Red Terror

• 1. Introduction

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  The Red Terror began, officially, on the 5th of September 1918, with a decree prescribing "mass shooting" of class enemies "without hesitation." But less than a year earlier, the same government had abolished the death penalty entirely. The Red Terror was a campaign of political repression carried out by the Bolsheviks in Soviet Russia. They conducted it chiefly through the Cheka, their secret police force. It ran from September 1918 until 1922, though killings by Bolshevik soldiers and sailors had been ongoing since late 1917.

  Two acts of political violence provided the immediate pretext for the official declaration. On the 30th of August 1918, Leonid Kannegisser, a young military cadet, shot and killed Moisei Uritsky outside the Petrograd Cheka headquarters. On the same day, Socialist Revolutionary Fanny Kaplan shot Vladimir Lenin. Lenin survived. But the Cheka did not wait for his recovery. Within days, approximately 1,300 hostages were killed in Petrograd and Kronstadt prisons alone.

  How had a government that had formally abolished the death penalty come to authorize mass shootings? What machinery carried out the killing? How many died? On that last question, historians have yet to reach a consensus even within an order of magnitude.

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• 2. Before September Fifth

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  On the 8th of November 1917, the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies voted to abolish the death penalty. The early Bolshevik coalition with the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries held the line. Not a single death sentence was issued in the first three months of Lenin's government.

  On the 14th of January 1918, sailors of the Black Sea Fleet killed some 300 victims at Yevpatoriya. They broke their limbs and threw them from the steamship Romania. In mid-January in Odessa, sailors killed officers and cadets by throwing them from the Russian cruiser Almaz. Civilian supporters of the Bolsheviks carried out killings of their own. Shortly after the Bolshevik takeover of Rostov in November 1917, workers in Taganrog surrounded fifty surrendering officer cadets. The cadets had been promised their lives. They were taken to a metal factory and thrown one at a time into the blast furnace. On November 20th (December 3rd), 1917, General Nikolai Dukhonin surrendered to Bolshevik commander Krylenko in Mogilev. Despite Krylenko's efforts to protect him, Dukhonin was lynched by a mob of Baltic Fleet sailors.

  On the 21st of February 1918, the decree "Socialist Homeland is in Danger!" formally re-established the death penalty as an exceptional instrument. Its eighth article ordered enemy agents, profiteers, and counter-revolutionary agitators "to be shot on the spot." On the 12th of April 1918, the Cheka raided 26 anarchist centres in Moscow. Fierce resistance at the House of Anarchy left a dozen Chekists dead and 40 anarchists killed or wounded. Around 500 more were imprisoned.

  A telegram Lenin sent to officials in Penza demanded the public hanging of "at least 100 kulaks, rich bastards, and known bloodsuckers." The actual result was the arrest of 13 organizers of a local murder and uprising. On the 16th of June 1918, a new decree re-established the death penalty as an ordinary judicial measure. Revolutionary courts were instructed to use it "as the only punishment for counter-revolutionary offences."

  On the 3rd of September 1918, Fanny Kaplan was executed under the specific orders of Yakov Sverdlov, chief secretary of the Bolshevik Central Committee. In 1958, Pavel Dmitriyevich Malkov (1887-1965), former commander of the Kremlin, revealed he had personally carried out the killing. Kaplan was shot in the back of the head in Alexander Garden, near the western walls of the Kremlin. Her corpse was bundled into a barrel and set alight, on Sverdlov's instructions, so that her remains would be "destroyed without a trace."

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• 3. Dzerzhinsky's Machine

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  In December 1917, Felix Dzerzhinsky was appointed to lead the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission, better known as the Cheka. This predecessor of the KGB served as the Soviet secret police and became the primary instrument of state repression. Dzerzhinsky and his assistant Jēkabs Peterss drafted the first official announcement of the Red Terror, published in Izvestia on September 3. It called on workers to "crush the hydra of counter-revolution with massive terror." It also warned: anyone spreading rumors against the Soviet regime "will be arrested immediately and sent to a concentration camp."

  On August 31, the newspaper Pravda declared that "the time has come for us to crush the bourgeoisie or be crushed by it." The next day, Krasnaia Gazeta stated that "only rivers of blood can atone for the blood of Lenin and Uritsky." Izvestia also reported that over 500 hostages had been executed in Petrograd alone in the four days since the attempt on Lenin.

  On September 5, the Council of People's Commissars issued the formal "On Red Terror" decree. It prescribed "mass shooting" to be "inflicted without hesitation." It ordered the Cheka to secure "the Soviet Republic from the class enemies by isolating them in concentration camps." The decree also required that "the names of the executed and the reasons of the execution must be made public." Soviet commissar Grigory Petrovsky called for an "immediate end of looseness and tenderness."

  The terror's first two months, counted from lists published in Cheka Weekly and other official press, claimed between 10,000 and 15,000 lives. By October 15, Chekist Gleb Bokii reported that 800 alleged enemies had been shot in Petrograd and 6,229 more imprisoned. In October 1918, Cheka commander Martin Latsis publicly stated the class logic: "We are not waging war against individuals. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class."

  On the 16th of March 1919, all military detachments of the Cheka were unified into the Troops for the Internal Defense of the Republic. By 1921, they numbered at least 200,000. These troops ran labor camps, conducted food requisitions from peasants, and suppressed rebellions. One of the chief organizers of the Terror's machinery was 2nd-Grade Army Commissar Yan Karlovich Berzin (1889-1938), whose real name was Pēteris Ķuzis. Berzin initiated the system of taking and shooting hostages to prevent desertions and acts of disloyalty. Berzin later played a role in suppressing the Red sailors' uprising at Kronstadt in March 1921. He personally took part in pursuing and killing captured sailors.

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• 4. Who Was Targeted

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  Over 800 Socialist Revolutionary members were executed during the Red Terror, while thousands more were driven into exile or held in labor camps. They were the first political group to face systematic destruction. In a matter of weeks, Cheka executions doubled or tripled all death sentences the Russian Empire had issued over 92 years, from 1825 to 1917.

  According to historian Orlando Figes, more than one million men deserted from the Red Army in 1918. Around two million deserted in 1919. By 1921, the figure reached almost four million. The Cheka's response was to treat deserters' families as hostages. Lenin's instructions stated plainly that families of deserters "are to be considered as hostages and treated accordingly." In September 1918 alone, in twelve provinces, 48,735 deserters and 7,325 brigands were arrested. Of those, 1,826 were executed and 2,230 deported.

  The suppression of the Tambov Rebellion of 1920-1921 brought the terror to its rural extreme. Around 100,000 peasant rebels and their families were imprisoned or deported, and approximately 15,000 were executed. The Red Army commander in the area, Mikhail Tukhachevsky, authorized the use of chemical weapons against villages holding rebels and civilians alike.

  When workers at the Putilov factory in Petrograd went on strike in March 1919, the Cheka stormed the plant. Hundreds were arrested, and around 200 were executed without trial within days. Strikes spread through the spring of 1919 to Tula, Oryol, Tver, Ivanovo, and Astrakhan. Workers were asking for food rations equal to those of Red Army soldiers, for the end of Bolshevik privileges, and for free elections. In Astrakhan, a White Guard revolt was suppressed between March 10 and 12, 1919. At least 184 were officially sentenced to death. Opposition observers claimed between 2,000 and 4,000 had been shot or drowned.

  Documents cited by Alexander Yakovlev, then head of the Presidential Committee for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repression, recorded the methods used against clergy. Priests, monks and nuns were crucified, thrown into cauldrons of boiling tar, scalped, and strangled. Some were given Communion with melted lead. Others were drowned in holes in the ice. An estimated 3,000 were killed in 1918 alone.

  In Crimea at the end of 1920, Béla Kun and Rosalia Zemlyachka, with Lenin's approval, killed prisoners who had surrendered under a promise of amnesty. One contemporary account claimed 50,000 dead. A modern estimate places the Crimea toll between 5,000 and 12,000.

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• 5. Methods of Execution

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  Those condemned in Cheka cellars were stripped of their clothing before execution. Their belongings were divided among the executioners. Then they were either machine-gunned in batches or shot individually with a revolver. Those killed inside prisons were usually shot in the back of the neck as they entered the execution cellar. Outside town, prisoners were moved by truck, bound and gagged, to their place of execution. They were sometimes made to dig their own graves before they were killed.

  At Odessa, the Cheka tied White officers to planks and fed them into furnaces or tanks of boiling water. In Kharkiv, victims had the skin peeled from their hands to create what Cheka operatives called "gloves." In Voronezh, the Cheka used barrels studded on the inside with nails. At Oryol, in winter, water was poured on naked prisoners bound outside until they froze solid. In Kiev, a detachment placed rats in iron tubes and heated them against prisoners' bodies.

  The Pyatigorsk Cheka organized a single "day of Red Terror," assigning execution quotas to each district of the town. The target was 300 people. In Kislovodsk, one Chekist account records, the Cheka killed all patients in the hospital. The reason given was that no better option presented itself. In October 1920 alone, more than 6,000 people were executed.

  Historian Edvard Radzinsky documented another practice: taking a husband hostage and waiting for his wife to purchase his freedom with her body. At the Kholmogory camp, the Cheka adopted the practice of drowning bound prisoners in the Dvina river. Occasionally, before abandoning a town to White forces, entire prisons were emptied by mass shooting. Conditions in the camps that held survivors led to high mortality rates, and repeated massacres took place within them.

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• 6. The Disputed Numbers

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  James Ryan writes that, at lowest estimates, around 28,000 executions per year took place from December 1917 to February 1922. The number shot in the initial period of the Red Terror was at least 10,000. But the full range of scholarly estimates is far wider.

  Robert Conquest placed the total number shot in 1917-1922 at 140,000. Jonathan D. Smele estimated the figure was "perhaps less than half that many." Martin Latsis, chief of the Ukrainian Cheka, recorded 12,733 Cheka executions between 1917 and 1920, but historian Evan Mawdsley judged even those figures too low. Mawdsley found Latsis's count too small and Conquest's too large, treating the estimates of William Henry Chamberlin (50,000) and George Leggett (140,000) as more plausible. By 1989, historian W. Bruce Lincoln concluded that the best available estimate was approximately 100,000 total executions.

  Russian historian V. Erlikhman estimated 1,200,000 deaths from the Red Terror, compared to 300,000 from the White Terror. In 1924, Popular Socialist Sergei Melgunov cited Professor Charles Saroléa's count of 1,766,188 executions. Melgunov questioned the accuracy of Saroléa's figures but endorsed his overall characterization of the terror. The frequently cited figure of 1,700,000 deaths was traced by British historian Ronald Hingley to a quoted statement from White Army leader Anton Denikin. Hingley called it "a considerable exaggeration."

  Estimates based only on Cheka records place executions at roughly 37,300 between 1918 and 1922. These figures exclude killings by the Red Army and deaths in suppressions of local rebellions. Including those categories raises the count significantly. In mid-September 1918, Grigory Zinoviev put the political logic plainly. He said the Bolsheviks needed to have 90 million of Russia's 100 million people on their side. As for the remaining 10 million: "we'll have to get rid of them."

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• 7. Justifications and Legacy

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  Leon Trotsky's book Terrorism and Communism presented the Bolshevik case in full. He argued that the terror began with the White Guard forces and the Bolsheviks were simply responding in kind. He dismissed the rights of the individual as "irrelevant nonsence." He wrote that to reject state terrorism was to reject socialism, since "he who wills the end must will the means." Trotsky also introduced the concept of "militarization of labor" and provided ideological justification for the concentration camp system.

  Karl Kautsky, the liberal socialist, argued that Bolshevik terror was indiscriminate, intended to frighten civilians, and involved the taking and executing of hostages. He wrote: "Among the phenomena for which Bolshevism has been responsible, terrorism... is certainly the most striking and the most repellent of all."

  In November 1918, Left SR leader Maria Spiridonova, writing from a Soviet prison, sent an open letter to the Bolshevik Central Executive. She wrote of "nightly murders of fettered, unarmed, helpless people, these secret shootings in the back." She described bodies "robbed to the very shirt, not always quite dead, often still groaning." She asked what distinguished this from the terror that earlier Russian revolutionaries had used to protest tyranny. She found no answer.

  Scholars such as Stéphane Courtois and Richard Pipes argued that the Bolsheviks used terror because they lacked popular support. The Bolsheviks had won less than a quarter of the popular vote in elections to the Constituent Assembly shortly after the October Revolution. Orlando Figes offered a different view: that the terror "erupted from below" and was "an integral element of the social revolution from the start." He argued the Bolsheviks encouraged but did not create the mass violence.

  Menshevik Julius Martov, writing at the time, described what he saw: "The beast has licked hot human blood. The man-killing machine is brought into motion." He saw in it the logic of civil war: "blood breeds blood."

  The Red Terror became a template for communist political violence worldwide. Campaigns bearing the same name were launched in Finland, Hungary, Bavaria, Spain, Yugoslavia, Greece, Ethiopia, and Maoist China. In China, Mao Zedong himself declared: "Red terror ought to be our reply to these counter-revolutionaries." In Hungary in 1919, the Hungarian Soviet Republic executed up to 590 people for alleged counter-revolutionary activity. It was just one year after the September 1918 decree.

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