The Cheka steadily expanded its military force. In the summer of 1918 its Combat Detachments were formed into an organization separate from the Red Army, designated as Korpus Voisk VChK (Corps of Armies of the AU-Russian Cheka).123 This security force, modeled on the tsarist Corps of Gendarmes, grew into a regular army for the “home front.” In May 1919, on the initiative of Dzerzhinskii in his new capacity as Commissar of the Interior, the government combined all these units into Armies of the Internal Security of the Republic (Voiska Vnutrennei Okhrany Respubliki), placing them under the supervision not of the Commissar of War but of the Commissar of the Interior.124 At this time, this internal army consisted of 120,000–125,000 men. By the middle of 1920, it doubled, totaling nearly a quarter of a million men who protected industrial establishments and transport facilities, helped the Commissariat of Supply obtain food, and guarded forced labor and concentration camps.125
Last but not least, the Cheka formed a bureau of counterintelligence for the armed forces, known as the Osobyi Otdel (Special Department).
By virtue of these functions and the powers which they carried, the Cheka became by 1920 the most powerful institution in Soviet Russia. The foundations of the police state thus were laid while Lenin was in charge and on his initiative.
Among the Cheka’s most important responsibilities was organizing and operating “concentration camps,” an institution which the Bolsheviks did not quite invent but which they gave a novel and most sinister meaning. In its fully developed form, the concentration camp, along with the one-party state and the omnipotent political police, was Bolshevism’s major contribution to the political practices of the twentieth century.
The term “concentration camp” originated at the end of the nineteenth century in connection with colonial wars.* The Spaniards first instituted such camps during the campaign against the Cuban insurrection. Their camps are estimated to have held up to 400,000 inmates. The United States emulated the Spaniards while fighting the Philippine insurrection of 1898; so did Britain during the Boer War. But apart from the name, these early prototypes had little in common with the concentration camps introduced by the Bolsheviks in 1919 and later copied by the Nazis and other totalitarian regimes. The Spanish, American, and British concentration camps were emergency measures adopted during campaigns against colonial guerrillas: their purpose was not punitive but military—namely, the isolation of armed irregulars from the civilian population. Conditions in these early camps admittedly were harsh—as many as 20,000 Boers are said to have perished in British internment. But here there was no deliberate mistreatment: the suffering and deaths were due to the haste with which these camps had been set up, which resulted in inadequate housing, provisioning, and medical care. The inmates of these camps were not made to perform forced labor. In all three cases, the camps were dismantled and the inmates released on the termination of hostilities.
Soviet concentration and forced labor camps (
1. They were permanent: introduced during the Civil War, they did not disappear with the end of hostilities in 1920, but remained in place under various designations, swelling to fantastic proportions in the 1930s, when Soviet Russia was at peace and ostensibly “constructing socialism.”
2. They did not hold foreigners suspected of assisting guerrillas, but Russians and other Soviet citizens suspected of political opposition: their primary mission was not to help subdue militarily a colonial people, but to suppress dissent among the country’s own citizens.
3. Soviet concentration camps performed an important economic function: their inmates had to work where ordered, which meant that they were not only isolated but also exploited as slave labor.
