*A similar phenomenon would be observed in Germany fifteen years later. When the Nazis came to power, members of the SA would often select for beating and torture personal enemies, including judges who had tried them under the Weimar Republic: Andrzej Kaminski, Konzentrationslager 1896 bis heute: eine Analyse (Stuttgart, 1982), 87–88.
*In November 1918 the venerable anarchist theoretician Peter Kropotkin met with Lenin to protest the terror: Lenin, Khronika, VI, 195. In 1920 he wrote an impassioned plea against the “medieval” practice of taking hostages: G. Woodcock and I. Avakumovic, The Anarchist Prince (London-New York, 1950), 426–27.
*An example of such self-pity can be found in the following 1919 statement of a group of Chekists: “Working under … incredibly difficult conditions which demand unyielding will and great inner strength, those employees [of the Cheka] who, despite false slander and the swill which is maliciously poured on their heads, continue their work without blemish,” etc.: V. P. Antonov-Saratovskii, Sovety v epokhu voennogo kommunizma, I (Moscow, 1928), 430–31.
*The Times, September 28, 1918, p. 5a. Petrovskii Park, which served as a major slaughter area, subsequently became the locale of the Dynamo football stadium. It was close to Butyrki Prison, where most of the Moscow Cheka’s prisoners—usually around 2,500—were incarcerated. Another execution field was located on the opposite, eastern end of Moscow, at Semenovskaia Zastava.
*The Cheka, on Dzerzhinskii’s instructions, took few Jewish hostages. This was not out of preference to Jews. One of the purposes in taking hostages was to restrain the Whites from executing captured Communists. Since the Whites were not expected to care about Jewish lives, taking Jews hostage, according to Dzerzhinskii, would serve no useful purpose: M. V. Latsis, Chrezvychainye Kommissii po bor’be’s kontr-revoliutsiei (Moscow, 1921), 54. According to Belerosov (p. 137) this policy was reversed in May 1919, when the Kiev Cheka received orders to “shoot some Jews” “for agitational purposes” and keep them from top positions.
*NChS, No. 9 (1925), 131–32. The Pictorial Archive at the Hoover Institution has a collection of slides, apparently taken by the Whites after capturing Kiev, which shows the local Cheka headquarters and in its garden shallow mass graves containing decomposed naked corpses. In December 1918, the Whites appointed a commission to study Bolshevik crimes in the Ukraine. Its materials were deposited in the Russian Archive in Prague, which the Czech Government, after World War II, turned over to Moscow. There it has been inaccessible to foreign scholars. Some of this commission’s published reports can be found in the Melgunov Archive at the Hoover Institution, Box n, and in the Bakhmeteff Archive, Columbia University, Denikin Papers, Box 24.
*Pravda, No. 229 (October 23, 1918), 1. Much material on the Cheka controversy of this period is filed in the Melgunov Archive, Box 2, Folder 6, Hoover Institution. See further Leggett, Cheka, 121–57.
†On November 7, 1918, addressing a “meeting-concert” of Chekists, Lenin defended the Cheka from its critics. He spoke of its “difficult work” and dismissed complaints about it as “wailing” (vopli). Among the qualities of the Cheka he singled out decisiveness, speed, and, above all, “loyalty” (vernost’ (Lenin, PSS, XXXVII, 173). It will be recalled that the device of Hitler’s SS was: “Unsere Ehre heisst Treue” (“Our honor is called loyalty”).
*Dekrety, III, 529–30. This was a response to the request of the Presidium of the Moscow Soviet in early October that the Cheka do something about the numerous prisoners whom it was holding without charges: Severnaia Kommuna, No. 122 (October 18, 1918), 3.
†It was first published thirty-nine years later in IA, No. 1 (1958), 6–11.
*The best history of this institution is Kaminski’s Konzentrationslager. The subject has been surprisingly neglected by historians.
*The most comprehensive account of Soviet concentration camps is Mikhail Geller’s Kontsen-tratsionnyi mir i sovetskaia literatura (London, 1974), of which there exist German, French, and Polish translations, but not an English one.
†L. D. Trotskii, Kak vooruzhalas’ revoliutsiia, I (Moscow, 1923), 214, 216. According to Geller (Kontsentratsionnyi mir, 73), this is the earliest use of the term in Soviet sources.
