You may be familiar with Stalin's Great Terror that occured in the mid-1930s,
but have you also heard of the Red Terror? This occured in 1918.
The Bolsheviks who seized power in Petrograd, Moscow and several other key Russian cities
as well in October (or November) 1917. In March 1918 the Brest-Litovsk
Treaty was signed that pulled them out of the war with the Central Powers. Then, the unleashed
the Red Terror against their own population. Why was this? How many were killed? Let find out now.
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The signing of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty resulted in Russia – or rather called
Soviet-Russia by now – ceding large strips of land to the Central
Powers. Within the Bolshevik party people were divided by this treaty.
Despite wanting to end the war, the Left SR wanted peace without annexation and
thus they opposed the the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. What is interesting is that this treaty shows
the pragmatic nature of the Bolsheviks, who were willing to give up much land for the time being in
order to save the Revolution. The Left SRs weren't having it, assassinated the German ambassador and
launched an uprising in the Summer of 1918 which was crushed by the pro-Bolshevik forces. Also
that Summer the abdicated Tsar Nicholas II and his family was executed by a Cheka firing squad
in Yekaterinenburg. According to historian Orlando Figes the Red Terror did not come out of the blue.
The direct cause occured near the end of the Summer of 1918. What is interesting
is that Lenin became a public figure in September 1918, when he was about to die.
Until then many Russians wouldn't recognize him. He barely went in public after his car was taken
under fire on 14 January (N.S.) in a failed assassination attempt. On August 30, 1918 Lenin
visited an arms factory in southern Moscow. Upon leaving the factory a young woman walked forward,
raising a pistol and firing three shots at Lenin. Fanny Kaplan, a Russian Jewish woman,
and Socialist-Revolutionary believed Lenin was a traitor
to the revolution. The Left SRs were against the treaty and launched a revolt that Summer which was
snuffed out by the Bolsheviks. Anyhow, Lenin was rushed to the hospital and he was likely
to die, but recovered near the end of September. The Bolsheviks press explained this as a miracle.
Who did die early that month was Kaplan. She was executed by the Cheka. So what about the Cheka?
The Cheka (All-Russian Extraordinary Commission to Combat Counterrevolution and Sabotage)
was the Bolshevik secret police. The Cheka HQ was located in the old tsarist police
building in Petrograd. Later it moved to Moscow and established its HQ in Lubyanka building (the
former All-Russia Insurance Company building) and by that point is had around 600 men in its ranks,
which soon increased to 1,000. The Cheka was seen as a state within a state and stood above the law
(an attempt to bring it under the law failed). The Cheka was led by Felix Dzerzhinsky,
a Polish former social democrat. He came from a modest gentry family in the Vilna region.
During his teens he became involved in underground political activity and spend
much of his years in tsarist prisons. He was liberated from these prisons in March 1917.
Despite being Polish he rejected Polish nationalism. The Cheka was the ancestor
of the later Soviet security sytems like the GPU, the NKVD and the KGB. Although not in
name the Cheka can be seen as a successor of the tsarist police: the Ochrana because it borrowed
many of its techniques and tactics. The Cheka was basically channelling the violence.
As Dzerzhinsky later stated in 1922:
Now Dzerzhinsky points out something really interesting when speaking of age-old
hatred. See, you can say that the Bolsheviks introduced the mass violence to Russia, but it's
more likely they awakened it. For decades Russia was a society with a small group of rich people
and and enormous group of poor people, majority of them peasants. These people always had to bow
for the rich, but that was no more. In many memoirs of the 1917-1918 period Russian princes,
countesses, artists, writers and businessmen recalled how they were met with rudeness and
hostility by those who previously showed their deep respect. As Figes puts it:
During the first month after the October Revolution the Bolshevik regime wasn't as
bloody as it would later be. Less then 1,000 exeuctions were carried out between December
and the following Summer of 1918. The Cheka would have SRs in their ranks which turned
out to have a moderate effect. This moderate influence would end when the SRs were ousted
after their failed uprising in the Summer of 1918. Many arrests were random, because the bolsheviks
hadn't consolidated their power to built a well functioning police state. If you would take a look
in a Cheka prison you would find inmates from all walks of life: from peasants to princes;
from clergymen to labourers. The Red Terror looked very similar to Stalin's Great Terror
in its randomness for the victims. The feared knock on the door at night could occur at
everyone. The bolsheviki justified their terror as a war against the counter revolution.
But who these counterrevolutionaires were wasn't entirely clear. As time progressed
the regime became more paranoid. Kaplans could be everywhere. Many of the victims of the Cheka
were bourgeois hostages (burgerlijke gijzelaars). The were taken hostage to be shot
once counterrevolutionary activities would occur. Most of them were innocent and just unfortunate to
be around when anti-bolshevik actions occured. The frenzy was the worst outside the big cities
were local Cheka bosses ruled their own 'kingdom' so to say. Inspired by
Lenin's words that it was better to arrest 100 innocents than let one guilty person go free,
these leaders did their best to make the most arrests. The ungroundedness went through the roof:
– One old man was arrested because he possessed a family photo from the 1870s with someone
in judicial clothing, – One man was arrested
because he had skipped the line. He was reported by two people who had skipped
the line and were called out for it by him. – Many were arrested because of their surname.
Those who had a common surname ran the most risk of being arrested.
The conditions in the Chekist prisons were often much worse than in the Tsarist
prisons. Lack of sanitation and poor food resulted in epidemics among the prisoners. The Peter and
Paul Fortress in Petrograd – that stood as a sybol of the horrors of the tsarist state –
was now worse than it ever had been. Compared to this the old prison regime in the fortress
had been like a holiday camp. The torture methods that were
implemented were Medieval to say the least. Many of the Cheka executioners had been confronted
with confinement and oppression by the tsarist regimes and now applied this on their
victims. Others were scarred by the years of war and revolution. It also had women who carried out
brutal executions. The Cheka had many sadists in their ranks who competed with each other of who
could go the furthest. The details are gruesome and feel free to look them up yourself.
In the Summer of 2019 I visted the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv in walked into a
building that was the former local Cheka HQ (this building had survived the Second World War). Its
inhabitants told me that victims were thrown head first down the stairwell. They also told
me that when mechanics visited the basement of the building to do some check-ups they found old
stains of blood on the walls of the basement. Executions were the final product of this
machinery of terror. Tens of thousands of summary executions were carried out in courtyards and
cellars, or in deserted fields on the edge of towns. As the civil war kicked off whole prisons
were emptied so these people couldn't be captured alive by the Whites. It is hard to say how many
people died as a result of the Red Terror. Do we count people that were killed by the Cheka
or also civilians who died at the hands of Red Army soldiers during the Civil War? We may never
know the exact number, but the numbers must in the 100Ks according to Orlando Figes, who also claims
the number might surpass the number of deaths during the fighting in the Russian Civil War.
The Red Terror led to protests, also within the Bolshevik party. Members like Kamenev
and Bucharin claimed the Cheka was abusing its power. Yet, hardliners as Trotsky, Stalin and
Lenin remained firm in their stance that the terror was nessecary to make the revolution
a success. Stalin would later surpass this. Many Lenin apologists claim the bolshevik leader
wasn't aware of these acts of terror or even opposed it. This is unlikely.
When Bolshevik party member Lev Kamanev proposed to abolish the death penalty,
Lenin flew in a rage and shouted:
The Red Teror would officially end near the end of 1918 but continue throughout the Russian Civil
War. And then there was also the White Terror. All these topics will be covered in the future.