*
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 tr
ied 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 an
d 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.
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