Apparently confident of Lenin’s backing, Dzerzhinskii ignored these instructions. On December 19, he arrested the members of the Union for the Defense of the Constituent Assembly. As soon as he learned of Dzerzhinskii’s action, Steinberg countermanded it, ordering the prisoners set free. The dispute was placed on the Sovnarkom’s agenda for that evening. The cabinet sided with Dzerzhinskii and reprimanded Steinberg for releasing Cheka prisoners.45 But Steinberg, undeterred by this defeat, asked the Sovnarkom to regularize relations between the Commissariat of Justice and the Cheka, and presented the Sovnarkom with a draft project, “On the Competence of the Commissariat of Justice.”46 The document forbade the Cheka to carry out political arrests without prior sanction from the Commissariat of Justice. Lenin and the rest of the cabinet approved Steinberg’s proposal, for the Bolsheviks did not want at this time to quarrel with the Left SRs. The resolution adopted required that all orders for arrests “with prominent political significance” carry the countersignature of the Commissar of Justice. Presumably the Cheka could carry out ordinary arrests on its own authority.
But even this limited concession was almost immediately withdrawn. Two days later, probably responding to Dzerzhinskii’s complaints, the Sovnarkom approved a very different resolution. While confirming that the Cheka was an investigatory body, it enjoined the Commissariat of Justice and all other bodies from interfering with its power to arrest important political figures. The Cheka had merely to inform the commissariats of Justice and of the Interior of its actions after the fact. Lenin added a stipulation that persons already under arrest be either turned over to the courts or released.47 The next day, the Cheka arrested the center which directed the strike of white-collar employees in Petrograd.48
As part of the agreement with the Bolsheviks, concluded in December 1917, the Left SRs received the right to have representatives on the Cheka governing board, known as the Collegium. This concession ran contrary to the Bolshevik intention to keep the Cheka 100 percent Bolshevik, but Lenin agreed to it over Dzerzhinskii’s objections. The Sovnarkom appointed a Left SR deputy director of the Cheka and added several members of this party to the Collegium.49 The Left SRs further secured acceptance of the principle that the Cheka would carry out no executions except with the unanimous consent of the Collegium, which gave them a veto over death sentences. On January 31, 1918, the Sovnarkom confirmed, in an unpublished resolution, that the Cheka had exclusively investigatory responsibilities:
The Cheka concentrates in its hands the entire work of intelligence, suppression [
This restriction was abandoned a month later in the decree “The Socialist Fatherland in Danger!”51 The document did not spell out who would “shoot on the spot” counterrevolutionaries and other enemies of the new state, but there could be no doubt that this responsibility devolved on the Cheka. The next day the Cheka confirmed that this was indeed the case by warning the population that “counterrevolutionaries” would be “mercilessly liquidated on the spot.”52 That day, February 23, Dzerzhinskii advised provincial soviets by wire that in view of the prevalence of anti-regime “plots” they should proceed at once to set up their own Chekas, arrest “counterrevolutionaries,” and execute them wherever apprehended.53 The decree thus transformed the Cheka, formally and permanently, from an investigating agency into a full-fledged machine of terror. The transformation was made with Lenin’s concurrence.
In Moscow and Petrograd the Cheka was prevented from executing political offenders by agreements with the Left SRs. As long as the Left SRs worked in the Cheka—that is, until July 6, 1918—no formal political executions took place in either of those cities. The first victim of the February 22 decree was an ordinary criminal who under the alias “Prince Eboli” had impersonated a Chekist.54 In the provinces, however, the organs of the Cheka were not bound by such restrictions and routinely executed citizens for political offenses. The Menshevik Grigorii Aronson recalled, for example, that in the spring of 1918 the Vitebsk Cheka arrested and executed two workers charged with distributing posters of the Council of Workers’ Plenipotentiaries.* How many fell victim of such arbitrary executions will probably never be known.
