to speak of the terror only in the abstract, disassociating himself from individual acts of terrorism, the murders in the basement of the Lubianka and in all the other basements.… Lenin kept himself so remote from the terror that the legend has grown up that he took no active part in it, leaving all decisions to Dzerzhinskii. It is an unlikely legend, for he was a man constitutionally incapable of deputing authority on important matters.13
In fact, all decisions bearing on this matter, whether they concerned general procedures or the execution of important prisoners, required the approval of the Bolshevik Central Committee (later the Politburo), of which Lenin was the permanent de facto chairman.14 The Red Terror was Lenin’s child, even if he desperately tried to deny parenthood.
The guardian of this unacknowledged progeny was Dzerzhinskii (Dzier-zyński), the Cheka’s founder and director. Almost forty at the outbreak of the Revolution, he was born near Vilno into a patriotic Polish gentry family. He broke with his family’s religious and nationalist heritage and joined the Lithuanian Social-Democratic Party, turning into a full-time revolutionary organizer and agitator. He spent eleven years in tsarist prisons and on hard labor. These were harsh years, which left indelible scars on his psyche, developing in him an indomitable will as well as an unquenchable thirst for revenge. He was capable of perpetrating the worst imaginable cruelties without pleasure, as an idealistic duty. Lean and ascetic, he carried out Lenin’s instructions with a religious dedication, sending “bourgeois” and “counterrevolutionaries” before firing squads with the same joyless compulsion with which centuries earlier he might have ordered heretics burned at the stake.
100. Feliks Dzerzhinskii.
The first step in the introduction of mass terror to Soviet Russia was the elimination of all legal restraint—indeed, of law itself—and its replacement by something labeled “revolutionary conscience.” Nothing like this had ever happened anywhere: Soviet Russia was the first state in history formally to outlaw law. This measure freed the authorities to dispose of anyone they disliked and legitimized pogroms against their opponents.
Lenin had planned it this way long before he took power. He believed that one of the cardinal mistakes of the Paris Commune had been its failure to abolish France’s legal system. This mistake he meant to avoid. In late 1918, he defined the dictatorship of the proletariat as “rule unrestricted by any law.”15 He viewed law and courts in the Marxist fashion as tools by means of which the ruling class advanced its interests: in “bourgeois” society, under the guise of enforcing impartial justice, law served to safeguard private property. This point of view was articulated in early 1918 by N. V. Krylenko, who would later serve as Commissar of Justice:
It is one of the most widespread sophistries of bourgeois science to maintain that the court … is an institution whose task it is to realize some sort of special “justice” that stands above classes, that is independent in its essence of society’s class structure, the class interests of the struggling groups, and the class ideology of the ruling classes … “Let justice prevail in courts”—one can hardly conceive more bitter mockery of reality than this.… Alongside, one can quote many such sophistries: that the court is a guardian of “law,” which, like “governmental authority,” pursues the higher task of assuring the harmonious development of “personality” … Bourgeois “law,” bourgeois “justice,” the interests of the “harmonious development” of bourgeois “personality” … Translated into the simple language of living reality this meant, above all, the preservation of private property …16
101. Fannie Kaplan.
From this premise, Krylenko concluded that the disappearance of private property would automatically lead to the disappearance of law: socialism would thus “destroy in embryo” the “psychological emotions” that made for crime. In this view, law did not prevent but caused crime.
Of course, some judiciary institutions would have to remain during the transition to full socialism, but these would serve the purposes not of hypocritical “justice” but of class war. “We need the state, we need compulsion,” Lenin wrote in March 1918. “The organs of the proletarian state in realizing this compulsion are to be Soviet courts.”17
