The Russian Revolution полностью

The Cheka was born in virtual secrecy. The decision to create a security force—essentially, a revived tsarist Department of Police and Okhrana—was adopted by the Sovnarkom on December 7, 1917, on the basis of Dzerzhinskii’s report on fighting “sabotage,” by which was meant the strike of white-collar employees.* The Sovnarkom’s resolution was not made public at the time. It first appeared in print in 1924 in a falsified and incomplete version, then again in 1926 in a fuller but still falsified version, and in its full and authentic version only in 1958.³³ In 1917, there was published in the Bolshevik press only a terse, two-sentence announcement that the Sovnarkom had established an “Extraordinary Commission to Fight the Counterrevolution and Sabotage” (Chrezvy-chainaia kommissia po bor’be s kontrrevoliutsiei i sabotazhem), the office of which would be located in Petrograd at Gorokhovaia 2.³⁴ Before the Revolution this building had served as the bureau of the city’s governor as well as of the local branch of the Department of Police. Neither the powers nor the responsibilities of the Cheka were spelled out.

The failure of the Bolshevik Government to make public, at the time of its founding, the functions and powers of the Cheka had dire consequences, because it enabled the Cheka to claim authority which it had not been intended to have. The Cheka’s original mandate, it is now known, modeled on the tsarist security police, charged it with investigating and preventing crimes against the state. It was to have no judiciary powers: the Sovnarkom intended for the Cheka to turn over political suspects to Revolutionary Tribunals for prosecution and sentencing. The pertinent clause of the secret resolution setting up the Cheka read as follows:

The tasks of the [Extraordinary] Commission: (I) to suppress [presek(at’)] and liquidate all attempts and acts of counterrevolution and sabotage throughout Russia, from every quarter; (2) to turn over all saboteurs and counterrevolutionaries to the court of the Revolutionary Tribunal and to work out the means of combating them; (3) the Commission conducts only a preliminary investigation to the extent that this is necessary to bar [counterrevolution and sabotage].³⁵

In the first published versions of this resolution (1924, 1926) one critical word was changed. As is now known, in the manuscript of the resolution the word “to suppress”—“presekat’”—appeared in an abbreviated form as “pre-sek[at’].” In the earliest published versions, this word was altered to read “presledovat’,” which means “to prosecute.”³⁶ The transposition and substitution of a few letters had the effect of giving the Cheka judiciary powers. This forgery, revealed only after Stalin’s death, allowed the Cheka and its successors (GPU, OGPU, and NKVD) to sentence political prisoners, by summary procedures conducted in camera, to a full range of punishments, including death. The Soviet security police was deprived of this right, which had claimed the lives of millions, only in 1956.

The Bolsheviks, who were normally punctilious about bureaucratic proprieties, made a significant exception in the case of the secret police. This institution, which was subsequently credited with saving the regime, had for a long time no legal standing.³⁷ Ignored in the Collection of Laws and Ordinances (Sobranie Uzakonenii i Rasporiazhenii) for 1917–18, it lacked a formal identity. This was deliberate policy. In early 1918, the Cheka forbade any information to be published on it except with its approval.³⁸ The injunction was not strictly observed, but it gives an idea of the Cheka’s conception of itself and its role in society. In this, the Bolsheviks followed the precedent set by Peter the Great, who had established Russia’s first political police, the Preobrazhenskii Prikaz, without a formal ukaz.*