18
The Red Terror
Terror is for the most part useless cruelties committed by frightened people to reassure themselves.
—F. Engels to K. Marx1
Systematic state terror is hardly a Bolshevik invention: its antecedents go back to the Jacobins. Even so, the differences between Jacobin and Bolshevik practices in this respect are so profound that one can credit the Bolsheviks with having invented terror. Suffice it to say that the French Revolution culminated in terror, whereas the Russian one began with it. The former has been called a “brief parenthesis,” a “countercurrent”:2 the Red Terror constituted from the outset an essential element of the regime, which now intensified, now abated, but never disappeared, hanging like a permanent dark cloud over Soviet Russia.
As in the case of War Communism, the Civil War, and other unsavory aspects of Bolshevism, Bolshevik spokesmen and apologists like to place the blame for terror on their opponents. It is said to have been a regrettable, but unavoidable reaction to the counterrevolution: in other words, a practice they would have shunned if given the chance. Typical is the verdict of Lenin’s friend Angelica Balabanoff:
Unfortunate though it might be, the terror and repression which had been inaugurated by the Bolsheviks had been forced upon them by foreign intervention and by Russian reactionaries determined to defend their privileges and reestablish the old regime.3
Such apologias can be dismissed on several grounds.
If terror had indeed been “forced” on the Bolsheviks by “foreign interventionists” and “Russian reactionaries,” then they would have abandoned it as soon as they had decisively defeated these enemies—that is, in 1920. They did nothing of the kind. Although with the termination of the Civil War they did put an end to the indiscriminate massacres of 1918–19, they made certain to leave intact the laws and institutions which had made them possible. Once Stalin became undisputed master of Soviet Russia all the instruments which he required to resume the terror on an incomparably vaster scale lay at hand. This fact alone demonstrates that for the Bolsheviks terror was not a defensive weapon but an instrument of governance.
This interpretation is confirmed by the fact that the principal institution of Bolshevik terror, the Cheka, was founded in early December 1917, before any organized opposition to the Bolsheviks had had a chance to emerge and when the “foreign interventionists” were still assiduously courting them. We have it on the authority of one of the most sadistic functionaries of the Cheka, the Latvian la. Kh. Peters, that in the first half of 1918, when the Cheka began to experiment with terror, “counterrevolutionary organizations … as such were not observed.”*
The evidence shows that Lenin, its most determined instigator, regarded terror as an indispensable instrument of revolutionary government. He was quite prepared to resort to it preventively—that is, in the absence of active opposition to his rule. His commitment to it was rooted in a deep-seated belief in the Rightness of his cause and in an inability to perceive politics in hues other than pure white and pure black. It was essentially the same outlook that had driven Robespierre, to whom Trotsky had compared Lenin as early as 1904.4 Like the French Jacobin, Lenin sought to build a world inhabited exclusively by “good citizens.” This objective led him, like Robespierre, morally to justify the physical elimination of “bad” citizens.
From the time he formed the Bolshevik organization, for which he was proud to claim the title “Jacobin,” Lenin spoke of the need for revolutionary terror. In a 1908 essay, “Lessons of the Commune,” he made revealing observations on this subject. Having listed the achievements and failures of this first “proletarian revolution,” he indicated its cardinal weakness: the proletariat’s “excessive generosity—it should have exterminated its enemies,” instead of trying “to exert moral influence on them.”5 This remark must be one of the earliest instances in political literature in which the term “extermination,” normally used for vermin, is applied to human beings. As we have seen, Lenin habitually described those whom he chose to designate as his regime’s “class enemies” in terms borrowed from the vocabulary of pest control, calling kulaks “bloodsuckers,” “spiders,” and “leeches.” As early as January 1918 he used inflammatory language to incite the population to carry out pogroms:
The communes, small cells in the village and city, must themselves work out and test thousands of forms and methods of practical accounting and control over the rich, swindlers, and parasites. Variety here is a guarantee of vitality, of success and the attainment of the single objective: the cleansing of Russia’s soil of all harmful insects, of scoundrel fleas, bedbugs—the rich, and so on.6
Hitler would follow this example in regard to the leaders of German Social Democracy, whom he thought of as mainly Jews, calling them in Mein Kampf “Ungeziefer,” or “vermin,” fit only for extermination.7
Nothing illustrates better how deeply the passion for terror was embedded in Lenin’s psyche than an incident which occurred on his first day as head of state. As the Bolsheviks were taking power, Kamenev asked the Second Congress of Soviets to abolish the death penalty for front-line deserters, which Kerensky had reintroduced in mid-1917. The congress adopted this proposal and abolished capital punishment at the front.8 Lenin, busy elsewhere, missed this event. According to Trotsky, when he learned of it, he became “utterly indignant.” “Nonsense,” he said,
how can you make a revolution without executions? Do you expect to dispose of your enemies by disarming yourself? What other means of repression are there? Prisons? Who attaches significance to that during a civil war, when each side hopes to win? … It is a mistake, he repeated, impermissible weakness, pacifist illusion, and so on.9
This was said at a time when the Bolshevik dictatorship was barely in the saddle, when no organized opposition had formed because no one believed the Bolsheviks would last, when there was as yet nothing remotely resembling a “civil war.” On Lenin’s insistence, the Bolsheviks ignored the congress’s action in regard to the death penalty and reintroduced it more or less formally the following June.
Although Lenin preferred to direct the terror from behind the scenes, he occasionally let it be known he had no patience with complaints about “innocent” victims of the Cheka. “I judge soberly and categorically,” he replied in 1919 to a Menshevik worker who criticized arrests of innocent citizens, “what is better—to put in prison a few dozen or a few hundred inciters, guilty or not, conscious or not, or to lose thousands of Red Army soldiers and workers? The former is better.”10 This kind of reasoning served to justify indiscriminate persecution.*
Trotsky fell in step. On December 2, 1917, addressing the new, Bolshevik Ispolkom, he said:
There is nothing immoral in the proletariat finishing off the dying class. This is its right. You are indignant … at the petty terror which we direct against our class opponents. But be put on notice that in one month at most this terror will assume more frightful forms, on the model of the great revolutionaries of France. Our enemies will face not prison but the guillotine.11
He defined the guillotine on this occasion (plagiarizing from the French revolutionary Jacques Hébert) as a device which “shortens a man by the length of a head.”
In light of this evidence it is absurd to talk of Red Terror as an “unfortunate” policy “forced” upon the Bolsheviks by foreign and domestic opponents. As it had been for the Jacobins, terror served the Bolsheviks not as a weapon of last resort, but as a surrogate for the popular support which eluded them. The more their popularity eroded, the more they resorted to terror, until in the fall and winter of 1918–19 they raised it to a level of indiscriminate slaughter never before seen.*