Responding to this dissatisfaction, the Central Committee on February 4 reviewed Krylenko’s December 1918 proposal. Dzerzhinskii and Stalin were asked to prepare a report. In recommendations presented a few days later, they proposed that the Cheka retain the double power of investigating sedition and suppressing armed rebellion, but that the sentencing for crimes against the state be reserved for Revolutionary Tribunals. An exception to this rule was to be made for areas under martial law, which happened to encompass large stretches of the country: here the Cheka should be allowed to operate as before and retain the right to mete out capital punishment.115 The Central Committee approved this recommendation and forwarded it to the Central Executive Committee (CEC) for endorsement.
At the CEC session of February 17, 1919, Dzerzhinskii delivered the principal report.† During the first fifteen months of its existence, he said, the Soviet regime had had to wage a “pitiless” struggle against organized resistance from all quarters. Now, however, in good measure thanks to the work of the Cheka, “our internal enemies, ex-officers, the bourgeoisie and tsarist bureaucracy, are defeated, dispersed.” Henceforth, the principal threat would come from counterrevolutionaries who had infiltrated the Soviet apparatus in order to carry out “sabotage” from inside. This called for different methods of struggle. The Cheka no longer needed to wage mass terror: henceforth it would furnish the evidence to the Revolutionary Tribunals, which would try and sentence the offenders.
102. Dzerzhinskii and Stalin in a jovial moment.
On the face of it, this marked the end of an era: some contemporaries hailed the reform, which the CEC routinely approved on February 17, as proof that the “proletariat,” having crushed the enemy, no longer needed the weapon of terror.116 But this was no Russian Thermidor: Soviet Russia did not dispense with terror either then or afterward. In 1919, 1920, and the years that followed, the Cheka and its successor, GPU, continued to arrest as well as try, sentence, and execute prisoners and hostages, without reference to the Revolutionary Tribunals. Indeed, as Krylenko explained, this did not matter since “qualitatively” there should have been no difference between the courts and the police.117 His comment was correct in view of the fact, noted above, that as of 1920 judges could sentence defendants without the customary judiciary procedures if their guilt appeared “obvious,” which is exactly what the Cheka did. In October 1919, the Cheka established its own “Special Revolutionary Tribunal.”118 The abortive efforts at reform, nevertheless, deserve to be remembered if only because they show that at least some Bolsheviks had a premonition as early as 1918–19 that the security police threatened not only the enemies of the regime, but also them, its friends.
By 1920, Soviet Russia had become a police state in the sense that the security police, virtually a state within the state, spread its tentacles to all Soviet institutions, including those that managed the economy. In a remarkably short time, the Cheka had transformed itself from an organ responsible for investigating and rendering harmless political dissent into a super-government which not only decided who lived and who died but supervised the day-to-day activities of the entire state apparatus. The development was inevitable. Having laid claim to running the country entirely on its own, the Communist regime had no choice but to engage hundreds of thousands of professionals—“bourgeois specialists” who, by its own definition, were a “class enemy.” As such, they required close supervision. This had to be the responsibility of the Cheka, since it alone had the requisite apparatus—a responsibility that enabled the Cheka to insinuate itself into every facet of Soviet life. In his report of February 1919 to the CEC on the new functions of the Cheka Dzerzhinskii said:
There is no longer any need to make short shrift of mass groupings. Now our enemies have changed the method of combat. Now they are endeavoring to worm themselves into Soviet institutions, so as to sabotage work from within our ranks, until the moment when our external enemies have broken us, and then, seizing the organs and machinery of power, turn them against us…, This struggle, if you will, is more individualistic [
