Red Terror

Background and decree

The Cheka was founded in December 1917 as an emergency body against counter-revolution and sabotage. The death penalty was restored in June 1918, and as civil war became general that summer the Cheka's powers expanded sharply. On 30 August the chairman of the Petrograd Cheka, Uritsky, was assassinated and Lenin was shot the same day; on 5 September Sovnarkom issued the decree On Red Terror.

The decree provided for isolating groups designated as class enemies in concentration camps, shooting those connected with White organizations, and publishing the names of the executed. The taking of hostages was introduced in this period, with unconnected hostages shot in reprisal for the acts of others. The execution of 512 hostages in Petrograd immediately after Uritsky's murder indicates the scale.

Principle of enforcement

What characterized the Red Terror was that targets were set by social origin rather than by act. The Cheka official Latsis wrote that the criterion of investigation should not be what the accused had done but which class he belonged to. On this principle former officials and officers, clergy, merchants, and landowners were classified and processed as groups.

Targeting was not confined to class categories. After the Left Socialist-Revolutionary rising of 1918 the socialist parties became objects of repression, in 1919 large-scale executions and deportations were carried out against Cossack communities in the south, and the suppression of peasant risings such as Tambov applied hostage-taking and collective responsibility.

Scale and dispute

The number of victims is given in a wide range because of the character of the records. Counts resting on the Cheka's own reports run to tens of thousands for 1918 to 1920, while researchers' estimates run considerably higher once unrecorded provincial executions and deaths during the suppression of risings are included. That it proceeded in interaction with terror from the White side further complicates any accounting.

Political assessment divided from the outset. The Bolsheviks justified it as a defensive measure forced by civil war; Kautsky attacked it as arbitrary violence incompatible with socialism; Luxemburg, while granting the necessity of defending the revolution, warned against terror substituting itself for democratic control.

Legacy

The most durable result was the permanence of the emergency organ. The Cheka was reorganized into the State Political Directorate in 1922 and then into its unified successor, but its power to determine punishment outside judicial procedure survived. The combination of targeting by class origin with punishment without trial returned in the same form in the kulak operation of 1930 and the mass operations of 1937.