The Russian Revolution полностью

*Bykov, Poslednie dni, 126. It is said that the first admission of the death of the family was made in P. Iurenev’s “Novye materialy o rasstrele Romanovykh,” Krasnaia gazeta, December 28, 1925 (Smirnoff, Autour, 25).

†Leninskaia Gvardiia Urala (Sverdlovsk, 1967), 509–14. An English officer, interested in the fate of the Imperial family, visited him in Ekaterinburg in 1919: Francis McCullagh in Nineteenth Century and After, No. 123 (September 1920), 377–427. Iurovskii kept a journal while commandant of Ipatev’s house: it remains unpublished except for brief fragments in Riabov’s article in Rodina, No. 4 (April 1989), 90–91.

‡The Ekaterinburg tragedy had a bizarre sequel. In September 1919, the Executive Committee of the Perm Soviet tried twenty-eight persons for the murder of the late Tsar, his family, and retainers. Although none is known to have had any connection with the event, the Left SR M. Iakhontov “confessed” to having ordered and personally participated in the murder of the Imperial family. He and four other defendants were sentenced to death for the alleged crime. The background and purpose of this mock trial cannot be determined: Robert Wilton, The Last Days of the Romanovs (London, 1920) 102–3, citing Rossiia (Paris), No. 1, December 17, 1919, with reference to Pravda; see also New York Times, December 7, 1919, p. 20.

18

The Red Terror

Terror is for the most part useless cruelties committed by frightened people to reassure themselves.

—F. Engels to K. Marx¹

Systematic state terror is hardly a Bolshevik invention: its antecedents go back to the Jacobins. Even so, the differences between Jacobin and Bolshevik practices in this respect are so profound that one can credit the Bolsheviks with having invented terror. Suffice it to say that the French Revolution culminated in terror, whereas the Russian one began with it. The former has been called a “brief parenthesis,” a “countercurrent”:² the Red Terror constituted from the outset an essential element of the regime, which now intensified, now abated, but never disappeared, hanging like a permanent dark cloud over Soviet Russia.

As in the case of War Communism, the Civil War, and other unsavory aspects of Bolshevism, Bolshevik spokesmen and apologists like to place the blame for terror on their opponents. It is said to have been a regrettable, but unavoidable reaction to the counterrevolution: in other words, a practice they would have shunned if given the chance. Typical is the verdict of Lenin’s friend Angelica Balabanoff:

Unfortunate though it might be, the terror and repression which had been inaugurated by the Bolsheviks had been forced upon them by foreign intervention and by Russian reactionaries determined to defend their privileges and reestablish the old regime.³

Such apologias can be dismissed on several grounds.

If terror had indeed been “forced” on the Bolsheviks by “foreign interventionists” and “Russian reactionaries,” then they would have abandoned it as soon as they had decisively defeated these enemies—that is, in 1920. They did nothing of the kind. Although with the termination of the Civil War they did put an end to the indiscriminate massacres of 1918–19, they made certain to leave intact the laws and institutions which had made them possible. Once Stalin became undisputed master of Soviet Russia all the instruments which he required to resume the terror on an incomparably vaster scale lay at hand. This fact alone demonstrates that for the Bolsheviks terror was not a defensive weapon but an instrument of governance.

This interpretation is confirmed by the fact that the principal institution of Bolshevik terror, the Cheka, was founded in early December 1917, before any organized opposition to the Bolsheviks had had a chance to emerge and when the “foreign interventionists” were still assiduously courting them. We have it on the authority of one of the most sadistic functionaries of the Cheka, the Latvian la. Kh. Peters, that in the first half of 1918, when the Cheka began to experiment with terror, “counterrevolutionary organizations … as such were not observed.”*