Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

In response to all this and the uncovering of an alleged plot against the Soviet government organized by Allied agents in Moscow (the “Lockhart Plot”), the bourgeoisie and its representatives (in Soviet eyes)—including officers and officer cadets, Kadets, priests, teachers, and students, as well as several former tsarist ministers—were the primary target of the thousands of arrests and the 8,000–15,000 shootings that, within eight weeks, had followed Sovnarkom’s decree “On Red Terror” of 5 September 1918. The principle that guided actions such as these was established by the Chekist Mārtiņš Lācis, who infamously declared that he saw his organization’s task as “the extermination of the bourgeoisie as a class” and determined that a suspect’s social class, not the evidence against him or her, should be uppermost in the mind of an investigator.147

But many workers too had fallen victim for their alleged counterrevolutionary crimes, while many entirely innocent people were also executed. Moreover, workers understood that although the Terror had only intensified in the autumn of 1918, its executioner, the Cheka, had been one of the very first institutions founded (on 7 December 1917) by the Soviet state—that it was, in fact, an essential and entirely necessary element of the revolution in the eyes of many Bolsheviks. Moreover, sudden waves of arrests and executions would periodically engulf the big cities of the Soviet zone throughout the ensuing years. In the autumn of 1919, for example, as Denikin’s forces closed on Moscow, the Cheka uncovered the machinations of the Tactical Center—a sort of umbrella organization for the remnants of the various anti-Bolshevik underground organizations that had sprung up and been cut down in 1918—and executed dozens of its real and alleged members.148

Such tactics did not contain urban unrest, however, as strikes continued, culminating in a huge wave of anti-Bolshevik worker activism in Petrograd in early 1921 (in which Mensheviks and anarchists featured prominently), which in turn prompted the uprising of the sailors at the nearby naval base of Kronshadt in February of that year. In sympathy with the striking and locked-out workers in the nearby city, and in protest against their own intolerable conditions of service, the sailors seized the island of Kotlin and issued proclamations in favor of “Soviets without Communists” and an end to the “commissarocracy.” To reconquer the island, huge Red Army forces were concentrated against Kotlin in mid-March 1921, and thousands of sailors and their supporters were killed, executed, imprisoned, or deported. Ironically, the Baltic sailors had earlier, in 1918, been eulogized by Trotsky as “the pride and glory of the revolution.”149 Despite the war commissars’ later protestations that by 1921 the majority of Baltic Fleet sailors were recent recruits from the “petite-bourgeois” peasantry and therefore innately hostile to the Soviet regime, the historian Israel Getzler has established that at least 75 percent of them had been recruited prior to 1918 (and were therefore likely to have been from the proletarian stock that the navy tended to prefer).150

In several of their resolutions, though, the Kronshtadt rebels had voiced their support for peasant victims of the predations of War Communism, which had inspired a series of uprisings in the villages—particularly (but far from exclusively) those in the immediate rear of a Red front, which were the most likely to be subjected to impromptu and locally organized Red Army requisitions.151 These disturbances began in the spring of 1918 and were particularly virulent in the rear districts of the newly formed Eastern Front, where 50 districts of Saratov province alone were involved. Perm province, farther north, was also the scene of such events in 1918. These uprisings, which took the form of collective actions of entire villages, were forcibly repressed, but continued to trouble the Soviet government over the next few years.152 In the spring of 1919, for example, the so-called Chapan (or Kaftan) War spread across Simbirsk, Samara, and Kazan provinces (just as Kolchak’s forces were approaching these regions). Several major towns were captured by the rebels and Soviet forces from the 4th Red Army had to be diverted from the front to expel them.153 All told, from January to June 1919 peasant disturbances occurred in 124 districts of European Russia.154