The Russian Revolution

by Richard Pipes

  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.

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  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 ord
er 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.

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  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 …

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  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 So
viet 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