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.
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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.
The Russian Revolution Page 127
