Our aim is to fight against the enemies of the Soviet Government and of the new order of life. We judge quickly. In most cases only a day passes between the apprehension of the criminal and his sentence. When confronted with evidence criminals in almost every case confess; and what argument can have greater weight than a criminal's own confession." (6) Walter Duranty, a journalist working for the New York Times claimed that "the fear of the Cheka was so great those early days in Moscow that people made a detour rather than step on the sidewalk in front of its main building on Lubyanka Square." (6)

After advances made by the White Army in February 1918, Lenin proclaimed that the "Socialist Fatherland" was in danger: "Agents of the speculators, gangsters, counter-revolutionary agitators, and German spies are to be shot on the spot... There had not been a single revolution in history when people did not... manifest salutary firmness by shooting thieves on the spot... A dictatorship is an iron power, possessing revolutionary daring and swiftness of action, ruthless in crushing exploiters as well as hooligans." (7)

In March, 1918, Moisei Uritsky joined the Communist Secret Police (Cheka) and was appointed Commissar for Internal Affairs in the Northern Region. He was assassinated by Leonid Kannegisser, a young military cadet, on 17th August, 1918. Anatoli Lunacharsky commented: "They killed him. They struck us a truly well-aimed blow. They picked out one of the most gifted and powerful of their enemies, one of the most gifted and powerful champions of the working class." (8)

In his orders to his subordinates Lenin made it clear that he expected the rigorous imposition of the Red Terror. In one order he told the chairman of the Council of People's Commissars that: "We must carry out a ruthless mass terror against the kulaks, priests and White Guards. All suspicious persons should be detained in a concentration camp outside the city." (9)

The same day he sent a wire to the Nizhny Novgorod Soviet: "In Nizhny Novgorod there are clearly preparations for a White Guard uprising. We must gather our strength, set up a doctorial troika and institute mass terror immediately; shoot and ferret out hundreds of prostitutes who get the soldiers drunk, former officers, etc. Not a moment of delay. It is necessary to act all-out. Mass searches, execution for concealment of weapons. Mass seizures of Mensheviks and other unreliables." (10)

On 30th August, 1918, Lenin spoke at a meeting in Moscow. According to Victor Serge: "Lenin arrived alone; no one escorted him and no one formed a reception party. When he came out, workers surrounded him for a moment a few paces from his car." As he left the building Dora Kaplan, a member of the Socialist Revolutionaries, tried to ask Lenin some questions about the way he was running the country. Just before he got into his car Lenin turned to answer the woman. Serge then explained what happened next: "It was at this moment Kaplan fired at him, three times, wounding him seriously in the neck and shoulder. Lenin was driven back to the Kremlin by his chauffeur, and just had the strength to walk upstairs in silence to the second floor: then he fell in pain. There was great anxiety for him: the wound in the neck could have proved extremely serious; for a while it was thought that he was dying." (11)

Two bullets entered his body and it was too dangerous to remove them. Kaplan was soon captured and explained that she had attempted to kill him because he had closed down the Constituent Assembly. In a statement to the police she confessed to trying to kill Lenin. "My name is Fanya Kaplan. Today I shot at Lenin. I did it on my own. I will not say whom I obtained my revolver. I will give no details. I had resolved to kill Lenin long ago. I consider him a traitor to the Revolution. I was exiled to Akatui for participating in an assassination attempt against a Tsarist official in Kiev. I spent 11 years at hard labour. After the Revolution, I was freed. I favoured the Constituent Assembly and am still for it." (12)

On 2nd September, as Lenin's life hung in the balance, Arthur Ransome, a British journalist, wrote an obituary hailing the founder of Bolshevism as "the greatest figure of the Russian Revolution". Here "for good or evil was a man who, at least for a moment, had his hand on the rudder of the world". Common peasants who had known Lenin attested to his goodness, his extraordinary generosity to children. The workers looked up to him, "not as an ordinary man, but as a saint". Without Lenin, Ransome concluded, the soviets would not perish, but they would lose their vital direction. "Fiery Trotsky, ingenious, briilliant Radek, are alike unable to replace the cool logic of the most colossal dreamer that Russia produced in our time." (13)

Joseph Stalin, who was in Tsaritsyn at the time of the assassination attempt, sent a telegram to Yakov Sverdlov suggesting: "having learned about the wicked attempt of capitalist hirelings on the life of the greatest revolutionary, the tested leader and teacher of the proletariat, Comrade Lenin, answer this base attack from ambush with the organization of open and systematic mass terror against the bourgeoisie and its agents." (14)

Leon Trotsky agreed and argued in My Life: An Attempt at an Autobiography (1930): "The Socialist-Revolutionaries had killed Volodarsky and Uritzky, had wounded Lenin seriously, and had made two attempts to blow up my train. We could not treat this lightly. Although we did not regard it from the idealistic point of view of our enemies, we appreciated the role of the individual in history. We could not close our eyes to the danger that threatened the revolution if we were to allow our enemies to shoot down, one by one, the whole leading group of our party." (15)

Poster, "Bolshevik Freedom" blaming Leon Trotsky for the Red Terror (1919)

The Bolsheviks newspaper, Krasnaya Gazeta, reported on 1st September, 1918: "We will turn our hearts into steel, which we will temper in the fire of suffering and the blood of fighters for freedom. We will make our hearts cruel, hard, and immovable, so that no mercy will enter them, and so that they will not quiver at the sight of a sea of enemy blood. We will let loose the floodgates of that sea. Without mercy, without sparing, we will kill our enemies in scores of hundreds. Let them be thousands; let them drown themselves in their own blood. For the blood of Lenin and Uritsky, Zinovief and Volodarski, let there be floods of the blood of the bourgeois - more blood, as much as possible." (16)

Morgan Philips Price, a journalist working for the Manchester Guardian, reported that initially the Red Terror was announced in Izvestia on 7th September, 1918. "There was no mistaking its meaning. It was proposed to take hostages from the former officers of the Tsar's army, from the Cadets and from the families of the Moscow and Petrograd middle-classes and to shoot ten for every Communist who fell to the White terror. Shortly after a decree was issued by the Central Soviet Executive ordering all officers of the old army within territories of the Republic to report on a certain day at certain places." (17)

The Bolshevik newspaper, Pravda made it clear that the Red Terror, was official government policy: "Workers! If you do not now destroy the bourgeoisie it will destroy you. Prepare for a mass attack on the enemies of the Revolution. We must eradicate the bourgeoisie, just as was done in the case of the army officers, and exterminate all those who are harmful to the Revolution. From now on the hymn of the working class will be a hymn of hate and revenge, even more terrifying than the hymn of hate that is sung in Germany against England. The counter revolution, this vicious mad dog, must be destroyed once and for all!" (18) Gregory Zinoviev told a meeting: "The bourgroisie kill separate individuals; but we kill whole classes." (19)

Leonid Krasin, the People's Commissar for Transport, wrote to his wife about his disagreement with the Red Terror: "After the assassination of Uritsky and the attempt on Lenin we went through a period of so-called `Terror', one of the most disgusting acts of the neo-Bolsheviks. About 600 to 700 persons were shot in Moscow and Petrograd, nine-tenths of them having been arrested quite at random or merely on suspicion of belonging to the right wing of the Socialist Revolutionaries, or else of being counter-revolutionists. In the provinces this developed into a series of revolting incidents, such as arrests and mass executions." (20)

It is estimated that in the few months after the attempt on the life of Lenin, over 800 socialists were arrested and shot without trial. A Foreign Office report in February, 1919, claimed: "The political parties which have been most oppressed by the Bolsheviks are the Socialists, Social Democrats and Social Revolutionaries. Owing to bribery and corruption - those notorious evils of the old regime which are now multiplied under Bolshevism - capitalists were able to get their money from the banks and their securities from safe deposits, and managed to get away. On the other hand, many members of the Liberal and Socialist parties who have worked all the time for the revolution, have been arrested or shot by the Bolsheviks." (21)

Walter Duranty later attempted to explain the thinking behind the Red Terror. He managed to obtain a document produced by a senior figure in Cheka: "The chief purpose, the writer said, was to strike terror into the hearts of the enemies of the Revolution; therefore action must be ruthless and, above all, swift. The destruction of enemies without delay might often, by paralysing opposition, save many more lives later. Secrecy was also stressed, because that, too, was an element of terror. For this reason Cheka arrests almost always were made in the dead of night and the relatives and friends of arrested persons generally heard no more of them for weeks. Perhaps they would then be released; more commonly there would be a notification that clothing or food might be provided on a given date for Citizen So-and-so, who had been sentenced to a term of exile; sometimes a curt notice of execution." (22)

The Red Terror continued throughout the Russian Civil War. David Bullock, the author of The Russian Civil War (2008) has argued that about "200,000-400,000 died in prison or were executed as a result of the Red Terror" between 1918-1920. (23) However, the executions continued after that date. According to Maxim Gorky it was left-wing opponents of the Bolsheviks who were the main victims. In a letter to Alexei Rykov concerning the trials of Socialist Revolutionaries in the Soviet Union: "I beg of you to inform Leon Trotsky and the others that this is my contention. I hope this will not surprise you since I had told the Soviet authorities a thousand times that it is a senseless and criminal to decimate the ranks of our intelligentsia in our illiterate and lacking of culture country. I am convinced, that if the SR's should be executed the crime will result in a moral blockade of Russia by all of socialist Europe." (24)

Primary Sources

(1) Felix Dzerzhinsky, address to senior members of Cheka (January, 1918)

This is no time for speech-making. Our Revolution is in serious danger. We tolerate too good-naturedly what is transpiring around us. The forces of our enemies are organizing. The counter-revolutionaries are at work and are organizing their groups in various sections of the country. The enemy is encamped in Petrograd, at our very hearth!

We have indisputable evidence of this and we must send to this front the most stern, energetic, hearty and loyal comrades who are ready to do all to defend the attainments of our Revolution. Do not think that I am on the look-out for forms of revolutionary justice. We have no need for justice now. Now we have need of a battle to the death! I propose, I demand the initiation of the Revolutionary sword which will put an end to all counter-revolutionists. We must act not tomorrow, but today, at once.

(2) Felix Dzerzhinsky, interviewed in Novaya Zhizn (14th July, 1918)

We stand for organized terror - this should be frankly admitted. Terror is an absolute necessity during times of revolution. Our aim is to fight against the enemies of the Soviet Government and of the new order of life. We judge quickly. In most cases only a day passes between the apprehension of the criminal and his sentence. When confronted with evidence criminals in almost every case confess; and what argument can have greater weight than a criminal's own confession.

(3) Krasnaya Gazeta (1st September, 1918)

We will turn our hearts into steel, which we will temper in the fire of suffering and the blood of fighters for freedom. We will make our hearts cruel, hard, and immovable, so that no mercy will enter them, and so that they will not quiver at the sight of a sea of enemy blood. We will let loose the floodgates of that sea. Without mercy, without sparing, we will kill our enemies in scores of hundreds. Let them be thousands; let them drown themselves in their own blood. For the blood of Lenin and Uritsky, Zinovief and Volodarski, let there be floods of the blood of the bourgeois - more blood, as much as possible.

(4) An English teacher in a Moscow secondary school escaped from Russia during the Red Terror. When he arrived in London he (referred to as Mr. A.) was interviewed by the British Foreign Office (21st, January, 1919).

Executions still continue in the prisons, though the ordinary people do not hear about them. Often during the executions a regimental band plays lively tunes. The following account of an an execution was given by Mr. A. by a member of one of the bands. On one occasion he was playing in a band, and as usual all the people to be executed were brought to the edge of the grave. Their hands and feet were tied together so that they would fall forward into the grave. They were then shot through the neck by Lettish soldiers. When the last man had been shot the grave was closed up, and on this particular occasion the band-man saw the grave moving. Not being able to stand the sight of it, he fainted, whereupon the Bolsheviks seized him, saying that he was in sympathy with the prisoners. They were on the point of killing him, but other members of the band explained that he was really ill, and he was then let off.

(5) Victor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary (1945)

Since the first massacres of Red prisoners by the Whites, the murders of Volodarsky and Uritsky and the attempt against Lenin (in the summer of 1918), the custom of arresting and, often, executing hostages had become generalized and legal. Already Cheka, which made mass arrests of suspects, the was tending to settle their fate independently, under formal control of the Party, but in reality without anybody's knowledge.

The Party endeavoured to head it with incorruptible men like the former convict Dzerzhinsky, a sincere idealist, ruthless but chivalrous, with the emaciated profile of an Inquisitor: tall forehead, bony nose, untidy goatee, and an expression of weariness and austerity. But the Party had few men of this stamp and many Chekas.

I believe that the formation of the Chekas was one of the gravest and most impermissible errors that the Bolshevik leaders committed in 1918 when plots, blockades, and interventions made them lose their heads. All evidence indicates that revolutionary tribunals, functioning in the light of day and admitting the right of defence, would have attained the same efficiency with far less abuse and depravity. Was it necessary to revert to the procedures of the Inquisition?

By the beginning of 1919, the Chekas had little or no resistance against this psychological perversion and corruption. I know for a fact that Dzerzhinsky judged them to be "half-rotten", and saw no solution to the evil except in shooting the worst Chekists and abolishing the death-penalty as quickly as possible.

(6) Victor Hay, 21st Earl of Erroll, the British ambassador in Copenhagen, sent Lord Curzon, the British Foreign Secretary, reports of what was taking place in Russia. This report written on 3rd February, 1919, was based on information received by a Frenchman who had just escaped from the country.

Night after night the counter-revolutionaries held secret meetings to plot against the Bolsheviks, but never once was a serious attempt made to carry through the conspiracy. The starving condition of the people quite paralyzed their will-power.

Recently many of the Red Guards themselves were being shot on account of the crimes which they had committed. An effort was being made to carry out the principles of "communism" on a more ideal basis, and though there was no effective restraint on plundering and thieving on the part of the Red Guards, still it happened now that selfish thieves, i.e., thieves who stole and refused to share the booty with the other Guards, were shot by their comrades.

(7) The manager of a British owned company in Petrograd was interviewed by the British Foreign Office (13th February, 1919).

The political parties which have been most oppressed by the Bolsheviks are the Socialists, Social Democrats and Social Revolutionaries. Owing to bribery and corruption - those notorious evils of the old regime which are now multiplied under Bolshevism - capitalists were able to get their money from the banks and their securities from safe deposits, and managed to get away. On the other hand, many members of the Liberal and Socialist parties who have worked all the time for the revolution, have been arrested or shot by the Bolsheviks.

The Bolsheviks continue to hold power by a system of terrorism and tyranny that has never before been heard of. It has made the history of the French Reign of Terror, or the Spanish Inquisition, appear mild by comparison. People were arrested wholesale, not merely on individual orders on information received from spies, but literally wholesale - people arrested in the streets, theatres, cafes, every day in hundreds.

The climax was reached after the murder of Uritsky. Hundreds of people were arrested in various parts of the town, mostly officers, who were shot and thrown into the river, bound and thrown into the river, or bound, put into barges, and the barges sunk.

(8) David Shub, Lenin (1948)

Like most Bolshevik leaders, Dzerzhinsky did not spring from the working class. He was the son of a rich Polish landowner of the Vilno province.... He was fair, slightly round-shouldered, with a short pointed beard and transparent eyes with dilated pupils. There were moments when his friendly smile gave way to icy sternness. At such times his eyes and ascetic bloodless lips revealed a demoniac fanaticism. Rigorous self-denial, incorrigible honesty, and a frigid indifference to the the opinions of others completed his make-up. His natural modesty, unassuming air and quiet manners set him apart. He was the great puritan, the 'saint' of the upheaval. Frail and given to occasional fits of melancholy, he sought retirement in unceasing labour behind closed doors, away from the multitude and party comrades alike. For most of the latter he had little respect; nearly all of them came to fear him, some distrusted him, and few mourned him when he died... In his bleak asceticism, complete devotion to Lenin, personal unselfishness, and utter lack of feeling towards political opponents, he had no equal.

(9) Pravda (31st August 1918)

Workers! If you do not now destroy the bourgeoisie it will destroy you. Prepare for a mass attack on the enemies of the Revolution. We must eradicate the bourgeoisie, just as was done in the case of the army officers, and exterminate all those who are harmful to the Revolution. From now on the hymn of the working class will be a hymn of hate and revenge, even more terrifying than the hymn of hate that is sung in Germany against England. The counter revolution, this vicious mad dog, must be destroyed once and for all!

(10) Leonid Krasin, the People's Commissar for Transport, letter to his wife Liubov Krassin (23rd September 1918)

After the assassination of Uritsky and the attempt on Lenin we went through a period of so-called `Terror', one of the most disgusting acts of the neo-Bolsheviks. About 600 to 700 persons were shot in Moscow and Petrograd, nine-tenths of them having been arrested quite at random or merely on suspicion of belonging to the right wing of the Socialist Revolutionaries, or else of being counter-revolutionists. In the provinces this developed into a series of revolting incidents, such as arrests and mass executions.

(11) Agnes Smedley, letter to Florence Lennon (December 1921)

Much that we read of Russia is imagination and desire only. And no person is safe from intrigues and the danger of prison. The prisons are jammed with anarchists and syndicalists who fought in the revolution. Emma Goldman and Berkman are out only because of their international reputations. And they are under house arrest; they expect to go to prison any day, and may be there now for all I know. Any Communist who excuses such things is a scoundrel and a blaggard. Yet they do excuse it - and defend it. If I'm not expelled or locked up or something, I'll raise a small-sized hell. Everybody calls everybody a spy, secretly, in Russia, and everybody is under surveillance. You never feel safe.

(12) Maxim Gorky, letter to Alexei Rykov (3rd July, 1922)

If the trial of the Socialist Revolutionaries will end with a death sentence, then this will be a premeditated murder, a foul murder. I beg of you to inform Leon Trotsky and the others that this is my contention. I hope this will not surprise you since I had told the Soviet authorities a thousand times that it is a senseless and criminal to decimate the ranks of our intelligentsia in our illiterate and lacking of culture country. I am convinced, that if the SR's should be executed the crime will result in a moral blockade of Russia by all of socialist Europe.

(13) Walter Duranty, I Write As I Please (1935)

The fear of the Cheka was so great those early days in Moscow that people made a detour rather than step on the sidewalk in front of its main building on Lubyanka Square.

With some difficulty I secured a copy of the pamphlet in question, which I think was written in the latter part of 1918 or early 1919. It explained in simple, lucid terms the principles by which the Red Terror was directed. The chief purpose, the writer said, was to strike terror into the hearts of the enemies of the Revolution; therefore action must be ruthless and, above all, swift. The destruction of enemies without delay might often, by paralysing opposition, save many more lives later. Secrecy was also stressed, because that, too, was an element of terror. For this reason Cheka arrests almost always were made in the dead of night and the relatives and friends of arrested persons generally heard no more of them for weeks. Perhaps they would then be released; more commonly there would be a notification that clothing or food might be provided on a given date for Citizen So-and-so, who had been sentenced to a term of exile; sometimes a curt notice of execution.

The Terror, as such, no longer existed when I went to Moscow, although people still spoke in whispers of the night of the attempt on Lenin's life when 500 people were executed without trial in Moscow, not because they were guilty of complicity, but because they were former nobles, landlords, bankers or generals, and as such were "class enemies" whose "execution" was carried out as an example and warning. In the official history of the Russian Communist Party, written by Popof in 1931, the facts are bluntly stated. "The system of mass Red Terror proved a weapon of tremendous importance. It came down with all its severity upon the heads of the landlord and bourgeois counter-revolutionaries; on the White officers, big Tsarist officials, and the most prominent figures among the nobility, the clergy and the capitalists." Although I was not in Russia at the time of the Kirov assassination in 1934, I have
no reason to doubt that the executions which followed it were prompted by the same motives as in 1918; that is to say, that many of those shot were not implicated in the plot to assassinate Kirov, but were "hostile elements" whose elimination was meant to strike terror; it was not even an act of revenge, but a symbol and a warning.