[The following is in regards to the beginning phases of what would later be known as the Red Terror, a period of the Russian Revolution which saw brutal crackdowns by the government on its own people.]
When told in June 1918 that party officials in Petrograd had restrained workers from carrying out a pogrom to avenge the assassination of Volodarskii, he fired off an indignant letter to his viceroy there.
”Comrade Zinoviev!” he wrote:
The Central Committee has learned only today that in Petrograd workers wanted to react to the murder of Volodarskii with mass terror and that you (not you personally but the Petrograd Central Committee or Regional Committee) held them back. I protest decisively! We compromise ourselves: even in Soviet resolutions we threaten mass terror, and when it comes to action, we impede the entirely correct revolutionary initiative of the masses. This is im-per-mis-si-ble!
Two months later, Lenin instructed the authorities in Nizhnii Novgorod to “introduce at once mass terror, execute and deport hundreds of prostitutes, drunken soldiers, ex-officers, etc.” These terribly imprecise three letters – “etc.” – gave agents of the regime a free hand in selecting their victims: it was to be carnage for the sake of carnage as an expression of the indomitable “revolutionary will” of the regime, which was fast losing ground under its feet.
Source:
Pipes, Richard. "The Red Terror." The Russian Revolution. New York: Knopf, 1990. 816-17. Print.
Original Source Listed:
Lenin , PSS, L, 106, 142.
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