The Cheka announced it would show no more mercy to the long list of enemies. In fact, the new secret police refrained from wholesale bloodletting and focused on ending lawlessness in the streets. We do not know how many people were executed in the first half of 1918, but estimates put the number in the tens or hundreds, and not yet in the thousands.27 Disorder continued in the capital following its bombing by German planes on March 2. The unrest spread after March 10, when the new government ignominiously left Petrograd for Moscow.
Lenin was convinced the German invasion would continue even though Russia had finally signed the Treaty of Brest Litovsk on March 3. This turn of events brought little joy to Russian patriots, because the once-great empire was forced to cede the western part of the country. The Germans took about one-quarter of the population, more than one-quarter of the industry, and even heavier percentages of the most productive agricultural lands and ore deposits. By signing this treaty, the Bolsheviks mobilized not just those who hated the new dictatorship but perhaps even more who despised the national humiliation.28
“SUPREME MEASURE”
In the spring and early summer of 1918, more opposition newspapers were closed and political parties outlawed. Lenin demanded that revolutionary tribunals (which existed from the start of the revolution) now be “mercilessly harsh in dealing with counterrevolutionaries, hooligans, idlers, and anarchists.”29
The death penalty was reinstated in mid-June. Within a week one of the new tribunals used it against Admiral A. M. Shchastny, who thereby became the first counterrevolutionary shot “legally.” Lenin advocated the death penalty not merely because it was “expedient,” as some have suggested, but because he saw it as belonging to heroic deeds and radical change. As he put it at the meeting of Sovnarkom on July 5, “There has not been a single revolution, or era of civil war, without executions.” So any revolutionary “who does not want to be a hypocrite cannot object to capital punishment.”30
The regime showed a passion for renaming everything, and the new label attached to the death penalty was the “supreme measure.” It was officially permitted for “social defense” and used against those defined under the new criminal code as counterrevolutionaries. In a “radiant” workers’ state, where the death penalty could not exist, the only “logical” explanation for its use was that it applied to traitors. By 1936, after years of temporizing, even as it carried out hundreds of thousands of executions, the regime admitted that the “supreme measure” was not only a social defense but also a punishment.31
Lenin had long advocated terror and itched to get started. By mid-1918 he was ranting at comrades he deemed unwilling to shed blood. Commissar Moisei Volodarsky-Goldstein was assassinated, and Lenin upbraided Zinoviev in a stern letter on June 26, because he understood the workers had wanted to use “mass terror” in response but the Party in Petrograd had restrained them. Lenin roared: “This is impossible! The terrorists will take us to be spineless.” That could not be allowed to stand. “It is necessary to applaud the energy and mass character of the terror against counterrevolutionaries, and especially in Petrograd, whose example is decisive.”32
Zinoviev responded belatedly to Lenin’s criticism and favored more bloodletting than ever, stating as follows: “To overcome our enemies we must have our own socialist militarism. We must carry along with us ninety million out of the one hundred million of Soviet Russia’s population. As for the rest, we have nothing to say to them. They must be annihilated.”33
Here was a “moderate” calmly contemplating the murder of millions of his own people whose “crime” was not sharing the dream of Communist utopia. Bloodcurdling statements such as this were rife in those days.
The Cheka purged and arrested the personnel of the old tsarist secret police and made up in brutality and enthusiasm what it lacked in experience. Bolshevik proponents of letting the Cheka run amok included Yakov Sverdlov, Stalin, Trotsky, and particularly Lenin. They defended the Cheka’s ruthless methods. By mid-1918, it was organized in every district and armed with extensive powers to stop counterrevolution and fight class enemies.
Felix Dzerzhinsky said in a June 1918 interview that the Cheka’s mission was “to fight the enemies of Soviet authority and of the new way of life.” These enemies, he continued, were “both our political opponents and all bandits, thieves, speculators, and other criminals who undermine the foundations of the socialist order.”34
In early 1919, just over a year after it was established, Cheka personnel counted around 37,000, and that number grew to a high in mid-1921 of 137, 106, with an additional 94,288 in the frontier troops. Its new title (and broad mission) in mid-1920 was summed up in its long name: the “All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combatting Counterrevolution, Speculation, Sabotage, and Misconduct in Office.”35
Lenin’s style of rule was to take a hands-on approach, especially when it came to the terror. He sent notes and telegrams by the hundreds to leaders in the provinces to apply the most draconian measures. He did not act alone, but was supported by Trotsky, Stalin, and others. In early August 1918, for example, he told officials to take hostages from among the bourgeoisie and to make these people “answer with their lives” if requisitioned grain was not delivered. He ordered the Nizhni Novgorod soviet on August 9 to create a dictatorial troika and “instantly commence mass terror, shoot and transport hundreds of prostitutes who get the soldiers drunk, ex-officers, and so forth. Do not delay.” Anyone found in possession of weapons was to be executed, and unreliable elements were to be deported.36 The same day he instructed the soviet in Penza to put “kulaks, priests, White Guards, and other doubtful elements in a concentration camp.”
He instructed comrades to be hard and heartless, as, for example, in Penza on August 11 when he told them to crush rebellion as follows:
The uprising of the five kulak districts should be mercilessly suppressed. The interests of the entire revolution require this, because “the last decisive battle” with the kulaks is underway everywhere. One must give an example.
Hang (hang without fail, so the people see) no fewer than one hundred known kulaks, rich men, bloodsuckers.
Publish their names.
Take from them all the grain.
Designate hostages—as per yesterday’s telegram.
Do it in such a way that for hundreds of versts [one verst is about one kilometer] around, the people will see, tremble, know, shout: they are strangling and will strangle to death the bloodsucker kulaks. Telegraph receipt and implementation. P.S. Find from truly hard people. 37
Seizing “all the grain” meant that the relatives of those not killed might well starve to death, and that was the point in taking it.
This state-sponsored terror came before the serious attempt on Lenin’s life on August 30, which is usually suggested as the rationalization for the terror. In January 1918 there had been an attempt on Lenin’s life, but he was not wounded. The commands for stifling the kulak uprising, rattled off by Lenin in early August, are worth mentioning as they give the flavor of his language and convey his rage.
His right-hand man during the revolution, Leon Trotsky, shared his views on the need for terror. According to Trotsky, terrorists were an integral part of modern history, and their methods inevitably grew out of intense political conflicts. In a pamphlet published in 1920, he claimed that the Bolsheviks were following the pattern established by the English and American civil wars.38
NEW CRIMINAL CODE
Karl Marx had postulated that ordinary criminals could be corrected through productive labor. Russia’s new leaders adopted that principle, but then extended it to include political criminals. The theory was that the “humane” thing was not to shut criminals in a cell but to rehabilitate them through labor. As early as January 24, 1918, the Commissariat of Justice decreed that “all able-bodied prisoners should work.”39
The underlying principle of the criminal justice system and the prison camps was that criminality was rooted in adverse social condit
ions. Once capitalism was replaced with the perfectly harmonious Socialist system, crime would disappear and there would be no need for prisons or police. In the meantime, however, something had to be done about criminals, and a new criminal code had been drawn up by 1922. “Compulsory work” was to be used to “rehabilitate” offenders.40
The new code dropped the word “punishment.” Slogans in places of detention read: “We are not being punished: we are being corrected.” The Party had declared in 1919 that “labor is the principal method of correction and re-education” of criminals, so the concept of “prison” was now dropped in favor of “places of detention.” They told themselves that within five years all delinquents would be “converted.”41
But criminality increased, partly because of social breakdown, also because the new regime criminalized completely new aspects of social life. Even though Lenin was nearing exhaustion and growing ill, he wanted to be sure that the “substance of terror” was in the new law code. He wrote to Commissar of Justice Dimitri Kursky on May 17, 1922: “The courts must not ban terror—to promise that would be deception or self-deception—but must work out the motives underlying it, legalize it as principle, in straightforward language, without any make-believe or embellishment.” He said the death penalty should be used freely, including against those who only belonged to organizations whose (widely defined) aims were deemed to be the overthrow of the Communist system.42
FIRST CONCENTRATION CAMPS
Concentration camps were not invented by the Communists. Rather, they were established prior to the First World War and in areas involved in colonial wars. The Spanish general Valeriano Weyler y Nicolau, the new governor who landed in Cuba on February 10, 1896, had already decided he would introduce “campos de reconcentración” and use other harsh measures to repress the rebellion there. In a continuation of the Spanish-American War in the Philippines, Americans built similar camps in 1900 to hold rebels opposed to the new “masters.” These “model” camps were copied by the British in South Africa against the Boers from mid-1900 onward. Unlike the relatively modest numbers who died in these hellholes during the Spanish-American War, the camps in Africa held over a hundred thousand women, children, and old people and resulted in more than twenty thousand deaths. The century of the concentration camp was born.43
In the Soviet Union the terms “concentration camps” and “forced-labor camps” (kontsentratsionnye lageri and lageri prinuditel’nykh rabot) were mentioned for the first time in the spring of 1918. Whereas those in Cuba, the Philippines, and South Africa were used against local insurgents, the Soviet camps were designed for their own citizens.
In May 1918, Trotsky said that rebellious Czechs (prisoners of war behind the lines in the east who escaped captivity) who would not lay down their arms would be sent to a camp. On June 4 he ordered camps for them, but on June 26 he went further and suggested to Sovnarkom that concentration camps be introduced for what he called “parasitic elements.” At that time he was trying to create the Red Army and needed the expertise of former tsarist officers. They were reluctant, and to get them to serve, he resorted to threatening them with internment. In some cases he proposed holding their wives and children in camps as hostages. On August 9, as we have seen, Lenin mentioned sending rebels in Penza to concentration camps. Two days later Trotsky spoke of such camps for various categories of people, including counterrevolutionary officers.44
Several assassination attempts on leading Bolsheviks removed the last reservations about unleashing full-blown terror. Fanny Kaplan, the woman who shot but did not kill Lenin, had acted on her own in the name of saving Socialism from such leaders. A front-page newspaper story the next day proclaimed: “We call on all comrades to maintain complete calm and to intensify their work in combating counterrevolutionary elements. The working class will respond to attempts against its leaders with even greater consolidation of its forces, with merciless mass terror against the enemies of the Revolution.”45
“RED TERROR”
Lenin had recovered from his wounds by September 3 and instructed Sovnarkom to form a commission. “It is necessary secretly—and urgently,” he wrote, “to prepare the terror.” This note was the key impulse behind what became the “Red terror.”46
In an article in a Party newspaper on September 3, the deputy head of the Cheka, I. K. Peters, threatened “instant execution” to those found without proper papers, and “anyone who dares to agitate against the Soviet authority will be arrested immediately and confined in a concentration camp. The representatives of the bourgeoisie must come to feel the heavy hand of the working class. All representatives of plundering capital, all marauders and speculators will be set to forced labor and their properties will be confiscated; persons involved in counterrevolutionary plots will be destroyed and crushed by the heavy hammer of the revolutionary proletariat.”47
In the same issue of the paper Stalin called for “open, mass, systematic terror against the bourgeoisie and its agents.” The press also reported that the Cheka had executed over 500 hostages in Petrograd, but the rumor was that the number was 1,300 or more.48 Lenin was involved in mass killings elsewhere at this time. For example, in September 1918, 25 former tsarist ministers and high civil servants were shot out of hand in Moscow. Another 765 so-called White Guards were also killed. Lenin personally signed the execution lists, thereby inventing another tradition that was carried on under Stalin.49 Terror in the form of summary judgment and execution of political enemies or suspects rolled across the country. Dozens were murdered without trial in one place, more somewhere else.
On September 4, the press reprinted a telegram from Commissar of Internal Affairs G. I. Petrovsky. He complained that the terror was still insufficient. Assassination attempts on Bolshevik leaders continued, and there were revolts in Ukraine and among the Don Cossacks. He advocated “mass shootings” of suspects on the slightest provocation and wanted no wavering or indecision “in the application of mass terror.”
On September 5, Petrovsky and Commissar of Justice Kursky signed a Sovnarkom decree that was regarded by the Cheka as the “official” beginning of the Red terror. It stated that the area behind the lines in the civil war had to be protected “by means of terror.” Specifically, “all persons” involved in White (counterrevolutionary) “organizations, plots and insurrections are to be shot.” The names of those executed were to be published. It was “essential to protect the Soviet Republic against its class enemies by isolating these in concentration camps.” So the decree gave the secret police the right to execute suspects on the spot and marked the official birth date of state-sanctioned concentration camps.50
The day after the declaration of the Red terror, the Krasnaja gaseta (Red Journal) reported that the first camp for (five thousand) “class enemies” was to be set up at a former women’s convent in Nizhni Novgorod.51
Relatively few camps were built in 1918, but there were more in the following spring. The political explanation on February 17, 1919, of the need for the camps was provided by a report written by Dzerzhinsky and co-authored by Kamenev and Stalin:
Along with sentencing by courts it is necessary to retain administrative sentencing—namely, the concentration camp. Even today the labor of those under arrest is far from being utilized in public works, and so I recommend that we retain these concentration camps for the exploitation of labor of persons under arrest: gentlemen who live without any occupation [and] those who are incapable of doing work without some compulsion; or, in regard to Soviet institutions, such a measure of punishment ought to be applied for unconscientious attitude toward work, for negligence, for lateness, etc. With this measure we should be able to pull up even our very own workers.52
The camps retained their mixed aims as “schools of work” and labor pools for decades. They were supposed to have an economic role, teach certain social classes that the free ride was over, instruct the lazy, and provide a demonstration effect to society outside the camp.
The first type o
f camp was administered by the Cheka. They were called concentration camps and based on the demand for Red terror. A second type was under the Commissariat for Internal Affairs, or the NKVD (at a later point the initials for the secret police). In fact, the Cheka’s facilities proved inadequate, and they sent thousands to the facilities of the NKVD or the justice system. At the end of 1919 there were 21 camps, and a year later there were 107.53 We have only fragments of the statistics of men and women held in these places. In September 1921 there were 117 camps and just over sixty thousand prisoners in NKVD camps and around fifty thousand in perhaps as many controlled by the Cheka.54
Already by mid-1919 the Cheka had prisons or camps of one kind or another in all regions and major cities of Russia. During 1920 at the Kholmogory camp the Cheka adopted the practice of drowning prisoners in the nearby Dvina River. A “great number” were bound hand and foot and, weighted down with stones around their necks, were thrown overboard from a barge.55
In 1922 the term “concentration camps” was replaced by “forced-labor camps.” But they went by other labels as well. Conditions in Cheka camps led to high mortality rates, and there were “repeated massacres,” so estimations of the total number of prisoners may bear little relation to the reality. Isolated figures suggest that the scale of the killings was enormous. At certain points, prisons were emptied by shooting all the inmates.
PERMANENT CONCENTRATION CAMPS
Lenin firmly supported the idea of camps in the north, and on April 20, 1921, the Politburo under his chairmanship approved the foundation of camps in the region of Ukhta that could hold up to twenty thousand. Ukhta is in the northern taiga area, almost fifteen hundred kilometers by railway from Moscow. Other camps were soon created on Lenin’s watch. Some thought was given to dissolving the camps in 1923. In that year a survey located twenty-three of them even though the civil war had ended.56
Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler Page 7