To what purpose this carnage?
Dzerzhinskii, supported by Lenin, was given to boasting that terror and its instrument, the Cheka, had saved the Revolution. This appraisal is probably correct, as long as “the Revolution” is identified with the Bolshevik dictatorship. There exists solid evidence that by the summer of 1918, when the Bolsheviks launched the terror, they were rejected by all strata of the population except for their own apparatus. Under these circumstances, “merciless terror” was indeed the only way of preserving the regime.
This terror had to be not only “merciless” (can one even conceive of “merciful” terror?) but also indiscriminate. If the opponents of the Bolshevik dictatorship had been an identifiable minority, then one could have targeted them for surgical removal. But in Soviet Russia it was the regime and its supporters that were a minority. To stay in power, the dictatorship had first to atomize society and then destroy in it the very will to act. The Red Terror gave the population to understand that under a regime that felt no hesitation in executing innocents, innocence was no guarantee of survival. The best hope of surviving lay in making oneself as inconspicuous as possible, which meant abandoning any thought of independent public activity, indeed any concern with public affairs, and withdrawing into one’s private world. Once society disintegrated into an agglomeration of human atoms, each fearful of being noticed and concerned exclusively with physical survival, then it ceased to matter what society thought, for the government had the entire sphere of public activity to itself. Only under these conditions could a small minority subjugate millions.
But the price of such a regime was not cheap, either for its victims or for its practitioners. To stay in power against the wishes of the overwhelming majority, the Bolsheviks had to distort that power beyond all recognition. Terror may have saved communism, but it corroded its very soul.
Isaac Steinberg noted with a keen eye the devastating impact of the Red Terror on both the citizens and the authorities. Traveling in a streetcar in 1920, he was struck by an analogy between that packed vehicle and the country at large:
Does not our land resemble today’s streetcars, which drag themselves along Moscow’s dreary streets, worn out and creaking from old age, weighed down with people hanging on to it? How tightly these people are squeezed, how difficult it is to breathe here, as if after an exhausting fight. How hungry is the look in their eyes! See how shamelessly they steal seats from one another, how this mass of humanity, accidentally chained together, seems to lack all sense of mutual sympathy and understanding, how everyone sees in his fellow man only a rival! … Mindless hatred for the streetcar conductor—this expresses the feeling of this casual mass toward the government, the state, the organization. Indifference and irony toward those who crowd at the car’s entrance hoping to get in—this is their attitude toward the community, toward solidarity. When one observes them more intently one realizes that at bottom they are close to one another: the same thought, the same spark shines fraternally in their hostile eyes; the same pain weeps in them all. But now, here, they are pitiless enemies.
142
But he also notes the effect of terror on its perpetrators:
When the terror strikes the class enemy, the bourgeois, when it tramples
his
self-esteem and the feeling of love, when it separates him from his family or confines him to his family, when it torments his spirit and causes it to wilt—whom does this terror strike? Only the class nature of the enemy, unique only to him and destined to disappear along with him? Or does it also, at the same time, strike something general, something that concerns all mankind, namely man’s human nature? The feelings of pity and suffering, the longing for the spirit and for freedom, the attachment to the family, and the yearning for the far away—all that which makes “men” out of men—these things, after all, are known and common to
both
camps. And when the terror stamps out, banishes, and exposes to ridicule feelings common to mankind in one group, then it does the same everywhere, in all souls.… The sense of dignity violated in the camp of the enemy, the suppressed feelings of pity for the enemy, the pain inflicted on some enemy, rebound, through a psychological reflex, back to the camp of the victors.… Slavery produces the same effect in the soul of the victor as in that of the vanquished.
143
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 Jean Christophe, made light of the evidence on the grounds that “almost identical things [were] going on in the prisons of California where they [were] martyring the workingmen of the I.W.W.” Upton Sinclair seconded him by professing sham surprise that the treatment of Soviet prisoners was “about the same as the conditions of prisoners in the state of California.” Bertrand Russell went one better: he “sincerely hoped” that the publication of these documents would contribute toward “the promotion of friendly relations” between Soviet and Western governments on the grounds that both engaged in similar practices.146
* PR, No. 10/33 (1924), 10. Peters served as deputy director, and, in July–August 1918, as acting director of the Cheka.
*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, In the Workshop of the Revolution (London, 1955), 177.
*I. Steinberg, Gewalt und Terror in der Revolution (Berlin, 1974), 22–25. The book, written between 1920 and 1923 (first published in 1931), describes Leninist, not Stalinist, Russia.
*Steinberg, In the Workshop, 145. Steinberg mistakenly attributes the authorship of this decree to Trotsky.
*Even pre-revolutionary Russian law operated with such subjective concepts as “goodwill” and “conscience.” The statutes that defined the procedures for conciliation courts, for example, instructed judges to mete out sentences “in accord with [their] conscience,” a formula used also in some criminal proceedings. This Slavophile legacy in Imperial statutes had been criticized by one of Russia’s leading legal theorists, Leon Petrazhitskii. See Andrzej Walicki, Legal Philosophies of Russian Liberalism (Oxford, 1987), 233.
* Iz istorii Vserossiiskoi Chrezvychainoi Kommissii, 1917–1921 gg. (Moscow, 1958), 78–79. Under pressure of the Peasants’ Congress, which on November 14 passed a resolution to this effect, the Bolsheviks dissolved the Military-Revolutionary Committee (Revoliutsiia, VI, 144). The Cheka was its successor.
*“The institution was introduced so surreptitiously that historians to this day have not been able to locate the decree authorizing its establishment or even to determine the approximate date when it might have been issued”: Richard Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime (London, 1974). 130.
*“Their confusion may have been partly due to the fact, reported on by many contemporaries, that many Cheka employees, including jailers, had served in the same capacities under tsarism.
†PR, No. 9 (1926), 55. Later on, Lenin would charge him and the Georgian Stalin with Russian chauvinism.
*Grigorii Aronson, Na zare krasnogo terrora (Berlin, 1929), 32. G. Leggett, therefore, is not correct when, following Latsis, he says that until July 6, 1918, the Cheka “executed only criminals and spared political adversaries”: The Cheka: Lenin’s Political Police (Oxford, 1986), 58.
*The protocols of these interrogations were published in PR, No. 6–7 (1923), 282–85. According to Peters, the principal interrogator, the existing dossier on the case is “very incomplete,” whatever this may mean: Izvestiia, No. 194/1, 931 (August 30, 1923), 1.
†That gun, a Browning, disappeared from the scene of the crime: on September 1, 1918, Izvestiia (No. 188/452, 3) carried a Cheka announcement requesting information on its whereabouts.
*V. Bonch-Bruevich, Tri Pokusheniia na V. I. Lenina (Moscow, 1924), 14. This passage was removed from subsequent editions of Bonch-Bruevich’s memoirs. Klara Zetkin, in 1920, saw in Lenin’s face a resemblance to Grünewald’s Christ: Reminiscences of Lenin (London, 1929), 22.
*P. Malkov, Zapiski komendanta Moskovskogo Kremlia (Moscow, 1959), 159–61. In the second edition, published in 1961, this passage is omitted. Here, Malkov is merely made to say: “We ordered Kaplan to go into the car, which had been previously prepared” (p. 162). A brief announcement of her execution appeared in Izvestiia on September 4 (No. 190/454, 1).
*This was confirmed in April 1922 when physicians removed the bullet from Lenin’s neck and found on it an incision shaped like a cross: P. Posvianskii, ed., Pokushenie na Lenina 30 avgusta 1918 g., 2nd ed. (Moscow, 1925), 64. The poison, however, seems to have lost its effectiveness, since it was not mentioned in the medical bulletins.
*The evolution of the Lenin cult is the subject of Nina Tumarkin’s Lenin Lives! (Cambridge, Mass., 1983).
*For all the attention paid to Lenin by Soviet propaganda after August 30, 1918, apparently not everyone knew who he was. Angelica Balabanoff recalls an incident which occurred in early 1919, when Lenin went to visit Krupskaia in a sanatorium outside Moscow. The car in which he and his sister were riding was stopped by two men. “One pointed a gun and said: ‘Your money or your life!’ Lenin took out his identification card and said: ‘I am Ulianov Lenin.’ The aggressors did not even look at the card and repeated: ‘Your money or your life!’ Lenin had no money. He took off his coat, got out of the car, and without letting go of the bottle of milk for his wife, proceeded on foot.”: Impressions of Lenin (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1964), 65.
*The earliest mention of hostages was in a speech by Trotsky on November 11, 1917, in which he said that military cadets taken prisoner would be held hostage: “if our men fall into the hands of the enemy … for every worker and for every soldier we shall demand five cadets”: Izvestiia, No. 211 (November 12, 1917), 2.
*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.
‡Lenin, PSS, L, 143–44. Peters, in his capacity as deputy director of the Cheka, said that all those caught with arms would be “shot on the spot” and those who agitated against the government confined to concentration camps: Izvestiia, No. 188/452 (September 1, 1918), 3.
*It is incorrect, therefore, to argue, as is done by some authorities, that initially the Soviet concentration camps served to terrorize the population, acquiring economic significance only in 1927 under Stalin. In fact, the practice of having penal labor pay for itself and even bring the state income went back to tsarist days; thus, in 1886 the Ministry of the Interior instructed the administration of hard labor installations to make certain that convict labor showed a profit: Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime, 310.
The Russian Revolution Page 130