It is difficult to convey the vehemence with which Communist leaders at this time called for the spilling of blood. It was as if they vied to prove themselves less “soft,” less “bourgeois” than the next man. The Stalinist and Nazi holocausts were carried out with much greater decorum. Stalin’s “kulaks” and political undesirables, sentenced to die from hunger and exhaustion, would be sent to “correction camps,” while Hitler’s Jews, en route to gas chambers, would be “evacuated” or “relocated.” The early Bolshevik terror, by contrast, was carried out in the open. Here there was no flinching, no resort to euphemisms, for this nationwide Grand Guignol was meant to serve “educational” purposes by having everyone—rulers as well as ruled—bear responsibility and hence develop an equal interest in the regime’s survival.
Here is Zinoviev addressing a gathering of Communists two weeks after the launching of the Red Terror: “We must carry along with us 90 million out of the 100 million of Soviet Russia’s inhabitants. As for the rest, we have nothing to say to them. They must be annihilated.”87 These words, by one of the highest Soviet officials, was a sentence of death on 10 million human beings. And here is the organ of the Red Army inciting the populace to pogroms:
Without mercy, without sparing, we will kill our enemies by the scores of hundreds, let them be thousands, let them drown themselves in their own blood. For the blood of Lenin and Uritskii … let there be floods of blood of the bourgeoisie—more blood, as much as possible.88
Karl Radek applauded these massacres, referring to the guiltless victims of the terror as persons who did “not participate directly in the White movement.” He spoke of their punishment as self-evident: “It is understood that for every Soviet worker, for every leader of the worker revolution who falls at the hands of agents of the counterrevolution, the latter will pay with tens of heads.” His only complaint was that the public was still insufficiently involved:
Five hostages taken from the bourgeoisie, executed on the basis of a public sentence announced by the plenum of the local soviet of workers, peasants, and Red Army deputies, in the presence of thousands of workers who approve of this act, is a more powerful act of mass terror than the execution of 500 persons by decision of the Cheka without the participation of the working masses.89
Such was the moral climate of the time that, according to one prisoner of the Cheka, Radek’s article calling for “participatory terror” was hailed by prison inmates, many of them hostages, as a humanitarian gesture.90
Not one of the leaders of the Bolshevik Party and Government, including those later eulogized as the “conscience of the Revolution,” objected publicly to these atrocities, let alone resigned in protest. Indeed, they gave them support: thus, on the Friday following the shooting of Lenin, the top Bolshevik leaders fanned out over Moscow to defend the government’s policies. Such expressions of concern and disgust at the carnage and such attempts to save human lives as were made came from Bolsheviks of the second rank, among them M. S. Olminskii, D. B. Riazanov, and E. M. Iaroslavskii, who had little influence on the course of events.*
