A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924

for the Bolshevik leader, it did not take much to turn this passion into violent hatred for his enemies. The mass circulation Krasnaia gazeta set the tone on I September:

Without mercy, we will kill our enemies in scores of hundreds. Let them be thousands, let them drown themselves in their own blood. For the blood of Lenin and Uritsky let there be floods of bourgeois blood — more blood, as much as possible.

Peters, the deputy head of the Cheka, denounced Kaplan's shot at Lenin as an attack on the working class and called on the workers to 'crush the hydra of counter-revolution' by applying mass terror. The Commissar for Internal Affairs ordered the Soviets to 'arrest all SRs at once' and take 'hostages' en masse from the 'bourgeoisie and officers': these were to be executed on 'the least opposition'.⁷¹ It was the signal for the start of the Red Terror.

* * * The Red Terror did not come out of the blue. It was implicit in the regime from the start. As Kamenev and his supporters had warned the party in October, the resort to rule by terror was bound to follow from Lenin's violent seizure of power and his rejection of democracy. The Bolsheviks were forced to turn increasingly to terror to silence their political critics and subjugate a society they could not control by other means.

Lenin had always accepted the need to use terror in order to 'defend the revolution'. It was a weapon in the 'civil war'. Of course he was careful to distance himself in public from the institutions of the Terror — others put their signatures to its death warrants — and this helped to fuel the myth that Lenin was a good and gentle 'Tsar' who had nothing to do with the evil actions of his oprichniki. But behind the scenes Lenin was a stalwart champion of the Red Terror. On 26 October 1917 the Second Soviet Congress had passed a resolution proposed by Kamenev to abolish the death penalty. Lenin was absent from the session and, when told of it, flew into a rage:

Nonsense, how can you make a revolution without firing squads? Do you expect to dispose of your enemies by disarming yourself? What other means of repression are there? Prisons? Who attaches significance to that during a civil war?

Lenin looked upon the use of terror as a means of class war against the 'bourgeoisie'. From the start, he had encouraged the mass terror of the lower classes against the rich and the privileged through the slogan 'Loot the Looters!' 'We must encourage the energy and the popular nature of the terror,' he wrote

the following June.⁷² As we saw in Chapter II, this mass terror had given the Bolsheviks a strong base of emotional support among those elements of the poor who derived a certain satisfaction from seeing the rich and mighty fall regardless of whether it brought any improvement in their own lot. The early Cheka system was directly shaped by the local initiatives of this mass terror.

Since its establishment in November 1917, the Cheka had grown by leaps and bounds. When it moved into its first headquarters in Petrograd, the Cheka had a tiny staff. Dzerzhinsky, its chief, carried all its records in his briefcase. But by the end of March, when the government moved to Moscow and the Cheka occupied the infamous Lubianka building (formerly occupied by Lloyd's Insurance), it had a staff of more than 600, rising to 1,000 by June, not including the security troops. Provincial Chekas were slower to develop; but nearly all the provinces and most of the districts had a Cheka branch by September, when the order came down to unleash the Red Terror. ³

The Cheka was a state within a state. There was scarcely any aspect of Soviet life, from the struggle against counter-revolution to the issuing of dog licences, that it did not cover. From the start it worked outside the law. The Commissariat of Justice struggled in vain to subordinate it to the courts. The knock on the door in the middle of the night, interrogations and imprisonment without charge, torture and summary executions — these were the methods of the Cheka. In the words of one of its founders:

The Cheka is not an investigating commission, a court, or a tribunal. It is a fighting organ on the internal front of the civil war ... It does not judge, it strikes. It does not pardon, it destroys all who are caught on the other side of the barricade.⁷⁴