The Bolsheviks encouraged this war on privilege — and even made it their own popular raison d’être. Lenin had always been an advocate of using mass terror against the enemies of his revolution. In ‘How to Organize Competition?’, written in December 1917, he called for a ‘war to the death against the rich, the idlers and the parasites’. Each village and town should be left to develop its own means of:
cleansing the Russian land of all vermin, of scoundrel fleas, the bedbug rich and so on. In one place they will put into prison a dozen rich men, a dozen scoundrels, half a dozen workers who shirk on the job … In another place they will be put to cleaning latrines. In a third they will be given yellow tickets [such as prostitutes were given] after a term in prison, so that everyone knows they are harmful and can keep an eye on them. In a fourth one out of every ten idlers will be shot. The more variety the better … for only practice can devise the best methods of struggle.66
On many occasions he stressed that the ‘proletarian state’ was ‘a system of organized violence’ against the bourgeoisie: this was what he had always understood by the term ‘Dictatorship of the Proletariat’. Licensing popular acts of plunder and retribution was an integral element of this system, a means of ‘terrorizing the bourgeoisie’ into submission to the Proletarian State. Here were the origins of the Red Terror.
Historians have tended to neglect the connections between this plebeian war on privilege and the origins of the Red Terror. Most of them have seen the Terror as exclusively political. They have shown how it was imposed by the Bolsheviks — either deliberately to build up their power, so that terror became the fundamental basis of their regime (the view of the Right), or as a largely pragmatic response to the threats and problems of the civil war (the view of the Left). Neither is a satisfactory explanation. The Terror erupted from below. It was an integral element of the social revolution from the start. The Bolsheviks encouraged but did not create this mass terror. The main institutions of the Terror were all shaped, at least in part, in response to these pressures from below. The anarchic plunder of bourgeois, Church and noble property was legitimized and institutionalized by the Bolshevik decrees of revolutionary confiscation and taxation, which the local Chekas then enforced through the arrest of ‘bourgeois’ and ‘counter-revolutionary’ hostages. The mob trials of bourgeois employers, officers, speculators and other ‘enemies of the people’ were institutionalized through the People’s Courts and the crude system of ‘revolutionary justice’ which they administered — which in turn became a part of the Cheka Terror.
The Cheka system, as centrally organized political terror, did not really take off until the late summer of 1918 (see here). During the early months of the Bolshevik regime, the Cheka system was, like the rest of the state apparatus, extremely decentralized; and this often meant that social pressures, such as the desire of the local population to despoil the rich and powerful, or even the desire of one community to pursue a vendetta against another, could determine whom the local Cheka bosses chose to arrest or execute. This ‘mass terror’ is analysed here, the aim being to understand the social roots of the Cheka’s Terror. For, however much one may condemn it, and however hard it may be to admit, there is no doubt that the Terror struck a deep chord in the Russian civil war mentality, and that it had a strange mass appeal. The slogan ‘Death to the Bourgeoisie!’, which was written on the walls of the Cheka interrogation rooms, was also the slogan of the street. People even called their daughters Terrora.
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In January 1918, at a meeting of party agitators on their way to the provinces, Lenin explained that the plunder of bourgeois property was to be encouraged as a form of social justice by revenge. It was a question of ‘looting the looters’. Under this slogan, which the Bolsheviks soon made their own, there was an orgy of robbery and violence in the next few months. Gorky described it as a mass pogrom. Armed gangs robbed the propertied — and then robbed each other. Swindlers, thieves and bandits grew rich, as law and order finally vanished. ‘They rob artistically,’ Gorky wrote in a bitter editorial on 16 March:
no doubt history will tell of this process of Russia’s self-robbery with the greatest inspiration. They rob and sell churches and museums, they sell cannons and rifles, they pilfer army warehouses, they rob the palaces of former grand dukes; everything which can be plundered is plundered, everything which can be sold is sold; in Theodossia the soldiers even traffic in people — they bring Turkish, Armenian and Kurdish women from the Caucasus and sell them for twenty-five roubles apiece. This is very ‘original’, and we can be proud — there was nothing like it even in the era of the Great French Revolution.67
