[The following is in regards to the phase of the Russian Revolution known as The Red Terror.]
Cheka agents were now told they could deal with enemies of the regime as they saw fit. According to Cheka Circular No. 47, signed by Peters: “In its activity, the Cheka is entirely independent, conducting searches, arrests, and executions, accounts of which it renders subsequently to the Sovnarkom and Central Executive Committee.” With this power, and spurred by Moscow’s threats, provincial and district Chekas all over Soviet Russia now energetically went to work. During September, the Communist press published a running account from the provinces on the progress of the Red Terror, column after column of reports of executions. Sometimes only the number of those executed was given, sometimes also their last names and occupations, the latter of which often included the designation “kr,” or “counterrevolutionary.” At the end of September, the Cheka came out with a house organ, the Cheka Weekly (Ezhenedel’nik VChK), to assist the brotherhood of Chekists in their work through the exchange of information and experience. It regularly carried summaries of executions, neatly arranged by provinces, as if they were the results of regional football matches.
It is difficult to convey the vehemence with which Communist leaders at this time called for the spilling of blood. It was as if they vied to prove themselves less “soft,” less “bourgeois” than the next man. The Stalinist and Nazi holocausts were carried out with much greater decorum. Stalin’s “kulaks” and political undesirables, sentenced to die from hunger and exhaustion, would be sent to “correction camps,” while Hitler’s Jews, en route to gas chambers, would be “evacuated” or “relocated.”
The early Bolshevik terror, by contrast, was carried out in the open. Here there was no flinching, no resort to euphemisms, for this nationwide Grand Guignol was meant to serve “educational” purposes by having everyone – rulers as well as ruled – bear responsibility and hence develop an equal interest in the regime’s survival.
Here is Zinoviev addressing a gathering of Communists two weeks after the launching of the Red Terror: “We must carry along with us 90 million out of the 100 million of Soviet Russia’s inhabitants. As for the rest, we have nothing to say to them. They must be annihilated.” These words, by one of the highest Soviet officials, was a sentence of death on 10 million human beings.
And here is the organ of the Red Army inciting the populace to pogroms:
Without mercy, without sparing, we will kill our enemies by the scores of hundreds, let them be thousands, let them drown themselves in their own blood. For the blood of Lenin and Uritskii… let there be floods of blood of the bourgeoisie – more blood, as much as possible.
Source:
Pipes, Richard. "The Red Terror." The Russian Revolution. New York: Knopf, 1990. 820. Print.
Original Source(s) Listed:
Ezhenedel’nik VChK, No. 2 (September 29, 1918), II.
Severnaia kommuna, No. 109 (September 19, 1918), 2, cited in Leggett, Cheka, 114.
Krasnaia gazeta, September I, 1918, cited in Leggett, Cheka, 108.
Further Reading:
No comments, yet...