During its early stages of development the Cheka system was extremely decentralized: each local Cheka organization was a law unto itself. This made the Cheka Terror both random and susceptible to pressures from below. Virtually anyone could be arrested, and almost anything could be construed as ‘counter-revolutionary’ behaviour. The Cheka’s own instructions listed private trading, drunkenness, and even being late for work as ‘counter-revolutionary’ conduct. But on this basis the whole of the population would have been in jail. Many of the early victims of the Red Terror had been arrested on the basis of no more than a single denunciation by some personal enemy. The Cheka in Omsk complained in April that of the 1,000 cases of ‘counter-revolution’ so far brought before it, more than 200 had had to be thrown out because the only evidence against the accused had been the hearsay of some person or group of people who, it later turned out, had a private grudge. Some of the less scrupulous Chekas did not let this stop them from securing a conviction. The Penza Department of Justice complained in April, for example, that its prisons were ‘full of innocent people arrested by the Cheka on the basis of some false accusation by one person against another’. It was particularly common for someone in debt to denounce his creditor as a ‘kulak usurer’, and thus a ‘counter-revolutionary’.81 It was one way to cancel your debts.
This is what was happening, then, in the early stages of the Terror, before the Centre took control and redirected it against its own politically defined enemies: sections of society were driving the Terror from below as a means of retribution against those whom they perceived as their own enemies, which in their eyes meant the same thing as ‘the enemies of the revolution’. Their ability to do this was of course dependent upon their place in the local Bolshevik power structure. But this hardly means that the Terror was constructed from above. Rather it suggests that there was a close but complicated link between the political and the mass terror. As Dzerzhinsky himself wrote in 1922, all the Cheka did was to ‘give a wise direction’ to the ‘centuries-old hatred of the proletariat for its oppressors’, a hatred which might otherwise ‘express itself in senseless and bloody episodes’.82
Many people foresaw that this mass terror would result in a social holocaust in which not only the bourgeoisie but also many of the common people would be destroyed. Citing the words of the Anarchist sailor Zhelezniakov, that ‘for the welfare of the Russian people even a million people could be killed’, Gorky warned the readers of Novaia zhizn’ on 17 January:
a million ‘free citizens’ could indeed be killed in our country. Even more could be killed. Why shouldn’t they be killed? There are many people in Russia and plenty of murderers, but when it comes to prosecuting them, the regime of the People’s Commissars encounters certain mysterious obstacles, as it apparently did in the investigation of the foul murder of Shingarev and Kokoshkin.fn13 A wholesale extermination of those who think differently is an old and tested method of Russian governments, from Ivan the Terrible to Nicholas II … so why should Vladimir Lenin renounce such a simple method?
Steinberg, the Left SR Commissar for Justice, was another early critic of the Terror, although all his efforts to subordinate the Chekas to the courts proved to be in vain. When, in February, Steinberg first saw the Decree on ‘The Socialist Fatherland in Danger!’, with its order to shoot ‘on the spot’ all ‘profiteers, hooligans and counter-revolutionaries’, he immediately went to Lenin and protested: ‘Then why do we bother with a Commissariat of Justice at all? Let’s call it frankly the “Commissariat for Social Extermination” and be done with it!’ Lenin’s face lit up and he replied: ‘Well put, that’s exactly what it should be; but we can’t say that.’83
iv Socialism in One Country
