Dzerzhinskii, supported by Lenin, was given to boasting that terror and its instrument, the Cheka, had saved the Revolution. This appraisal is probably correct, as long as “the Revolution” is identified with the Bolshevik dictatorship. There exists solid evidence that by the summer of 1918, when the Bolsheviks launched the terror, they were rejected by all strata of the population except for their own apparatus. Under these circumstances, “merciless terror” was indeed the only way of preserving the regime.
This terror had to be not only “merciless” (can one even conceive of “merciful” terror?) but also indiscriminate. If the opponents of the Bolshevik dictatorship had been an identifiable minority, then one could have targeted them for surgical removal. But in Soviet Russia it was the regime and its supporters that were a minority. To stay in power, the dictatorship had first to atomize society and then destroy in it the very will to act. The Red Terror gave the population to understand that under a regime that felt no hesitation in executing innocents, innocence was no guarantee of survival. The best hope of surviving lay in making oneself as inconspicuous as possible, which meant abandoning any thought of independent public activity, indeed any concern with public affairs, and withdrawing into one’s private world. Once society disintegrated into an agglomeration of human atoms, each fearful of being noticed and concerned exclusively with physical survival, then it ceased to matter what society thought, for the government had the entire sphere of public activity to itself. Only under these conditions could a small minority subjugate millions.
But the price of such a regime was not cheap, either for its victims or for its practitioners. To stay in power against the wishes of the overwhelming majority, the Bolsheviks had to distort that power beyond all recognition. Terror may have saved communism, but it corroded its very soul.
Isaac Steinberg noted with a keen eye the devastating impact of the Red Terror on both the citizens and the authorities. Traveling in a streetcar in 1920, he was struck by an analogy between that packed vehicle and the country at large:
Does not our land resemble today’s streetcars, which drag themselves along Moscow’s dreary streets, worn out and creaking from old age, weighed down with people hanging on to it? How tightly these people are squeezed, how difficult it is to breathe here, as if after an exhausting fight. How hungry is the look in their eyes! See how shamelessly they steal seats from one another, how this mass of humanity, accidentally chained together, seems to lack all sense of mutual sympathy and understanding, how everyone sees in his fellow man only a rival! … Mindless hatred for the streetcar conductor—this expresses the feeling of this casual mass toward the government, the state, the organization. Indifference and irony toward those who crowd at the car’s entrance hoping to get in—this is their attitude toward the community, toward solidarity. When one observes them more intently one realizes that at bottom they are close to one another: the same thought, the same spark shines fraternally in their hostile eyes; the same pain weeps in them all. But now, here, they are pitiless enemies.142
But he also notes the effect of terror on its perpetrators:
When the terror strikes the class enemy, the bourgeois, when it tramples
