The first official to say what was on the minds of many rank-and-file Bolsheviks was Olminskii, a member of the Pravda editorial staff. In early October 1918 he accused the Cheka of considering itself to be above the party and the soviets.100 Officials of the Commissariat of the Interior, who were supposed to supervise the provincial administration, expressed displeasure that provincial and uezd Chekas ignored the local soviets. In October 1918, the commissariat sent out an inquiry to the provincial and uezd soviets asking how they envisioned their relationship with the local Chekas. Of the 147 soviets that responded, only 20 were content to have the local Cheka acting independently; the remaining 127 (85 percent) wanted them to operate under their supervision.101 No less annoyed was the Commissariat of Justice, which saw itself eliminated from the process of trying and sentencing political offenders. Its head, N. V. Krylenko, was an enthusiastic proponent of terror, an advocate of executing even innocents, and later a leading prosecutor at Stalin’s show trials. But he quite naturally wanted his commissariat to have a hand in the killings. In December 1918 he presented the party’s Central Committee with a project which called for the Cheka to confine itself to its original function—namely, investigation—and leave to the Commissariat of Justice the task of trying and sentencing.102 For the time being, the Central Committee shelved this proposal.
Criticism of the Cheka continued in the winter of 1918–19. There was widespread revulsion at the publication in the Cheka Weekly, without editorial comment, of a letter from a group of provincial Bolshevik officials expressing anger that Bruce Lockhart, whom the authorities had accused of complicity in the attempt on Lenin’s life, had been released instead of being subjected to the “most refined tortures.”103 Olminskii returned to the fray in February 1919. One of the few prominent Bolsheviks to protest the executions of innocents, he wrote: “One can hold different opinions of the Red Terror. But what now goes on in the provinces is not Red Terror at all, but crime, from beginning to end.”104 Moscow gossip had it that the motto of the Cheka was: “Better execute ten innocent people than spare one who is guilty.”105
The Cheka fought back. The task fell to Dzerzhinskii’s Latvian deputies, Latsis and Peters, for early in October Dzerzhinskii left for a one-month vacation in Switzerland. He had been back on the job for six weeks, supervising the Lenin Days of the Red Terror, when something happened to him. He shaved off his beard and quietly slipped out of Moscow. Traveling by way of Germany to Switzerland, he joined his wife and children, whom he had settled in the Soviet mission in Berne. There exists a photograph of him, taken in October 1918, at the height of the Red Terror, posing in elegant mufti with family on the shores of Lake Lugano.106 His apparent inability to stand the carnage is the best thing known of this grand master of terror: he would never again display such un-Bolshevik weakness.
In responding to the criticism, Cheka spokesmen defended their organization but also counterattacked. They called the critics “armchair” politicians who had no practical experience in combating the counterrevolution and failed to understand the necessity of conceding the Cheka unrestrained freedom of action. Peters charged that behind the anti-Cheka campaign stood “sinister” elements, “hostile to the proletariat and the Revolution,” a hint that criticizing the Cheka could bring charges of treason.107 To those who claimed that by acting independently of the soviets the Cheka violated the Soviet Constitution, the editorial board of the Cheka Weekly responded that the constitution could take effect only “after the bourgeoisie and counterrevolution have been totally crushed.”*
