The Russian Revolution

by Richard Pipes

  I felt ill during the meeting. For more than a year, of course, I had known that executions were decimating Russia—but here I myself was present while a five-minute discussion doomed scores of totally innocent men. I was shaken to my innermost being. A cough was choking me, but it was more than the cough of one of my winter colds.

  It was plain to me that, when within a week or two the executions of those foresters took place, their deaths would not have moved things forward one single iota. I knew that this terrible decision stemmed from a feeling of resentment and revenge on the part of those who invoked such senseless measures.

  122

  There must have been many such decisions which left no trace in the documentation.

  The Cheka steadily expanded its military force. In the summer of 1918 its Combat Detachments were formed into an organization separate from the Red Army, designated as Korpus Voisk VChK (Corps of Armies of the AU-Russian Cheka).123 This security force, modeled on the tsarist Corps of Gendarmes, grew into a regular army for the “home front.” In May 1919, on the initiative of Dzerzhinskii in his new capacity as Commissar of the Interior, the government combined all these units into Armies of the Internal Security of the Republic (Voiska Vnutrennei Okhrany Respubliki), placing them under the supervision not of the Commissar of War but of the Commissar of the Interior.124 At this time, this internal army consisted of 120,000–125,000 men. By the middle of 1920, it doubled, totaling nearly a quarter of a million men who protected industrial establishments and transport facilities, helped the Commissariat of Supply obtain food, and guarded forced labor and concentration camps.125

  Last but not least, the Cheka formed a bureau of counterintelligence for the armed forces, known as the Osobyi Otdel (Special Department).

  By virtue of these functions and the powers which they carried, the Cheka became by 1920 the most powerful institution in Soviet Russia. The foundations of the police state thus were laid while Lenin was in charge and on his initiative.

  Among the Cheka’s most important responsibilities was organizing and operating “concentration camps,” an institution which the Bolsheviks did not quite invent but which they gave a novel and most sinister meaning. In its fully developed form, the concentration camp, along with the one-party state and the omnipotent political police, was Bolshevism’s major contribution to the political practices of the twentieth century.

  The term “concentration camp” originated at the end of the nineteenth century in connection with colonial wars.* The Spaniards first instituted such camps during the campaign against the Cuban insurrection. Their camps are estimated to have held up to 400,000 inmates. The United States emulated the Spaniards while fighting the Philippine insurrection of 1898; so did Britain during the Boer War. But apart from the name, these early prototypes had little in common with the concentration camps introduced by the Bolsheviks in 1919 and later copied by the Nazis and other totalitarian regimes. The Spanish, American, and British concentration camps were emergency measures adopted during campaigns against colonial guerrillas: their purpose was not punitive but military—namely, the isolation of armed irregulars from the civilian population. Conditions in these early camps admittedly were harsh—as many as 20,000 Boers are said to have perished in British internment. But here there was no deliberate mistreatment: the suffering and deaths were due to the haste with which these camps had been set up, which resulted in inadequate housing, provisioning, and medical care. The inmates of these camps were not made to perform forced labor. In all three cases, the camps were dismantled and the inmates released on the termination of hostilities.

  Soviet concentration and forced labor camps (kontsentratsionnye lageri and lageri prinuditel’nykh rabot) were from the outset different in organization, operation, and purpose:

  1. They were permanent: introduced during the Civil War, they did not disappear with the end of hostilities in 1920, but remained in place under various designations, swelling to fantastic proportions in the 1930s, when Soviet Russia was at peace and ostensibly “constructing socialism.”

  2. They did not hold foreigners suspected of assisting guerrillas, but Russians and other Soviet citizens suspected of political opposition: their primary mission was not to help subdue militarily a colonial people, but to suppress dissent among the country’s own citizens.

  3. Soviet concentration camps performed an important economic function: their inmates had to work where ordered, which meant that they were not only isolated but also exploited as slave labor.

  Talk of concentration camps was first heard in Soviet Russia in the spring of 1918 in connection with the Czech uprising and the induction of former Imperial officers.* At the end of May, Trotsky threatened Czechs who refused to surrender arms with confinement to concentration camps.† On August 8, he ordered that, for the protection of the railroad line from Moscow to Kazan, concentration camps be constructed at several nearby localities to isolate such “sinister agitators, counterrevolutionary officers, saboteurs, parasites and speculators” as were not executed “on the spot” or given other penalties.126 Thus, the concentration camp was conceived of as a place of detention for citizens who could not be specifically charged but whom, for one reason or another, the authorities preferred not to execute. Lenin used the term in this sense in a cable to Penza of August 9, in which he ordered that mutinous “kulaks” be subjected to “merciless mass terror”—that is, executions—but “dubious ones incarcerated in concentration camps outside the cities.”‡ These threats acquired legal and administrative sanction on September 5, 1918, in the “Resolution on Red Terror,” which provided for the “safeguarding of the Soviet Republic from class enemies by means of isolating them in concentration camps.”

  It seems, however, that few concentration camps were built in 1918 and that those which were owed their existence to the initiative of the provincial Chekas or of the military command. The construction of concentration camps began in earnest in the spring of 1919 on the initiative of Dzerzhinskii. Lenin did not want his name linked with these camps, and the decrees establishing them and detailing their structure and operations came out in the name not of the Council of People’s Commissars but of the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets and its chairman, Sverdlov. They implemented recommendations contained in the report by Dzerzhinskii of February 17, 1919, on the reorganization of the Cheka. Dzerzhinskii argued that the existing judiciary measures to combat sedition were not sufficient:

  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.

  127

  Dzerzhinskii, Kamenev, and Stalin (the co-drafters of this decree) conceived of the camps as a combination “school of work” and pool of labor. In accord with their recommendation, the CEC adopted the following resolution:

  The All-Russian Extraordinary Commission [Cheka] is empowered to confine to concentration camps, under the guidance of precise instructions concerning the rules of imprisonment in a concentration camp approved by the All-Russian Central Executive Committee.

  128

  For reasons that are not clear, in 1922 and subsequently, the term “concentration camps” was replaced by “camps of forced labor” (lageri prinuditel’nykh rabot).

  On April 11, 1919, the CEC issued a “Decision” concerning the organization of such camps. It provided for the establishment of a network of forced labor camps under the authority of the Commissariat of the Interior—now headed by Dzerzhinskii:

  Subject to i
nternment in the camps of forced labor are individuals or categories of individuals concerning whom decisions had been taken by organs of the administration, Chekas, Revolutionary Tribunals, People’s Courts, and other Soviet organs authorized to do so by decrees and instructions.

  129

  Several features of this landmark decree call for comment. Soviet concentration camps, as instituted in 1919, were meant to be a place of confinement for all kinds of undesirables, whether sentenced by courts or by administrative organs. Liable to confinement in them were not only individuals but also “categories of individuals”—that is, entire classes: Dzerzhinskii at one point proposed that special concentration camps be erected for the “bourgeoisie.” Living in forced isolation, the inmates formed a pool of slave labor on which Soviet administrative and economic institutions could draw at no cost. The network of camps was run by the Commissariat of the Interior, first through the Central Administration of Camps and later through the Main Camp Administration (Glavnoe Upravlenie Lageriami), popularly known as Gulag. One can perceive here, not only in principle but also in practical detail, Stalin’s concentration camp empire: it differed from Lenin’s only in size.

  The CEC resolutions approving the creation of concentration camps called for detailed instructions to guide their operations. A decree issued on May 12, 1919,130 spelled out in meticulous bureaucratic language the constitution of the camps: how they were to be organized, what were the duties and putative rights of the inmates. The decree ordered every provincial capital city to construct a forced labor camp capable of holding 300 or more inmates. Since Soviet Russia had (depending on the shifting fortunes of the Civil War) about thirty-eight provinces, this provision called for facilities for a minimum of 11,400 prisoners. But this figure could be greatly expanded, for the decree authorized also district capital cities to construct concentration camps, and these numbered in the hundreds. Responsibility for organizing the camps was given to the Cheka; after they were in place, authority over them was to pass to the local soviets. This provision, one of many in Bolshevik legislation meant to keep alive the myth that the soviets were “sovereign” organs, was rendered inoperative by the assignment of responsibility for the “general administration” of the camps in Soviet Russia to a newly formed Department of Forced Labor (Otdel Prinuditel’nykh Rabot) of the Commissariat of the Interior, which, as noted, happened to have been headed by the same individual who directed the Cheka.

  Russian governments had an old tradition of exploiting convict labor: “In no other country has the utilization of forced labor in the economy of the state itself played as significant a role as in the history of Russia.”131 The Bolsheviks revived this tradition. Inmates of Soviet concentration camps, from their birth in 1919, had at all times to perform physical labor either inside or outside the place of confinement. “Immediately upon their arrival in the camp,” the instruction read, “all inmates are to be assigned to work and they are to occupy themselves with physical labor throughout their stay.” To encourage camp authorities to exploit prison labor to the fullest, as well as to save the government money, it was stipulated that the camps had to be fully self-supporting:

  The costs of running the camp and the administration, when there is a full complement of inmates, must be covered by the inmates’ labor. The responsibility for deficits will be borne by the administration and the inmates in accord with rules stipulated in a separate instruction.

  *

  Attempts to escape from the camps were subject to severe punishments: for a first attempt, a recaptured prisoner could have his sentence prolonged as much as ten times; for a second, he was to be turned over to a Revolutionary Tribunal, which could sentence him to death. To further discourage escapes, the camp authorities were empowered to institute “collective responsibility” (krugovaia poruka), which made fellow inmates accountable for each other. In theory, an inmate had the right to complain of mistreatment in a book kept for the purpose.

  Thus, the modern concentration camp was born—an enclave within which human beings lost all rights and became slaves of the state. In this connection, the question may arise as to the difference between the status of an inmate in a concentration camp and that of an ordinary Soviet citizen. After all, no one in Soviet Russia enjoyed personal rights or had recourse to law, and everyone could be ordered, under decrees providing for compulsory labor, to work wherever the state wanted. The line separating freedom from imprisonment in the Soviet Russia of that time was indeed blurred. For example, in May 1919, Lenin decreed the mobilization of labor for military construction on the southern front.132 He stipulated that the mobilized work force was to consist “primarily of prisoners as well as citizens confined to concentration camps and sentenced to hard labor.” But if these were insufficient, the decree called for pulling “into the labor obligation also local inhabitants.” Here, camp inmates were distinguished from ordinary, “free” citizens only by being the first to be drafted for forced labor. Even so, significant differences separated the two categories. Citizens not confined to camps normally lived with their families and had access to the free market to supplement their rations, whereas camp inmates could have only occasional visits from relatives and were forbidden to receive food packages. Ordinary citizens did not live, day in and day out, under the watchful eyes of the commandant and his assistants (often Communist trusties), who were held responsible for squeezing enough labor from their charges to cover their own salaries as well as the costs of running the camp. Also, they were not quite so liable to be punished, under the practice of “collective responsibility,” for the actions of others.

  At the end of 1920, Soviet Russia had eighty-four concentration camps with approximately 50,000 prisoners; three years later (October 1923), the number had increased to 315 camps with 70,000 inmates.133

  Information on conditions in the early Soviet concentration camps is sparse and few scholars have shown an interest in the subject.134 The occasional testimonies smuggled out by inmates or provided by survivors paint a picture that to the smallest detail resembles descriptions of Nazi camps: so much so that were it not that they had been published two decades earlier, one might suspect them to be recent forgeries. In 1922, Socialist-Revolutionary émigrés brought out in Germany, under the editorship of Victor Chernov, a volume of reports by survivors of Soviet prisons and camps. Included was a description of life in a concentration camp at Kholmogory, near Archangel, written in early 1921 by an anonymous female prisoner. The camp had four compounds holding 1,200 inmates. The prisoners were housed in an expropriated cloister whose accommodations were relatively comfortable and well heated. The author describes it nevertheless as a “death camp.” Hunger was endemic: food packages, some sent by American relief organizations, were immediately confiscated. The commandant, who bore a Latvian name, had prisoners shot for the most trifling offenses: if a prisoner, while working in the fields, dared to eat a vegetable that he had dug up, he was killed on the spot and then reported as having tried to escape. The flight of a prisoner automatically led to the execution of nine others, bound to him by “collective responsibility,” as provided for by law; a recaptured escapee was killed as well, sometimes by being buried alive. The administration regarded the inmates as ciphers, whose survival or death was a matter of no consequence.135

  Thus came into existence a central institution of the totalitarian regime:

  Trotsky and Lenin were the inventors and the creators of the new form of the concentration camp. [This means not only] that they created establishments called “concentration camps.” … The leaders of Soviet communism also created a specific method of legal reasoning, a network of concepts that implicitly incorporated a gigantic system of concentration camps, which Stalin merely organized technically and developed. Compared with the concentration camps of Trotsky and Lenin, the Stalinist ones represented merely a gigantic form of implementation [

  Ausfiihrungsbestimmung

  ]. And, of course, the Nazis found in the former as we
ll as the latter ready-made models, which they merely had to develop. The German counterparts promptly seized upon these models. On March 13, 1921, the then hardly known Adolf Hitler wrote in the

  Völkischer Beobachter:

  “One prevents the Jewish corruption of our people, if necessary, by confining its instigators to concentration camps.” On December 8 of that year, in a speech to the National Club in Berlin, Hitler expressed his intention of creating concentration camps upon taking power.

  136

  The Red Terror had many aspects, but the historian’s first and foremost concern must be with its victims. Their number cannot be determined, and it is unlikely that it ever will be, for it is almost certain that Lenin ordered the Cheka archives destroyed.137 The closest to an official Soviet figure for the number executed between 1918 and 1920, furnished by Latsis, is 12,733. This figure, however, has been challenged as a vast underestimation on the grounds that, according to Latsis’s own admission, in the twenty provinces of central Russia in a single year (1918) there were 6,300 executions, 4,520 of whose victims had been shot for counterrevolutionary activity.138 Latsis’s figures are entirely disproportionate to the statistics available for some of the major cities. Thus, William Henry Chamberlin had seen at the Prague Russian Archive (now in Moscow) a report of the Ukrainian Cheka for the year 1920—by which time the death penalty had been formally abolished—listing 3,879 executions, 1,418 of them in Odessa and 538 in Kiev.139 Inquiries into Bolshevik atrocities in Tsaritsyn came up with an estimate of 3,000 to 5,000 victims.140 According to Izvestiia, between May 22 and June 22, 1920, the Revolutionary Tribunals alone—that is, without Cheka victims being taken into account—condemned to death 600 citizens, including 35 for “counterrevolution,” 6 for spying, and 33 for dereliction of duty.* Using such figures, Chamberlin estimates a total of 50,000 victims of the Red Terror, and Leggett, 140,000.141 All one can say with any assurance is that if the victims of Jacobin terror numbered in the thousands, Lenin’s terror claimed tens if not hundreds of thousands of lives. Victims of the next wave of terror, launched by Stalin and Hitler, would be counted in the millions.