The Russian Revolution

by Richard Pipes

  With the expulsion of other parties from Soviet institutions, first the Mensheviks and SRs and then the Left SRs, the Revolutionary Tribunals turned into tribunals of the Bolshevik Party thinly disguised as public courts. In 1918, 90 percent of their staff were members of the Bolshevik Party.25 To be appointed a judge on a Revolutionary Tribunal one needed no formal qualifications other than the ability to read and write. According to contemporary statistics, 60 percent of the judges on these tribunals had less than secondary schooling.26 Steinberg writes, however, that some of the worst offenders were not such semi-educated proletarians but intellectuals who used the tribunals to pursue personal vendettas and who were not above taking bribes from families of the accused.27

  Those living under Bolshevik rule found themselves in a situation for which there was no historic precedent. There were courts for ordinary crimes and for crimes against the state, but no laws to guide them; citizens were sentenced by judges lacking in professional qualifications for crimes which were nowhere defined. The principles nullum crimen sine lege and nulla poena sine lege—no crime without a law and no punishment without a law—which had traditionally guided Western jurisprudence (and Russia’s since 1864), went overboard as so much useless ballast. The situation struck contemporaries as unusual in the extreme. One observer noted in April 1918 that in the preceding five months no one had been sentenced for looting, robbery, or murder, except by execution squads and lynching mobs. He wondered where all the criminals had disappeared to, given that the old courts had had to work around the clock.28 The answer, of course, was that Russia had been turned into a lawless society. In April 1918, the novelist Leonid Andreev described what this meant for the average citizen:

  We live in unusual conditions, still comprehensible to a biologist who studies the life of molds and fungi, but inadmissible for the psycho-sociologist. There is no law, there is no authority, the entire social order is defenseless.… Who protects us? Why are we still alive, unrobbed, not evicted from our homes? The old authority is gone; a band of unknown Red Guards occupies the neighborhood railroad station, learns how to shoot … carries out searches for food and weapons, and issues “permits” for travel to the city. There is no telephone and no telegraph. Who protects us? What remains of reason? Chance that no one has noticed us.… Finally, some general human cultural experiences, sometimes simple, unconscious habits: walking on the right side of the road, saying “good day” on meeting someone, tipping one’s own hat, not the other person’s. The music has long stopped, and we, like dancers, continue rhythmically to shuffle our feet and sway to the inaudible melody of law.

  29

  To Lenin’s disappointment, the Revolutionary Tribunals did not turn into instruments of terror. The judges worked lackadaisically and passed mild sentences. One newspaper noted in April 1918 that they had done little more than shut down a few newspapers and sentence a few “bourgeois.”30 Even after being empowered to do so, they were reluctant to pass sentences of death. In the course of 1918, a year which included the official Red Terror, the Revolutionary Tribunals tried 4,483 defendants, one-third of whom it sentenced to hard labor, another third to the payment of fines, and only fourteen to death.31

  This is not what Lenin intended. The judges, who in time were almost exclusively members of the Bolshevik Party, were urged to pass extreme sentences and given ever wider discretion to do so. In March 1920, the tribunals

  received the authority to refuse to call and interrogate witnesses if their testimony during the preliminary inquest was clear, as well as the authority to stop at any moment the judiciary proceeding if [they] determined that the circumstances of the case had been adequately clarified. Tribunals had the authority to refuse the plaintiff and the defendant the right to appear and plead.

  32

  These measures returned Russian judiciary procedures to the practices of the seventeenth century.

  But even thus streamlined, the Revolutionary Tribunals proved too slow and too cumbersome to satisfy Lenin’s quest for rule “unrestricted by any laws.” Hence, he increasingly came to rely on the Cheka, which he endowed with the license to kill without having to follow even the most perfunctory procedures.

  The Cheka was born in virtual secrecy. The decision to create a security force—essentially, a revived tsarist Department of Police and Okhrana—was adopted by the Sovnarkom on December 7, 1917, on the basis of Dzerzhinskii’s report on fighting “sabotage,” by which was meant the strike of white-collar employees.* The Sovnarkom’s resolution was not made public at the time. It first appeared in print in 1924 in a falsified and incomplete version, then again in 1926 in a fuller but still falsified version, and in its full and authentic version only in 1958.33 In 1917, there was published in the Bolshevik press only a terse, two-sentence announcement that the Sovnarkom had established an “Extraordinary Commission to Fight the Counterrevolution and Sabotage” (Chrezvy-chainaia kommissia po bor’be s kontrrevoliutsiei i sabotazhem), the office of which would be located in Petrograd at Gorokhovaia 2.34 Before the Revolution this building had served as the bureau of the city’s governor as well as of the local branch of the Department of Police. Neither the powers nor the responsibilities of the Cheka were spelled out.

  The failure of the Bolshevik Government to make public, at the time of its founding, the functions and powers of the Cheka had dire consequences, because it enabled the Cheka to claim authority which it had not been intended to have. The Cheka’s original mandate, it is now known, modeled on the tsarist security police, charged it with investigating and preventing crimes against the state. It was to have no judiciary powers: the Sovnarkom intended for the Cheka to turn over political suspects to Revolutionary Tribunals for prosecution and sentencing. The pertinent clause of the secret resolution setting up the Cheka read as follows:

  The tasks of the [Extraordinary] Commission: (

  I

  ) to suppress [

  presek(at’

  )] and liquidate all attempts and acts of counterrevolution and sabotage throughout Russia, from every quarter; (2) to turn over all saboteurs and counterrevolutionaries to the court of the Revolutionary Tribunal and to work out the means of combating them; (3) the Commission conducts only a preliminary investigation to the extent that this is necessary to bar [counterrevolution and sabotage].

  35

  In the first published versions of this resolution (1924, 1926) one critical word was changed. As is now known, in the manuscript of the resolution the word “to suppress”—“presekat’”—appeared in an abbreviated form as “pre-sek[at’].” In the earliest published versions, this word was altered to read “presledovat’,” which means “to prosecute.”36 The transposition and substitution of a few letters had the effect of giving the Cheka judiciary powers. This forgery, revealed only after Stalin’s death, allowed the Cheka and its successors (GPU, OGPU, and NKVD) to sentence political prisoners, by summary procedures conducted in camera, to a full range of punishments, including death. The Soviet security police was deprived of this right, which had claimed the lives of millions, only in 1956.

  The Bolsheviks, who were normally punctilious about bureaucratic proprieties, made a significant exception in the case of the secret police. This institution, which was subsequently credited with saving the regime, had for a long time no legal standing.37 Ignored in the Collection of Laws and Ordinances (Sobranie Uzakonenii i Rasporiazhenii) for 1917–18, it lacked a formal identity. This was deliberate policy. In early 1918, the Cheka forbade any information to be published on it except with its approval.38 The injunction was not strictly observed, but it gives an idea of the Cheka’s conception of itself and its role in society. In this, the Bolsheviks followed the precedent set by Peter the Great, who had established Russia’s first political police, the Preobrazhenskii Prikaz, without a formal ukaz.*

  The Cheka began with a small staff of officials and some military units. In March it moved with the rest of the government to Moscow, where it took over the spacious
quarters of the Iakor Insurance Company on Bolshaia Lubianka 11. At the time it claimed to have only 120 employees, although some scholars estimate the true figure to have been closer to 600.39 The Chekist Peters conceded that the Cheka had difficulty recruiting personnel because Russians, with the tsarist police fresh in mind, reacted “sentimentally,” and unable to distinguish persecution by the old regime from that of the new, refused to join.40* As a consequence, a high proportion of Cheka functionaries were non-Russians. Dzerzhinskii was a Pole, and many of his closest associates were Latvians, Armenians, and Jews. The guards the Cheka used to protect Communist officials and important prisoners were recruited exclusively from the Latvian Rifles because Latvians were considered more brutal and less susceptible to bribery. Lenin strongly favored this reliance on foreigners. Steinberg recalls his “fear” of the Russian national character. He thought that Russians lacked firmness: “ ‘Soft, too soft is the Russian,’ he would say, ‘He is incapable of applying the harsh measures of revolutionary terror.’ ”41

  Employing foreigners had the additional advantage that they were less likely to be bound to their potential victims by ties of kinship or inhibited by opprobrium of the Russian community. Dzerzhinskii, for one, had grown up in an atmosphere of intense Polish nationalism: as a youth he wanted to “exterminate all Muscovites” for the suffering they had inflicted on his people.† The Latvians looked on Russians with contempt. During his brief internment by the Cheka in September 1918, Bruce Lockhart heard from his Latvian guards that Russians were “lazy and dirty” and in battle always “let them down.”42 Lenin’s reliance on foreign elements to terrorize the Russian population recalled the practice of Ivan the Terrible, who had also filled his terror apparatus, the Oprichnina, with foreigners, mostly Germans.

  To remove some of the odium which attached to the political police in a socialist country, the Bolsheviks combined the Cheka’s primary mission, which was political, with the task of fighting ordinary crime. Soviet Russia was in the grip of murders, lootings, and robberies, which the citizens desperately wanted to stop. To make the new political police more acceptable, the regime also assigned the Cheka responsibility for eradicating ordinary crimes, including banditry and “speculation.” In an interview with a Menshevik daily in June 1918, Dzerzhinskii laid stress on the Cheka’s twin missions:

  [The task of the Cheka] is to fight the enemies of Soviet authority and of the new way of life. Such enemies are both our political opponents and all bandits, thieves, speculators, and other criminals who undermine the foundations of the socialist order.

  43

  Bridling at the limitations which its mandate imposed, the Cheka sought unrestricted freedom to deal with political undesirables. This led to a conflict with the Commissariat of Justice.

  From the day of its foundation, the Cheka arrested on its own authority persons suspected of engaging in “counterrevolution” and “speculation.” The prisoners were delivered under guard to Smolnyi. This procedure did not suit Commissar of Justice Steinberg, a twenty-nine-year-old Jewish lawyer who had received his degree in Germany with a dissertation on the Talmudic concept of justice. On December 15 he issued a resolution forbidding further delivery of arrested citizens either to Smolnyi or to the Revolutionary Tribunal without prior approval of the Commissariat of Justice. Prisoners in the Cheka’s custody were to be released.44

  Apparently confident of Lenin’s backing, Dzerzhinskii ignored these instructions. On December 19, he arrested the members of the Union for the Defense of the Constituent Assembly. As soon as he learned of Dzerzhinskii’s action, Steinberg countermanded it, ordering the prisoners set free. The dispute was placed on the Sovnarkom’s agenda for that evening. The cabinet sided with Dzerzhinskii and reprimanded Steinberg for releasing Cheka prisoners.45 But Steinberg, undeterred by this defeat, asked the Sovnarkom to regularize relations between the Commissariat of Justice and the Cheka, and presented the Sovnarkom with a draft project, “On the Competence of the Commissariat of Justice.”46 The document forbade the Cheka to carry out political arrests without prior sanction from the Commissariat of Justice. Lenin and the rest of the cabinet approved Steinberg’s proposal, for the Bolsheviks did not want at this time to quarrel with the Left SRs. The resolution adopted required that all orders for arrests “with prominent political significance” carry the countersignature of the Commissar of Justice. Presumably the Cheka could carry out ordinary arrests on its own authority.

  But even this limited concession was almost immediately withdrawn. Two days later, probably responding to Dzerzhinskii’s complaints, the Sovnarkom approved a very different resolution. While confirming that the Cheka was an investigatory body, it enjoined the Commissariat of Justice and all other bodies from interfering with its power to arrest important political figures. The Cheka had merely to inform the commissariats of Justice and of the Interior of its actions after the fact. Lenin added a stipulation that persons already under arrest be either turned over to the courts or released.47 The next day, the Cheka arrested the center which directed the strike of white-collar employees in Petrograd.48

  As part of the agreement with the Bolsheviks, concluded in December 1917, the Left SRs received the right to have representatives on the Cheka governing board, known as the Collegium. This concession ran contrary to the Bolshevik intention to keep the Cheka 100 percent Bolshevik, but Lenin agreed to it over Dzerzhinskii’s objections. The Sovnarkom appointed a Left SR deputy director of the Cheka and added several members of this party to the Collegium.49 The Left SRs further secured acceptance of the principle that the Cheka would carry out no executions except with the unanimous consent of the Collegium, which gave them a veto over death sentences. On January 31, 1918, the Sovnarkom confirmed, in an unpublished resolution, that the Cheka had exclusively investigatory responsibilities:

  The Cheka concentrates in its hands the entire work of intelligence, suppression [

  presechenie

  ] and prevention of crimes, but the entire subsequent conduct of the investigation and the presentation of the case to the court is entrusted to the Investigatory Commission of the [Revolutionary] Tribunal.

  50

  This restriction was abandoned a month later in the decree “The Socialist Fatherland in Danger!”51 The document did not spell out who would “shoot on the spot” counterrevolutionaries and other enemies of the new state, but there could be no doubt that this responsibility devolved on the Cheka. The next day the Cheka confirmed that this was indeed the case by warning the population that “counterrevolutionaries” would be “mercilessly liquidated on the spot.”52 That day, February 23, Dzerzhinskii advised provincial soviets by wire that in view of the prevalence of anti-regime “plots” they should proceed at once to set up their own Chekas, arrest “counterrevolutionaries,” and execute them wherever apprehended.53 The decree thus transformed the Cheka, formally and permanently, from an investigating agency into a full-fledged machine of terror. The transformation was made with Lenin’s concurrence.

  In Moscow and Petrograd the Cheka was prevented from executing political offenders by agreements with the Left SRs. As long as the Left SRs worked in the Cheka—that is, until July 6, 1918—no formal political executions took place in either of those cities. The first victim of the February 22 decree was an ordinary criminal who under the alias “Prince Eboli” had impersonated a Chekist.54 In the provinces, however, the organs of the Cheka were not bound by such restrictions and routinely executed citizens for political offenses. The Menshevik Grigorii Aronson recalled, for example, that in the spring of 1918 the Vitebsk Cheka arrested and executed two workers charged with distributing posters of the Council of Workers’ Plenipotentiaries.* How many fell victim of such arbitrary executions will probably never be known.

  Emulating the Corps of Gendarmes of the tsarist security system, the Cheka acquired an armed force. The first military unit to come under its control was a small Finnish detachment. Other units were added, and at the end of April 1918 the
Cheka had a Boevoi Otriad (Combat Detachment) of six companies of infantry, fifty cavalrymen, eighty bicyclists, sixty machine gunners, forty artillerymen, and three armored cars.55 It was these detachments which in April 1918 carried out perhaps the only popular action ever undertaken by the Cheka, the disarming in Moscow of the “Black Guards,” bands of anarchists who had occupied residential buildings and terrorized the civilian population. Acquiring a rudimentary military force was only the first step in the expansion of the political police into a virtual state within the state. In June 1918, at a conference of Chekists, voices were heard demanding the creation of a regular Cheka armed force and entrusting the Cheka with the security of the railways as well as borders.56

  Much of the efforts of the Cheka in the first months of its existence went to fighting ordinary commercial activities. Since the most routine retail trade transactions, such as selling a bag of flour, were now classified as “speculation,” and the Cheka’s mandate included fighting speculation, its agents spent much time chasing peasant “bagmen,” inspecting luggage of railway passengers, and raiding black markets. This preoccupation with “economic crimes” prevented it from keeping an eye on far more dangerous anti-government plots that were beginning to take shape in the spring of 1918. In the first half of 1918, its only success in this field was uncovering the Moscow headquarters of Savinkov’s organization. This, however, was due to a fortuitous accident and, in any event, did not enable the Cheka to penetrate the center of Savinkov’s Union for the Defense of the Fatherland and Freedom, with the result that the Iaroslavl uprising in July caught it completely by surprise. Even more astonishing was the Cheka’s ignorance of Left SR plans for a rebellion, given that the Left SR leaders had all but advertised their intentions. To make matters worse, the Left SR plot was hatched inside the Cheka headquarters and was supported by its armed detachments. This resounding fiasco forced Dzerzhinskii on July 8 to relinquish his office, which was temporarily entrusted to Peters. He was reinstated on August 22, just in time to suffer another humiliating embarrassment, the failure to forestall a nearly successful terrorist attempt on the life of Lenin.