The Russian Revolution полностью

But the Cheka apologists did not confine themselves to defending their institution: they glorified it as essential to the triumph of “proletarian dictatorship.” Developing Lenin’s theme of “class war” as a conflict that knew no frontiers, they depicted themselves as a counterpart of the Red Army, the sole difference between the two being that whereas the Red Army fought the class enemy outside Soviet boundaries, the Cheka and its armed forces combated him on the “domestic front.” The notion of the Civil War as “war on two fronts” became one of the favorite themes of the Cheka and its supporters: those who served in the Red Army and those who served in the Cheka were said to be comrades-in-arms, fighting, each in his own way, the “international bourgeoisie.”¹⁰⁸ This analogy allowed the Cheka to claim that its license to kill within Soviet territory paralleled the right, indeed the duty, of army personnel to kill on sight enemy soldiers at the front. War was not a court of justice: in the words of Dzerzhinskii (as reported by Radek), innocents died on the home front just as innocents died on the field of battle.¹⁰⁹ It was a position deduced from the premise that politics was warfare. Latsis pushed the analogy to its logical conclusion:

The Extraordinary Commission [Cheka] is not an investigatory commission, nor is it a court or a tribunal. It is an organ of combat, active on the internal front of the Civil War. It does not judge the enemy: it smites him. It does not pardon those on the other side of the barricade but incinerates them.¹¹⁰

This analogy between police terror and military combat ignored, of course, the critical difference between the two—namely, that a soldier fights other armed men at the risk of his life, whereas Cheka personnel killed defenseless men and women at no risk to themselves. The “courage” which the Chekist had to display was not physical or moral courage, but the willingness to stifle his conscience: his “toughness” lay in the ability not to bear suffering but to inflict it. Nevertheless, the Cheka grew very fond of this spurious analogy, with which it sought to rebut criticism and overcome the loathing with which Russians regarded it.

Lenin had to step into the fray. He liked the Cheka and approved of its brutality, but agreed that some of its most egregious abuses had to be curbed, if only to improve its public image. Appalled by the item in the Cheka Weekly demanding the application of torture, he ordered this organ of Latsis’s closed even as he called Latsis an outstanding Communist.† On November 6, 1918, the Cheka was instructed to release all prisoners who had not been charged or against whom charges could not be brought within two weeks. Hostages were also to be let go, except “where needed.”* The measure was hailed by Communist organs as an “amnesty” although it was nothing of the kind, since it applied to individuals who not only had not been tried and sentenced but had not even been charged. These rules remained a dead letter: in 1919 Cheka jails continued to overflow with prisoners incarcerated for no stated reason, many of them hostages.

Toward the end of October 1918, the government moved halfheartedly to limit the Cheka’s independence by bringing it into a closer relationship with other state institutions. The Moscow headquarters of the Cheka was ordered to admit representatives of the commissariats of Justice and of the Interior; provincial soviets were authorized to appoint and dismiss local Cheka officials.¹¹¹ The only meaningful curtailment of police abuses, however, was the dissolution, on January 7, 1919, of the Chekas in the uezdy, the smallest administrative entities, which had acquired notoriety for committing the worst atrocities and engaging in large-scale extortion.¹¹²

The authorities were finally shaken from their complacency by signs of disaffection in the Moscow Committee of the Party, whose meeting on January 23, 1919, heard strong protests against the uncontrolled operations of the Cheka. A motion was introduced to abolish the Cheka: it was defeated as “bourgeois,” but a point had been made.¹¹³ A week later, the same committee, the country’s most important, voted with a plurality of 4 to 1 to deprive the Cheka of the right to act as tribunal and to limit it to its original function of an investigatory body.¹¹⁴