It is true that immediately after 25th October the Bolsheviks released many of those who had fought against the Insurrection and, at Martov’s request, the Menshevik and SR Ministers who had been arrested. There was an element of genuine idealism in this, although the main reason was the urgent need to assuage the Soviet Congress and the Left SRs. It was also why the post of People’s Commissar for Justice was given to the Left SR Isaac Steinberg when his party joined Sovnarcom. Steinberg would attempt, unsuccessfully, to control and regulate the Cheka.
Cheka officers, under their feared chief Felix Dzerzhinsky, had wide discretionary powers to enter premises and arrest any they suspected of “counter–revolutionary” activity. With the Kadet Party declared illegal in November 1917 and all who supported the convoking of the Constituent Assembly smeared as counter-revolutionary, this was in effect anybody beyond the ranks of the Bolshevik Party. Very quickly the Cheka began to arrest and execute political opponents. The nature of the Cheka’s work, its untrammeled powers, its special ethos and identity (down to the leather overcoats Dzerzhinsky secured for his men as protection from the typhus virus which bred easily in woolen clothes) attracted a certain type of man, one who found satisfaction in investigation, surveillance, intimidation and coercion. Dzerzhinsky’s deputies Unschlicht, Peters and Katsis reflected the force they commanded: a mix of puritanical political activists, secret policemen and bullying sadists. The “Special Purpose Units” led by Unschlict grew in time to a paramilitary force of 300,000 men authorised to detain and execute as they pleased.
Western commentators and historians who condemn the Cheka invariably ignore the activities of their own state’s political police. At the same time as Russia was convulsed by revolutionary upheaval the US Congress passed the 1917 Espionage Act and 1918 Sedition Act. The Espionage Act removed the right of free speech against the war. The US Postal Service immediately stopped delivery of the Socialist Party’s magazine, The American Socialist, followed shortly after by almost every other radical publication. Socialist Party offices were raided and ransacked and the Chicago office was occupied for three days by federal agents. The socialist Kate O’Hara was sentenced to five years in prison for the crime of making a speech in which she said, “the women of the United States are nothing more nor less than brood sows, to raise children to get into the army and be made into fertilizer”.1 The US’s leading socialist and Presidential candidate Eugene Debs was sentenced to ten years (later commuted to three). The Espionage Act’s clauses against undermining the military or the security services are still in use today and were deployed against Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden.
The Sedition Act outlawed “disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language” about the United States government, its flag and its armed forces. The Industrial Workers of the World (Iww), whose organizers had always been viciously persecuted by state police, was outlawed for “criminal syndicalism”. Its leader Big Bill Haywood escaped and fled to Russia. In November 1919 the US Attorney General, Mitchell Palmer, ordered Justice Department agents to raid the offices of socialist organisations in twelve cities. New York State declared the Socialist Party illegal. On 2nd January, 1920 raids against socialist and communist organisations were launched in a further 33 cities.2 Over 5,000 people were arrested in their offices and homes–400 in NewYork, 500 in New Jersey, 700 in Detroit. In Boston hundreds of socialists were shackled together and paraded through the streets. In 1920 thousands of political “undesirables” were deported, following the 249 immigrants of Russian birth (including Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman) already deported to Russia in December 1919. The ensuing “Red Scare” was the Invisible Worm of 20th-century American history. It engendered the FBI, the CIA and the American Security State.
From here the atrocities multiplied. The cia’s Phoenix programme kidnapped, tortured and murdered 20, 000 Vietnamese civilians in the late 1960s suspected of supporting the Viet Cong. At home the FBI’s COINTELPRO (Counter–Intelligence Programme) against domestic “subversives” such as the Black Panthers, the American Indian Movement, Black Civil Rights groups, the New Left, and feminist and anti-Vietnam War activists aimed to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, neutralize or otherwise eliminate” leading political dissidents. It targeted individuals such as Martin Luther King, of whom FBI Deputy Director William Sullivan wrote in 1963, “In the light of King’s powerful demagogic speech […] we must mark him now, if we have not done so before, as the most dangerous Negro in this nation from the standpoint of communism, the Negro, and national security”.3 Sullivan later admitted that COINTELPRO’s activities were illegal. Carrying on this tradition, on 17th September, 2001 President George W. Bush ordered the CIA to “hunt, capture, imprison and interrogate” suspected terrorists anywhere in the world. In his history of the CIA, Tim Weiner concluded, “It was the foundation for a system of secret prisons where CIA officers and contractors used techniques that included torture […] This was not the role of a civilian intelligence service in a democratic society”.4
The Phoenix Programme, COINTELPRO and the persecution of Julian Assange and Edward Snowden demonstrate how far the security organs of Western capitalist states will go to crush major threats to ruling elites. If today they resort less to these methods it is because genuine threats have receded. When they do arise–as with WikiLeaks or the election of a socialist government in a strategically important country like Venezuela–the full panoply of state surveillance, fabrication, repression and subversion is quickly brought to bear.5
The record of the CIA and MI6 in organising and supporting coups against democratic left governments that threaten American and British geo-strategic and business interests is too long to summarise here, running from Mexico, the Philippines and Cuba early in the 20th century to Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, Brazil in 1964, Greece in 1967, Chile in 1973, Nicaragua throughout the 1980s, Venezuela under Chavez and Honduras in 2010; not to mention active complicity in murderous, sometimes genocidal policies in Malaya, Indonesia, Vietnam, South Africa, East Timor, El Salvador, Iraq and Palestine. It is a record that in total number of victims easily matches that of the Cheka/NKVD/KGB across the same time period.
The Cheka was a secret police with powers similar to those of the CIA or FBI but under far less scrutiny and restraint. As Isaac Deutscher acknowledged, when considering the activities of the Cheka (by then the GPU) in 1923, long after they had turned their attention to breaking strikes and arresting trade unionists, “the attitude of the Bolsheviks to the GPU had nothing in it of that haughty distaste with which the good bourgeois democrat normally views any political police”.6 Some haughty distaste might have been in order. Although many Bolsheviks believed that the Cheka was the “sword of the revolution”, it was in all essentials their Okhrana. It demonstrated how far they had departed from the generous, libertarian tradition of the Russian revolutionary left.
The survivors of that left saw this intimately. In a private letter to Axelrod (who was living abroad) of 1st December, 1917, Martov analysed the current state and likely future of Bolshevik rule. “Even though the mass of workers are behind Lenin”, Martov recorded, “his regime is becoming more and more a regime based on terror”. Martov had a clear sense of where this was heading: