The Russian Revolution полностью

Terror is not an individual act, not an isolated, fortuitous—even if recurrent—expression of the government’s fury. Terror is a system … a legalized plan of the regime for the purpose of mass intimidation, mass compulsion, mass extermination. Terror is a calculated register of punishments, reprisals, and threats by means of which the government intimidates, entices, and compels the fulfillment of its imperative will. Terror is a heavy, suffocating cloak thrown from above over the entire population of the country, a cloak woven of mistrust, lurking vigilance, and lust for revenge. Who holds this cloak in his hands, who presses through it on the entire population, without exception? … Under terror, force rests in the hands of a minority, the notorious minority, which senses its isolation and fears it. Terror exists precisely because the minority, ruling on its own, regards an ever-growing number of persons, groups, and strata as its enemy.… This “enemy of the Revolution” … expands until he dominates the entire expanse of the Revolution.… The concept keeps on enlarging until, by degrees, it comes to embrace the entire land, the entire population, and, in the end, “all with the exception of the government” and its collaborators.*

Steinberg included among the manifestations of the Red Terror the dissolution of free trade unions, the suppression of free speech, the ubiquity of police agents and informers, the disregard for human rights, and the all-pervasive hunger and want. In his view, this “atmosphere of terror,” its ever-present threat, poisoned Soviet life even more than the executions.

At the root of the terror lay Lenin’s Jacobin conviction that if the Bolsheviks were to stay and expand their power, the embodiment of “evil” ideas and interests, labeled “bourgeoisie,” had to be physically exterminated. The term “bourgeoisie” the Bolsheviks applied loosely to two groups: those who by virtue of their background or position in the economy functioned as “exploiters,” be they a millionaire industrialist or a peasant with an extra acre of land, and those who, regardless of their economic or social status, opposed Bolshevik policies. One could thus qualify as a “bourgeois,” objectively as well as subjectively, by virtue of one’s opinions. There exists telling testimony of Lenin’s genocidal fury in Steinberg’s recollections of his days in the Sovnarkom. On February 21, 1918, Lenin submitted to the cabinet the draft of a decree called “The Socialist Fatherland in Danger!”¹² The inspiration was the German advance into Russia following the Bolshevik failure to sign the Brest Treaty. The document appealed to the people to rise in defense of the country and the Revolution. In it, Lenin inserted a clause that provided for the execution “on the spot”—that is, without trial—of a broad and undefined category of villains labeled “enemy agents, speculators, burglars, hooligans, counterrevolutionary agitators, [and] German spies.” Lenin included summary justice for ordinary criminals (“speculators, burglars, hooligans”) in order to gain support for the decree from the population, which was sick of crime, but his true target was his political opponents, called “counterrevolutionary agitators.”

99. Isaac Steinberg.

The Left SRs criticized this measure, being opposed in principle to the death penalty for political opponents. “I objected,” Steinberg writes:

that this cruel threat killed the whole pathos of the manifesto. Lenin replied with derision, “On the contrary, herein lies true revolutionary pathos. Do you really believe that we can be victorious without the very crudest revolutionary terror?”

It was difficult to argue with Lenin on this score, and we soon reached an impasse. We were discussing a harsh police measure with far-reaching terroristic potentialities. Lenin resented my opposition to it in the name of revolutionary justice. So I called out in exasperation, “Then why do we bother with a Commissariat of Justice? Let’s call it frankly the Commissariat for Social Extermination and be done with it!” Lenin’s face suddenly brightened and he replied, “Well put … that’s exactly what it should be … but we can’t say that.”*

Although Lenin all along provided the main driving force for the Red Terror and often had to cajole his more humane colleagues, he went to extraordinary lengths to disassociate his name from the terror. He who insisted on affixing his signature to all laws and decrees omitted to do so whenever acts of state violence were involved: in these cases, he preferred to give credit to the chairman of the Central Committee, the Commissar of the Interior, or some other authority, such as the Ural Regional Soviet, which he made falsely assume responsibility for the massacre of the Imperial family. He desperately wanted to avoid having his name historically linked with the inhumanities which he instigated. “He took care,” writes one of his biographers,