The Russian Revolution полностью

Two months later, Lenin instructed the authorities in Nizhnii Novgorod to “introduce at once mass terror, execute and deport hundreds of prostitutes, drunken soldiers, ex-officers, etc.”⁷⁷ These terribly imprecise three letters—“etc.”—gave agents of the regime a free hand in selecting their victims: it was to be carnage for the sake of carnage as an expression of the indomitable “revolutionary will” of the regime, which was fast losing ground under its feet.

Terror spread to the countryside in connection with the government’s declaration of war on the village. We have cited Lenin’s exhortations to the workers to kill “kulaks.” It is impossible to form even an approximate notion of the number of peasants who perished in the summer and fall of 1918 trying to save their grain from food detachments: given that the victims on the government side ran into the thousands, they were unlikely to have been smaller.

Lenin’s associates now vied with each other in using language of explicit brutality to incite the population to murder and to make murder committed for the cause of the Revolution appear noble and uplifting. Trotsky, for instance, on one occasion warned that if any of the ex-tsarist officers whom he drafted into the Red Army behaved treasonably, “nothing will remain of them but a wet spot.”⁷⁸ The Chekist Latsis declared that the “law of the Civil War [was] to slaughter all the wounded” fighting against the Soviet regime: “It is a life-and-death struggle. If you do not kill, you will be killed. Therefore kill that you may not be killed.”⁷⁹

No such exhortation to mass murder was heard either in the French Revolution or on the White side. The Bolsheviks deliberately sought to brutalize their citizens, to make them look on some of their fellow citizens just as frontline soldiers look on those wearing enemy uniforms: as abstractions rather than human beings.

This murderous psychosis had already attained a high pitch of intensity by the time bullets struck down Uritskii and Lenin. These two terrorist acts—as it turned out, unrelated, but at the time seen as part of an organized plot—unleashed the Red Terror in its formal sense. The majority of its victims were hostages chosen at random, mainly because of their social background, wealth, or connections with the old regime. The Bolsheviks considered these massacres necessary not only to suppress concrete threats to their regime but also to intimidate the citizens and force them into psychic submission.

The Red Terror was formally inaugurated with two decrees, issued on September 4 and 5, over the signatures of the commissars of the Interior and of Justice.

The first instituted the practice of taking hostages.* It was a barbarian measure, a reversion to the darkest of ages, which international tribunals after World War II would declare a war crime. The Cheka hostages were to be executed in reprisal for future attacks on Bolshevik leaders or any other active opposition to Bolshevik rule. In fact, they were lined up before firing squads around the clock. The official sanction for these massacres was given in the “Order Concerning Hostages” signed by Grigorii Petrovskii, the Commissar of the Interior, on September 4, 1918, one day before the Red Terror decree, and cabled to all provincial soviets:

The killing of Volodarskii, the killing of Uritskii, the attempt to kill and the wounding of the chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, Vladimir Ilich LENIN, the mass executions of tens of thousands of our comrades in Finland, in the Ukraine, on the Don, and in [areas controlled by] the Czechoslovaks, the continuous discovery of conspiracies in the rear of our armies, the open admission by Right SRs and other counterrevolutionary scum [of their involvement] in these conspiracies, and, at the same time, the exceedingly insignificant number of serious repressions and mass executions of White Guardists and bourgeois by the soviets, show that, notwithstanding the constant talk of mass terror against the SRs, White Guardists, and bourgeoisie, the terror, in fact, does not exist.

This situation must be decisively ended. An immediate stop must be put to slackness and pampering. All Right SRs known to local soviets must be immediately arrested. It is necessary to take from among the bourgeoisie and officers numerous hostages. In the event of the least attempts at resistance or the least stir in White Guard circles, resort must be had at once to mass executions. Executive Committees of local provincial soviets ought to display in this regard particular initiative.

Administrative offices, using the militia and Chekas, must take all measures to identify and arrest all those who hide behind false names. All persons involved in White Guard work are subject to mandatory execution.

All indicated measures are to be carried out immediately.