The Russian Revolution полностью

The Cheka began with a small staff of officials and some military units. In March it moved with the rest of the government to Moscow, where it took over the spacious quarters of the Iakor Insurance Company on Bolshaia Lubianka 11. At the time it claimed to have only 120 employees, although some scholars estimate the true figure to have been closer to 600.³⁹ The Chekist Peters conceded that the Cheka had difficulty recruiting personnel because Russians, with the tsarist police fresh in mind, reacted “sentimentally,” and unable to distinguish persecution by the old regime from that of the new, refused to join.⁴⁰ * As a consequence, a high proportion of Cheka functionaries were non-Russians. Dzerzhinskii was a Pole, and many of his closest associates were Latvians, Armenians, and Jews. The guards the Cheka used to protect Communist officials and important prisoners were recruited exclusively from the Latvian Rifles because Latvians were considered more brutal and less susceptible to bribery. Lenin strongly favored this reliance on foreigners. Steinberg recalls his “fear” of the Russian national character. He thought that Russians lacked firmness: “ ‘Soft, too soft is the Russian,’ he would say, ‘He is incapable of applying the harsh measures of revolutionary terror.’ ”⁴¹

Employing foreigners had the additional advantage that they were less likely to be bound to their potential victims by ties of kinship or inhibited by opprobrium of the Russian community. Dzerzhinskii, for one, had grown up in an atmosphere of intense Polish nationalism: as a youth he wanted to “exterminate all Muscovites” for the suffering they had inflicted on his people.† The Latvians looked on Russians with contempt. During his brief internment by the Cheka in September 1918, Bruce Lockhart heard from his Latvian guards that Russians were “lazy and dirty” and in battle always “let them down.”⁴² Lenin’s reliance on foreign elements to terrorize the Russian population recalled the practice of Ivan the Terrible, who had also filled his terror apparatus, the Oprichnina, with foreigners, mostly Germans.

To remove some of the odium which attached to the political police in a socialist country, the Bolsheviks combined the Cheka’s primary mission, which was political, with the task of fighting ordinary crime. Soviet Russia was in the grip of murders, lootings, and robberies, which the citizens desperately wanted to stop. To make the new political police more acceptable, the regime also assigned the Cheka responsibility for eradicating ordinary crimes, including banditry and “speculation.” In an interview with a Menshevik daily in June 1918, Dzerzhinskii laid stress on the Cheka’s twin missions:

[The task of the Cheka] is to fight the enemies of Soviet authority and of the new way of life. Such enemies are both our political opponents and all bandits, thieves, speculators, and other criminals who undermine the foundations of the socialist order.⁴³

Bridling at the limitations which its mandate imposed, the Cheka sought unrestricted freedom to deal with political undesirables. This led to a conflict with the Commissariat of Justice.

From the day of its foundation, the Cheka arrested on its own authority persons suspected of engaging in “counterrevolution” and “speculation.” The prisoners were delivered under guard to Smolnyi. This procedure did not suit Commissar of Justice Steinberg, a twenty-nine-year-old Jewish lawyer who had received his degree in Germany with a dissertation on the Talmudic concept of justice. On December 15 he issued a resolution forbidding further delivery of arrested citizens either to Smolnyi or to the Revolutionary Tribunal without prior approval of the Commissariat of Justice. Prisoners in the Cheka’s custody were to be released.⁴⁴