Isaac Steinberg, who was in a unique position to evaluate the phenomenon [the Red Terror] by virtue of his legal training and his experience as Lenin’s Commissar of Justice, noted in 1920 that even though the Civil War was over, the terror continued, having become an intrinsic feature of the regime. Summary executions of prisoners and hostages were to him only “the most glittering object in the somberly flickering firmament of terror that dominates the revolutionary earth,” “its bloody pinnacle, its apotheosis”:
Terror is not an individual act, not an isolated, fortuitous – even if recurrent – expression of the government’s fury. Terror is a system… a legalized plan of the regime for the purpose of mass intimidation, mass compulsion, mass extermination. Terror is a calculated register of punishments, reprisals, and threats by means of which the government intimidates, entices, and compels the fulfillment of its imperative will. Terror is a heavy, suffocating cloak thrown from above over the entire population of the country, a cloak woven of mistrust, lurking vigilance, the lust for revenge. Who holds this cloak in his hands, who presses through it on the entire population, without exception?... Under terror, force rests in the hands of a minority, the notorious minority, which senses its isolation and fears it. Terror exists precisely because the minority, ruling on its own, regards an ever-growing number of persons, groups, and strata as its enemy… This “enemy of the Revolution… The concept keeps on enlarging until, by degrees, it comes to embrace the entire land, the entire population, and, in the end, “all with the exception of the government” and its collaborators.
Author’s Note:
The book, written between 1920 and 1923 (first published in 1931), describes Leninists, not Stalinist, Russia.
Source:
Pipes, Richard. "The Red Terror." The Russian Revolution. New York: Knopf, 1990. 793. Print.
Original Source Listed:
I. Steinberg, Gewalt und Terror in der Revolution (Berlin, 1974), 22-25.
Further Reading:
Исаак Нахман Штейнберг (Isaac Nachman Steinberg)
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