Chekism

Etymology and early history

Chekism (Russian чекизм) takes its name from the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission, the Cheka (ЧК), established on 20 December [O.S. 7 December] 1917 by the Council of People's Commissars of the Russian SFSR under Felix Dzerzhinsky. After the Cheka was dissolved in February 1922, officers of the successor agencies (the GPU, OGPU, NKVD, GUGB, NKGB, MGB, MVD and, longest-lasting, the KGB) were commonly called "Chekists", both by themselves and by the wider public. That self-identification and continuity is what the concept rests on.

The Cheka's own repression is documented fact, not interpretation: it carried out mass arrests, imprisonment, torture and execution without trial during the Red Terror, and the number executed is estimated at anywhere from at least 50,000 to as many as 200,000, with wide variation among researchers. Describing Chekism as the institutional culture and ideology of these organs begins from that practice.

The practices and doctrines that produced Chekism came from the first chief of the Soviet security services, Felix Dzerzhinsky; the protocols he established encouraged officers to see repression as justified, necessary and romanticized. In 1950 the Soviet defector and Kremlinologist Abdurakhman Avtorkhanov first defined the term in a Russian émigré journal, calling the Soviet secret police the key structure behind Stalin's dictatorship and treating Chekism not as a state secret police or a "state within a state" but as a single universal force reaching from the state and party down to the individual informant.

Bakatin's declaration and its character

In his 1992 memoir, Bakatin rooted Chekism in the post-October Revolution system of suppression, arguing that the Cheka carried out arrests, investigations, sentences, executions and the mass shooting of "hostages" at its own discretion with the Party's sanction, elevating terror and lawlessness to state policy. This is a politically freighted formulation by a participant and must be attributed to him rather than spoken in the site's voice. He also argued that Chekism requires a permanent enemy, and defined it as "the complete merger of the ideology of the secret services not with the law, but with the ideology of the ruling party."

Continuity and application in Russia

The term is also applied to other Eastern Bloc security services: the long-serving East German security chief Erich Mielke liked to call himself a Chekist. After the collapse of the USSR it was extended to the political and economic role of KGB and FSB personnel. Russian State Duma member Konstantin Borovoi called Putin's appointment "the culmination of the KGB's crusade for power." The sociologist Olga Kryshtanovskaya's study found that up to 78% of 1,016 leading Russian political figures had previously served in organizations affiliated with the KGB or FSB, and described their spread from security into business, parties, NGOs, regional government and culture. Other accounts hold that Chekism generated a "mafiocracy" in Russia, and that Chekists perceive themselves as a ruling class.

Distinctions and disputes

The word "Chekist" must be distinguished from the agencies themselves. A member of the Cheka was called a Chekist, and the term referred to the Soviet secret police throughout the Soviet period despite repeated official renamings. Solzhenitsyn recalled that zeks used "old Chekist" as a mark of special esteem for experienced camp administrators, a usage separate from the ideology term.

Definitions of contemporary Chekism diverge. Andrei Illarionov, a former Putin adviser, describes it as a new corporatism, the "Corporation of Intelligence Service Collaborators" or KSSS, with an omerta-like code and "Nashism", the selective application of rights. Political scientist Stanislav Belkovsky defines Chekism as an "imperial ideology" that includes aggressive anti-Americanism. These are contested analyses to be attributed, not adopted as the entry's own definition. Yevgenia Albats condemned the earlier Chekists' violence and the pride of today's agents in claiming Dzerzhinsky's legacy. Conversely Viktor Cherkesov, head of the Russian Drug Enforcement Administration, invoked Chekism as a "hook" that kept post-Soviet society from falling apart and insisted that Chekists must stay together, an emic self-justification that shows Chekist ideology in its own words.

Chekist values, meaning unquestioning loyalty to the Soviet system and its defence against foreign and domestic adversaries, were systematically cultivated through the KGB's own educational system, whose pinnacle was the Felix Dzerzhinsky Higher School in Moscow, and the ideology was still being actively reproduced in cadre training as late as 1984. A December 1984 Lithuanian KGB document, "A Plan for the Individual Training of a Young Officer of the State Security Service", shows a newly recruited officer without formal Chekist schooling being trained through theoretical topics and practical assessments. The plan directed supervisors' "regular conversations" to invoke "the glorious Chekist war and post-war traditions", using idealized Chekist role models and material from the bi-monthly journal Sbornik, novels and films to mould loyalty.