The Russian Revolution полностью

At the end of 1920, Soviet Russia had eighty-four concentration camps with approximately 50,000 prisoners; three years later (October 1923), the number had increased to 315 camps with 70,000 inmates.¹³³

Information on conditions in the early Soviet concentration camps is sparse and few scholars have shown an interest in the subject.¹³⁴ The occasional testimonies smuggled out by inmates or provided by survivors paint a picture that to the smallest detail resembles descriptions of Nazi camps: so much so that were it not that they had been published two decades earlier, one might suspect them to be recent forgeries. In 1922, Socialist-Revolutionary émigrés brought out in Germany, under the editorship of Victor Chernov, a volume of reports by survivors of Soviet prisons and camps. Included was a description of life in a concentration camp at Kholmogory, near Archangel, written in early 1921 by an anonymous female prisoner. The camp had four compounds holding 1,200 inmates. The prisoners were housed in an expropriated cloister whose accommodations were relatively comfortable and well heated. The author describes it nevertheless as a “death camp.” Hunger was endemic: food packages, some sent by American relief organizations, were immediately confiscated. The commandant, who bore a Latvian name, had prisoners shot for the most trifling offenses: if a prisoner, while working in the fields, dared to eat a vegetable that he had dug up, he was killed on the spot and then reported as having tried to escape. The flight of a prisoner automatically led to the execution of nine others, bound to him by “collective responsibility,” as provided for by law; a recaptured escapee was killed as well, sometimes by being buried alive. The administration regarded the inmates as ciphers, whose survival or death was a matter of no consequence.¹³⁵

Thus came into existence a central institution of the totalitarian regime:

Trotsky and Lenin were the inventors and the creators of the new form of the concentration camp. [This means not only] that they created establishments called “concentration camps.” … The leaders of Soviet communism also created a specific method of legal reasoning, a network of concepts that implicitly incorporated a gigantic system of concentration camps, which Stalin merely organized technically and developed. Compared with the concentration camps of Trotsky and Lenin, the Stalinist ones represented merely a gigantic form of implementation [Ausfiihrungsbestimmung]. And, of course, the Nazis found in the former as well as the latter ready-made models, which they merely had to develop. The German counterparts promptly seized upon these models. On March 13, 1921, the then hardly known Adolf Hitler wrote in the Völkischer Beobachter: “One prevents the Jewish corruption of our people, if necessary, by confining its instigators to concentration camps.” On December 8 of that year, in a speech to the National Club in Berlin, Hitler expressed his intention of creating concentration camps upon taking power.¹³⁶

The Red Terror had many aspects, but the historian’s first and foremost concern must be with its victims. Their number cannot be determined, and it is unlikely that it ever will be, for it is almost certain that Lenin ordered the Cheka archives destroyed.¹³⁷ The closest to an official Soviet figure for the number executed between 1918 and 1920, furnished by Latsis, is 12,733. This figure, however, has been challenged as a vast underestimation on the grounds that, according to Latsis’s own admission, in the twenty provinces of central Russia in a single year (1918) there were 6,300 executions, 4,520 of whose victims had been shot for counterrevolutionary activity.¹³⁸ Latsis’s figures are entirely disproportionate to the statistics available for some of the major cities. Thus, William Henry Chamberlin had seen at the Prague Russian Archive (now in Moscow) a report of the Ukrainian Cheka for the year 1920—by which time the death penalty had been formally abolished—listing 3,879 executions, 1,418 of them in Odessa and 538 in Kiev.¹³⁹ Inquiries into Bolshevik atrocities in Tsaritsyn came up with an estimate of 3,000 to 5,000 victims.¹⁴⁰ According to Izvestiia, between May 22 and June 22, 1920, the Revolutionary Tribunals alone—that is, without Cheka victims being taken into account—condemned to death 600 citizens, including 35 for “counterrevolution,” 6 for spying, and 33 for dereliction of duty.* Using such figures, Chamberlin estimates a total of 50,000 victims of the Red Terror, and Leggett, 140,000.¹⁴¹ All one can say with any assurance is that if the victims of Jacobin terror numbered in the thousands, Lenin’s terror claimed tens if not hundreds of thousands of lives. Victims of the next wave of terror, launched by Stalin and Hitler, would be counted in the millions.

To what purpose this carnage?