[The following is in regards to the opening phases of the Red Terror, a particularly bloody phase of the Russian Civil War.]
Lenin’s associates now vied with each other in using language of explicit brutality to incite the population to murder and to make murder committed for the cause of the Revolution appear noble and uplifting. Trotsky, for instance, on one occasion warned that if any of the ex-tsarist officers whom he drafted into the Red Army behaved treasonably, “nothing will remain of them but a wet spot.” The Chekist Latsis declared that the “law of the Civil War [was] to slaughter all the wounded” fighting against the Soviet regime. “It is a life-and-death struggle. If you do not kill, you will be killed. Therefore kill that you may not be killed.”
No such exhortation to mass murder was heard either in the French Revolution or on the White side. The Bolsheviks deliberately sought to brutalize their citizens, to make them look on some of their fellow citizens just as frontline soldiers look on those wearing enemy uniforms: as abstractions rather than human beings.
This murderous psychosis had already attained a high pitch of intensity by the time bullets struck down Uritskii and Lenin. These two terrorist acts – as it turned out, unrelated, but at the same time seen as part of an organized plot – unleashed the Red Terror in its formal sense. The majority of its victims were hostages chosen at random, mainly because of their social background, wealth, or connections with the old regime. The Bolsheviks considered these massacres necessary not only to suppress concrete threats to their regime but also to intimidate the citizens and force them into psychotic submission.
Source:
Pipes, Richard. "The Red Terror." The Russian Revolution. New York: Knopf, 1990. 817-18. Print.
Original Source(s) Listed:
Izvestiia, No. 134/398 (June 30, 1918), 3.
Ibid., No. 181/445 (August 23, 1918), 2.
Further Reading:
Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov / Lenin
Lev Davidovich Bronstein / Лев Дави́дович Тро́цкий (Leon Trotsky)
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