The Russian Revolution полностью

The evidence shows that Lenin, its most determined instigator, regarded terror as an indispensable instrument of revolutionary government. He was quite prepared to resort to it preventively—that is, in the absence of active opposition to his rule. His commitment to it was rooted in a deep-seated belief in the Rightness of his cause and in an inability to perceive politics in hues other than pure white and pure black. It was essentially the same outlook that had driven Robespierre, to whom Trotsky had compared Lenin as early as 1904.⁴ Like the French Jacobin, Lenin sought to build a world inhabited exclusively by “good citizens.” This objective led him, like Robespierre, morally to justify the physical elimination of “bad” citizens.

From the time he formed the Bolshevik organization, for which he was proud to claim the title “Jacobin,” Lenin spoke of the need for revolutionary terror. In a 1908 essay, “Lessons of the Commune,” he made revealing observations on this subject. Having listed the achievements and failures of this first “proletarian revolution,” he indicated its cardinal weakness: the proletariat’s “excessive generosity—it should have exterminated its enemies,” instead of trying “to exert moral influence on them.”⁵ This remark must be one of the earliest instances in political literature in which the term “extermination,” normally used for vermin, is applied to human beings. As we have seen, Lenin habitually described those whom he chose to designate as his regime’s “class enemies” in terms borrowed from the vocabulary of pest control, calling kulaks “bloodsuckers,” “spiders,” and “leeches.” As early as January 1918 he used inflammatory language to incite the population to carry out pogroms:

The communes, small cells in the village and city, must themselves work out and test thousands of forms and methods of practical accounting and control over the rich, swindlers, and parasites. Variety here is a guarantee of vitality, of success and the attainment of the single objective: the cleansing of Russia’s soil of all harmful insects, of scoundrel fleas, bedbugs—the rich, and so on.⁶

Hitler would follow this example in regard to the leaders of German Social Democracy, whom he thought of as mainly Jews, calling them in Mein Kampf “Ungeziefer,” or “vermin,” fit only for extermination.⁷

Nothing illustrates better how deeply the passion for terror was embedded in Lenin’s psyche than an incident which occurred on his first day as head of state. As the Bolsheviks were taking power, Kamenev asked the Second Congress of Soviets to abolish the death penalty for front-line deserters, which Kerensky had reintroduced in mid-1917. The congress adopted this proposal and abolished capital punishment at the front.⁸ Lenin, busy elsewhere, missed this event. According to Trotsky, when he learned of it, he became “utterly indignant.” “Nonsense,” he said,

how can you make a revolution without executions? Do you expect to dispose of your enemies by disarming yourself? What other means of repression are there? Prisons? Who attaches significance to that during a civil war, when each side hopes to win? … It is a mistake, he repeated, impermissible weakness, pacifist illusion, and so on.⁹

This was said at a time when the Bolshevik dictatorship was barely in the saddle, when no organized opposition had formed because no one believed the Bolsheviks would last, when there was as yet nothing remotely resembling a “civil war.” On Lenin’s insistence, the Bolsheviks ignored the congress’s action in regard to the death penalty and reintroduced it more or less formally the following June.

Although Lenin preferred to direct the terror from behind the scenes, he occasionally let it be known he had no patience with complaints about “innocent” victims of the Cheka. “I judge soberly and categorically,” he replied in 1919 to a Menshevik worker who criticized arrests of innocent citizens, “what is better—to put in prison a few dozen or a few hundred inciters, guilty or not, conscious or not, or to lose thousands of Red Army soldiers and workers? The former is better.”¹⁰ This kind of reasoning served to justify indiscriminate persecution.*

Trotsky fell in step. On December 2, 1917, addressing the new, Bolshevik Ispolkom, he said:

There is nothing immoral in the proletariat finishing off the dying class. This is its right. You are indignant … at the petty terror which we direct against our class opponents. But be put on notice that in one month at most this terror will assume more frightful forms, on the model of the great revolutionaries of France. Our enemies will face not prison but the guillotine.¹¹

He defined the guillotine on this occasion (plagiarizing from the French revolutionary Jacques Hébert) as a device which “shortens a man by the length of a head.”