Since its establishment in November 1917, the Cheka had grown by leaps and bounds. When it moved into its first headquarters in Petrograd, the Cheka had a tiny staff. Dzerzhinsky, its chief, carried all its records in his briefcase. But by the end of March, when the government moved to Moscow and the Cheka occupied the infamous Lubianka building (formerly occupied by Lloyd’s Insurance), it had a staff of more than 600, rising to 1,000 by June, not including the security troops. Provincial Chekas were slower to develop; but nearly all the provinces and most of the districts had a Cheka branch by September, when the order came down to unleash the Red Terror.73
The Cheka was a state within a state. There was scarcely any aspect of Soviet life, from the struggle against counter-revolution to the issuing of dog licences, that it did not cover. From the start it worked outside the law. The Commissariat of Justice struggled in vain to subordinate it to the courts. The knock on the door in the middle of the night, interrogations and imprisonment without charge, torture and summary executions — these were the methods of the Cheka. In the words of one of its founders:
The Cheka is not an investigating commission, a court, or a tribunal. It is a fighting organ on the internal front of the civil war … It does not judge, it strikes. It does not pardon, it destroys all who are caught on the other side of the barricade.74
During the early months of Bolshevik power the Cheka was not as murderous as it would later be. One source counted 884 executions listed in the press between December and July. The presence of the Left SRs — who joined the Cheka in January and remained in it even after they resigned from Sovnarkom in March — had a restraining influence. So too did public protests, especially from the workers, whose strike resolutions nearly always condemned the Terror. The time when the public lived in terror of the Cheka had still not arrived. Take, for example, the famous incident in the Moscow Circus. The humourless Chekists had taken exception to the anti-Soviet jokes of the clown Bim-Bom and burst into the middle of his act in order to arrest him. At first the audience thought it was all part of the act; but Bim-Bom fled and the Chekists shot him in the back. People began to scream and panic ensued. News of the shooting spread, giving rise to public condemnations of the Cheka Terror. Hundreds turned out for the clown’s funeral, which became in effect a demonstration.75
During these early stages of the Terror arrests were often random. This stemmed from the chaotic nature of the newly emergent police state: virtually anyone could be arrested on denunciation by an enemy or on the whim of the local Cheka boss. All sorts of people filled the Cheka jails in these early months. Prince Lvov, who was arrested by the Cheka in Ekaterinburg, described his fellow prisoners in February as a ‘very motley public’, from princes and priests to ordinary peasants. Even Lenin’s cousin, Viktor Ardashev, was arrested and shot by the Ekaterinburg Cheka in January 1918. The Bolshevik leader only found out some months later, when he ordered an official to convey his greetings to Ardashev and was told that he had been killed. It seems he was very fond of his cousin. But the affection was not returned. Ardashev was a prominent Kadet in Ekaterinburg and had organized a Civil Service strike against Lenin’s government.76
*
Two landmarks stand out in the progress of the Terror: the Left SR uprising and the murder of the imperial family.
The Left SR uprising was one of the most farcical episodes in the history of the revolution. It epitomized the naiveté of the Left SRs. The remarkable thing is that at its crucial moment the Left SRs might have overthrown the Bolshevik regime: only, it appears, success was not part of their plan. This was not a coup d’étât but — not unlike the Bolsheviks’ own July uprising of 1917 — a suicidal act of public protest to galvanize ‘the masses’ against the regime. At no point did the Left SRs ever really think of taking power. They were only ‘playing’ at revolution.
The ideals that had brought the Left SRs into Sovnarkom in December all seemed to them to be in jeopardy by the following June. The freedom of the Soviets had been stifled by the dictatorship. The interests of the peasantry had been trampled on by the grain monopoly and the kombedy. Civil liberties had gone down the drain, along with the Left SRs’ foolish notion that, by joining the Bolsheviks in government, they might restrain their abuses of power. But the greatest of their disappointments was the Brest-Litovsk Treaty. Like the Left Communists, the Left SRs believed that the treaty had transformed Russia into a vassal of the German Empire, and that it had given up the only hope of spreading socialism to the West through a revolutionary war against the imperialists. On the signing of the peace, the Left SRs condemned the Bolsheviks as traitors to the revolution and resigned from Sovnarkom, although they remained in the Soviet Executive and ironically the Cheka. Count Mirbach, the German Ambassador, who arrived in the latter half of April to resume diplomatic relations between Berlin and Moscow,fn10 became a target of terrorist threats from the Left SRs, who were out to disrupt the peace.
Their campaign of noisy opposition reached its peak at the Fifth Soviet Congress, which opened in the Bolshoi Theatre on 4 July. Given the swing away from the Bolsheviks in the Soviets during the spring, the Left SRs had a large delegation, although not as many as they had expected, and it was suspected that the Bolsheviks had packed the congress with their own supporters. The Left SRs claimed to represent ‘the masses’ who had supported the ‘Soviet revolution’ but who felt betrayed by the Bolsheviks. Kamkov and Spiridonova, the party’s two main leaders, denounced the Bolsheviks’ policies. Top of their list was the ‘shameful peace’, which they said had sold out the workers and peasants of the Ukraine to the German imperialists. They vowed to resume a revolutionary war and waved their fists at the imperial loge, where, symbolically, Count Mirbach was in attendance.
Two days later he was assassinated. This act of terror was supposed to disrupt the peace by provoking Germany to attack Russia. Like the terrorists’ bombs of the nineteenth century, it was also meant to spark a popular uprising against the regime. The decision to assassinate Mirbach had been taken by the Left SRs on the evening of the 4th, after the first session of the Congress, when it became clear that they could not win the majority they needed to bring about a change in the government’s pro-German and anti-peasant policies. A Left SR motion of no-confidence in the Bolsheviks — designed to win the support of the Left Communists — had been defeated, and the Left SRs had walked out. Spiridonova — who despite her genteel appearance had never wanted for terrorist verve — masterminded Mirbach’s murder. She recruited Yakov Bliumkin, a Left SR Chekist suitably placed in charge of counter-espionage against the Germans, and his photographer, Nikolai Andreev, to do the bloody deed. In the afternoon of the 6th they arranged a meeting with the Ambassador on the pretext of discussing the case of a Count Robert Mirbach, believed to be a relative of his, arrested on suspicion of spying. After a brief conversation, the Chekists pulled out revolvers and opened fire. Their shots missed and Mirbach began to escape. But Bliumkin threw a bomb after him, causing fatal injuries. The two men escaped through a window, Bliumkin taking a bullet in the leg, and fled in a waiting car to the Pokrovsky Barracks of the Cheka Combat Detachment, commanded by Dmitrii Popov, another prominent Left SR in the Cheka, which became the headquarters of the uprising. Lenin was at once summoned to the German Embassy to apologize for the murder. Never before in diplomatic history had a Russian head of state been humiliated in this way.