How conscious the Bolsheviks were of these precedents and how aware of the conflict between their pretense at being “scientific” and their appeals to the most primitive craving for idol worship, it is difficult to tell. The chances are that they acted instinctively. If so, their instincts served them well, for these appeals proved much more successful in winning them mass support than all the talk of “socialism,” “class struggle,” and the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” To the people of Russia “dictatorship” and “proletariat” were meaningless foreign words that most of them could not even pronounce. But the tales of the miraculous rise from the dead of the country’s ruler evoked an instant emotional response and created something of a bond between the government and its subjects. This is why the cult of Lenin would never be abandoned, even if, for a time, it would be eclipsed by the state-fostered cult of another deity, Stalin.*
The Bolsheviks had practiced terror from the day they seized power, intensifying it as their power grew and their popularity declined. The arrest of the Kadets in November 1917, followed by the unpunished murder of the Kadet leaders Kokoshkin and Shingarev had been acts of terror, as was the closing of the Constituent Assembly and the shooting of the demonstrators marching in its support. The Red Army troops and Red Guards who in the spring of 1918 dispersed and manhandled, in one city after another, the soviets that had voted the Bolsheviks out of power, perpetrated acts of terror. The executions, mainly carried out by provincial and district Chekas under the mandate given them by Lenin’s decree of February 22, 1918, pushed terror to a still higher level of intensity: the historian S. Melgunov, then residing in Moscow, compiled from the press evidence of 882 executions in the first six months of 1918.73
Early Bolshevik terror, however, was unsystematic, rather like the terror of the Whites later on in the Civil War, and many of its victims were ordinary criminals as well as “speculators.” It began to assume a more systematic political character only in the summer of 1918, when Bolshevik fortunes sank to their lowest. Following the suppression of the Left SR uprising on July 6, the Cheka carried out its first mass executions, the victims of which were members of Savinkov’s secret organization, arrested the previous month, and some participants in the Left SR uprising. The expulsion of the Left SRs from the Cheka Collegium in Moscow removed the last restraints on the political police. In the middle of July, many officers who had taken part in the Iaroslavl uprising were shot. Frightened of military conspiracies, the Cheka now began to hunt down officers of the old army and execute them without trial. According to Melgunov’s records, in the month of July 1918 alone, the Bolshevik authorities, mainly the Cheka, carried out 1,115 executions.74
The murder of the Imperial family and their relatives represented a further escalation of terror. Cheka agents now arrogated to themselves the right to shoot prisoners and suspects at will, although judging by subsequent complaints from Moscow, the provincial authorities did not always make use of their powers.
Notwithstanding this intensification of government terror, Lenin was still dissatisfied. He wanted to involve the “masses” in such action, presumably because pogroms which involved both agents of the government and the people helped bring the two closer together. He kept on badgering Communist officials and the citizenry to act more resolutely and rid themselves of all inhibitions against killings. How else could “class war” turn into reality? As early as January 1918, he complained that the Soviet regime was “too gentle”: he wanted “iron power,” whereas it was “inordinately soft, at every step more like jelly than iron.”75 When told in June 1918 that party officials in Petrograd had restrained workers from carrying out a pogrom to avenge the assassination of Volodarskii, he fired off an indignant letter to his viceroy there. “Comrade Zinoviev!” he wrote:
The Central Committee has learned only today that in Petrograd
