The outside world heard muffled reverberations of the Bolshevik terror from newspaper accounts, reports of visitors, and Russian refugees. Some reacted with revulsion, a few with sympathy: but the prevalent response was one of indifference. Europe preferred not to know. It had just emerged from a war that had claimed millions of lives. It desperately wanted to return to normalcy; it felt incapable of absorbing still more stories of mass death. So it lent a willing ear to those who assured it, sometimes sincerely, sometimes deceptively, that things in Red Russia were not as bad as depicted, that the terror was over, and that, in any event, it had no bearing on its own destiny. It was, after all, the exotic, cruel Russia of Ivan the Terrible, Dostoevsky’s “underground men,” and Rasputin.
It was easy to be misled. The Soviet disinformation machine minimized the casualties of the terror and magnified its alleged provocations. It was especially effective with well-meaning foreign visitors, such as the rich American dilettante William Bullitt, who breezed through Soviet Russia in February 1919 on a mission for President Wilson. On his return, he informed the U.S. Congress that the tales of bloody terror had been wildly exaggerated. “The red terror is over,” he assured his listeners, stating that the Cheka had executed in all of Russia “only” 5,000 people. “Executions are extremely rare.”* Lincoln Steffens reported on his visit to Soviet Russia that “the Bolshevik leaders regret and are ashamed of their red terror.”144
Although Bullitt and Steffens minimized the terror, at least they admitted it. But what is one to make of a “witness” like Pierre Pascal, a young French ex-officer posted in Russia turned Communist, later a professor at the Sorbonne, who denied it and mocked its victims? “The terror is finished,” he wrote in February 1920:
To tell the truth, it never existed. This word “terror,” which for a Frenchman corresponds to a precise idea, has always made me laugh here, on seeing the moderation, the sweetness, the good nature of this terrible Extraordinary Commission [Cheka] charged with its enforcement.145
Others yet found consolation in the thought that if one kind of terror ravaged Soviet Russia, then another kind, said to be no less dreadful, afflicted Western Europe and the United States. In 1925, a group calling itself the International Committee for Political Prisoners published a collection of smuggled testimonies from prisoners in Soviet jails and camps. No one questioned their authenticity. Yet when the editor, Isaac Don Levine, asked some of the world’s leading intellectuals what they thought of this appalling evidence, the responses ranged from mildly shocked to snide and cynical. Few saw the significance of this material, as did Albert Einstein, in the “tragedy of human history in which one murders for fear of being murdered.” Romain Rolland, the author of
*Compare this with Heinrich Himmler’s exhortation to the SS in a 1943 speech in Poznan: “Whether during the construction of a tank trap 10,000 Russian women die of exhaustion or not interests me only insofar as the tank trap for Germany has been constructed.… When someone comes to me and says: ‘I cannot build tank traps with women and children, that is inhuman, they will die,’ I shall say to him: ‘You are the murderer of your own blood, because if the tank trap is not built, German soldiers shall die.’ ”
*By 1919–20, Lenin had many socialists in jail. When Fritz Platten, his Swiss friend, protested that surely they were not counterrevolutionaries, Lenin responded: “Of course not.… But that’s exactly why they are dangerous—just because they are honest revolutionists. What can one do?”: Isaac Steinberg,
*I. Steinberg,
*Steinberg,
