In light of this evidence it is absurd to talk of Red Terror as an “unfortunate” policy “forced” upon the Bolsheviks by foreign and domestic opponents. As it had been for the Jacobins, terror served the Bolsheviks not as a weapon of last resort, but as a surrogate for the popular support which eluded them. The more their popularity eroded, the more they resorted to terror, until in the fall and winter of 1918–19 they raised it to a level of indiscriminate slaughter never before seen.*
For these reasons, the Red Terror cannot be compared either with the so-called White Terror of the anti-Bolshevik armies in Russia, to which the Bolsheviks habitually referred for self-justification, or with the Jacobin Terror of France, which they liked to claim as a model.
The White armies did, indeed, execute many Bolsheviks and Bolshevik sympathizers, usually in summary fashion, sometimes in a barbarous manner. But they never elevated terror to the status of a policy and never created a formal institution like the Cheka to carry it out. Their executions were as a rule ordered by field officers, acting on their own initiative, often in an emotional reaction to the sights which greeted their eyes when they entered areas evacuated by the Red Army. Odious as it was, the terror of the White armies was never systematic, as was the case with the Red Terror.
The Jacobin Terror of 1793–94, for all its psychological and philosophical similarities with the Red Terror, also differed from it in several fundamental ways. For one, it had its origin in pressures from below, from the streets, from mobs outraged by shortages of food and in search of scapegoats. The Bolshevik terror, by contrast, was imposed from above on a population that had had its fill of bloodshed. As we shall see, Moscow had to threaten provincial soviets with severe punishments for failing to implement its terroristic directives. Although there was a great deal of spontaneous violence in 1917–18, there exists no evidence of mobs calling for the blood of entire social classes.
Second, the two terrors were of a very different duration. The Jacobin Terror took up less than one year of a revolution that by the narrowest definition lasted a decade: hence it could properly be described as an episode, “a brief parenthesis.” Immediately after the 9th of Thermidor, when the Jacobin leaders were arrested and guillotined, the French terror came to a sudden and permanent halt. But in Soviet Russia, the terror never ceased, going on intermittently, although at varying levels of intensity. While the death penalty was once again abolished at the end of the Civil War, executions went on as before, with minimum respect for judiciary procedures.
The difference between the Jacobin and Bolshevik terrors is perhaps best symbolized by the fact that in Paris no monuments have been raised to Robespierre and no streets named after him, whereas in the capital of Soviet Russia a giant statue of Feliks Dzerzhinskii, the founder of the Cheka, stands in the heart of the city, dominating a square named in his honor.
Bolshevik terror involved much more than mass executions: in the opinion of some contemporaries, these executions, terrible as they were, had a less oppressive effect than the pervasive atmosphere of repression. Isaac Steinberg, who was in a unique position to evaluate the phenomenon by virtue of his legal training and his experience as Lenin’s Commissar of Justice, noted in 1920 that even though the Civil War was over, the terror continued, having become an intrinsic feature of the regime. Summary executions of prisoners and hostages were to him only “the most glittering object in the somberly flickering firmament of terror that dominates the revolutionary earth,” “its bloody pinnacle, its apotheosis”:
