Red Terror
The Red Terror was a campaign of political repression and executions in Soviet Russia which was carried out by the Bolsheviks, chiefly through the Cheka, the Bolshevik secret police force. It officially started in early September 1918 and it lasted until 1922, though violence committed by Bolshevik soldiers, sailors, and Red Guards had been ongoing since late 1917.
Decreed after assassination attempts on Vladimir Lenin along with the successful assassinations of Petrograd Cheka leader Moisei Uritsky and party editor V. Volodarsky in alleged retaliation for Bolshevik mass repressions, the Red Terror was modeled on the Reign of Terror of the French Revolution, and the Paris Commune. The policy sought to eliminate political dissent, opposition, and any other threat to Bolshevik power.
More broadly, the term can be applied to Bolshevik political repression throughout the Russian Civil War. Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky justified the repressive measures as a necessary response to the White Terror allegedly initiated in 1917.
History
Background
When the Revolution took power in November 1917, many top Bolsheviks hoped to avoid much of the violence which would come to define this period. Through one of its first decrees on 8 November 1917, the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies abolished the death penalty. It had first been canceled by the February Revolution and then restored by the Kerensky's government. Not a single death sentence was issued in the first three months of Vladimir Lenin's government, which consisted of a coalition with the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries, who, albeit terrorists in the tsarist era, were staunch opponents of the death penalty. However, as pressure mounted from the White Armies and from international intervention, the Bolsheviks moved closer to Lenin's harsher perspective.The Bolsheviks had employed terror before the official declaration of September 5, 1918. This early phase of the terror was mainly carried out by sailors, soldiers, and Red Guards. Their methods included confiscations, fines, executions, and hostage-taking. On January 14, 1918, Bolshevik sailors from the Black Sea Fleet killed some 300 victims at Yevpatoriya by breaking their limbs and throwing them from the steamship Romania.
Targets at the early period of violence were chiefly officers, cadets, and 'bourgeois'. In mid-January in Odessa sailors killed officers and junkers by throwing them from the Russian cruiser Almaz. According to another account a colonel was roasted alive within the engine of a locomotive.
Several unsanctioned incidents of mob violence were perpetrated by civilian supporters of the Bolsheviks. Shortly after the Bolshevik takeover of Rostov in November 1917, workers in Taganrog surrounded fifty officer cadets, who surrendered on the understanding that their lives were to be spared. They were taken to a metal factory and thrown one at a time into the blast furnace.
Several prominent figures also fell victim to this phase of violence. On November 20th, 1917, General Nikolai Dukhonin surrendered himself to the Bolshevik Krylenko in Mogilev. Despite Krylenko's efforts to defend the general, Dukhonin was lynched by a mob of Bolshevik sailors from the Baltic Fleet.
The decision to enact the Red Terror was also driven by the initial "massacre of their 'Red' prisoners by the office-cadres during the Moscow insurrection of October 1917", allied intervention in the Russian Civil War, and the large-scale massacres of Reds during the Finnish Civil War in which 10,000 to 20,000 revolutionaries had been killed by the Finnish Whites.
File:Menzhinsky V 1921-2.jpg|thumb|Members of the presidium of VCheKa Yakov Peters, Józef Unszlicht, Abram Belenky, Felix Dzerzhinsky, Vyacheslav Menzhinsky, 1921
In December 1917, Felix Dzerzhinsky was appointed to the duty of rooting out counterrevolutionary threats to the Soviet government. He was the director of the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission, a predecessor of the KGB that served as the secret police for the Soviets.
On 21 February 1918, the death penalty was also formally re-established, as an exceptional revolutionary instrument, with the famous decree Socialist Homeland is in Danger!. In article 8, it read as follows: "Enemy agents, profiteers, marauders, hooligans, counter-revolutionary agitators and German spies are to be shot on the spot".
Starting around April 1918, Russian anarchists were among the first revolutionary socialist victims of the precursors of Red Terror. Anarchists harshly criticized Bolsheviks' centralization of political power by creating the Bolshevik-dominated Council of People's Commissars, nationalizing the land, subordinating the factory committees to the state-controlled network of trade unions, and creating the secret police organization Cheka; later, anarchists widely opposed the Declaration of the Rights of the Peoples of Russia and the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk as betrayals of revolutionary internationalism and the stateless ideal. Some militant Bakuninist anarchists even advocated armed struggle against the dictatorship. Meanwhile, Bolsheviks associated violent anti-Bolshevik rhetoric and such crimes as robberies, expropriations, and murders committed by nominally anarchist criminals with all anarchists and perceived the increasingly militant and resistant anarchists as legitimate threat. Subsequently, the Sovnarkom decided to liquidate anarchist-associated criminal recklessness and disarm and disband all anarchist organizations. In Moscow and Petrograd the Cheka largely succeeded in disbanding all anarchist organizations; particularly, on 12 April 1918, the Cheka raided 26 anarchist centres in Moscow, including the Moscow Federation of Anarchist Groups' headquarters, namely House of Anarchy. In almost all cases the anarchists surrendered without a fight, yet in the Donskoi Monastery and at the House of Anarchy the anarchists fiercely resisted the Cheka; as a result a dozen Chekists were killed while 40 anarchists were killed or wounded, and approximately 500 more were imprisoned.
In 1922, anarchist activists Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman recounted the Cheka raid against anarchists in April 1918 thus:
Later, Goldman acknowledged many anarchists' opposition the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, yet drew no causal link between such opposition and later persecutions of anarchists by Bolsheviks.
On 16 June 1918, more than two months prior to the events that would officially catalyze the Terror, a new decree re-established the death penalty as an ordinary jurisdictional measure by instructing the Revolutionary People's Courts to use it "as the only punishment for counter-revolutionary offences".
Also prior to the events that would officially catalyze the Terror, Lenin issued orders and made speeches which included harsh expressions and descriptions of brutal measures to be taken against the "class enemies", which, however, often were not actual orders or were not carried out as such. For example, in a telegram, which became known as "Lenin's hanging order", he demanded to "crush" landowners in Penza and to publicly hang "at least 100 kulaks, rich bastards, and known bloodsuckers" in response to a peasant revolt there; yet, only the 13 organizers of the murder of local authorities and the uprising were arrested, while the uprising was ended with a number of propaganda activities. In 1920, having received information that in Estonia and Latvia, with which Soviet Russia had concluded peace treaties, volunteers were being enrolled in anti-Bolshevik detachments, Lenin offered to "advance by 10–20 miles and hang kulaks, priests, landowners" "while pretending to be greens", but instead, Lenin's government confined itself to sending diplomatic notes. Lenin even urged to "hang" Anatoly Lunacharsky and "Communist scum". Russian historian explains that while relatively peaceful resolutions of conflicts following Lenin's brutal declarations took place "not always and not everywhere", Lenin complained in his letters that his bureaucratic "apparatus has already become gigantic — in some places excessively so — and under such conditions a “personal dictatorship” is entirely unrealizable and attempts to realize it would only be harmful." Loginov explains that Lenin attempted to compensate this "lack of real power" with either with "abundance of decrees" or "simply with strong words."
The Bolsheviks also used terror as a means to dissuade unrest. On August 20, 1918 Lenin wrote to Nikolai Semashko, "I congratulate you on your energetic suppression of the kulaks and White Guards in the district. We must strike while the iron's hot and not lose a minute, organize the poor of the district, confiscate all the grain and all the property of the rebellious kulaks, hang the kulak ringleaders, mobilize and arm the poor under reliable leaders out of our own unit, arrest hostages from among the wealthy and hold them."
Lenin had justified the state response to the kulak revolts due to the preceding 258 uprisings that had occurred in 1918 and the threat of the White Terror. He summarised his view that either the "kulaks massacre vast numbers of workers, or the workers ruthlessly suppress the revolt of the predatory kulak minority... There can be no middle course".
Beginnings
On August 30, 1918, Leonid Kannegisser, a young military cadet of the Imperial Russian Army, assassinated Moisei Uritsky, the head of the Petrograd Cheka, outside the Petrograd Cheka headquarters in retaliation for the execution of his friend and other officers.On the same day, August 30, 1918, Socialist Revolutionary Fanny Kaplan unsuccessfully attempted to assassinate Vladimir Lenin.
During interrogation by the Cheka, she made the following statement:
File:Le Petit Journal, 1926 cover.png|thumb|Murder of the Romanov family in 1918, Le Petit Journal
Kaplan referenced the Bolsheviks' growing authoritarianism, citing their forcible shutdown of the Constituent Assembly in January 1918, the elections to which they had lost. When it became clear that Kaplan would not implicate any accomplices, she was executed in Alexander Garden, near the western walls of the Kremlin. "Most sources indicate that Kaplan was executed on 3 September, the day after her transfer to the Kremlin". In 1958 the commander of the Kremlin, the former Baltic sailor Pavel Dmitriyevich Malkov revealed he had personally executed Kaplan on that date upon the specific orders of Yakov Sverdlov, chief secretary of the Bolshevik Central Committee. She was killed with a bullet to the back of the head. Her corpse was bundled into a barrel and set alight so that her "remains be destroyed without a trace", as Sverdlov had instructed.
These events persuaded the government to heed Dzerzhinsky's lobbying for greater terror against opposition. The campaign of mass repressions would officially begin thereafter. The Red Terror is considered to have officially begun between 30 August and 12 September 1918.