The tasks of the [Extraordinary] Commission: (I) to suppress [presek(at’)] and liquidate all attempts and acts of counterrevolution and sabotage throughout Russia, from every quarter; (2) to turn over all saboteurs and counterrevolutionaries to the court of the Revolutionary Tribunal and to work out the means of combating them; (3) the Commission conducts only a preliminary investigation to the extent that this is necessary to bar [counterrevolution and sabotage].35
In the first published versions of this resolution (1924, 1926) one critical word was changed. As is now known, in the manuscript of the resolution the word “to suppress”—“presekat’”—appeared in an abbreviated form as “pre-sek[at’].” In the earliest published versions, this word was altered to read “presledovat’,” which means “to prosecute.”36 The transposition and substitution of a few letters had the effect of giving the Cheka judiciary powers. This forgery, revealed only after Stalin’s death, allowed the Cheka and its successors (GPU, OGPU, and NKVD) to sentence political prisoners, by summary procedures conducted in camera, to a full range of punishments, including death. The Soviet security police was deprived of this right, which had claimed the lives of millions, only in 1956.
The Bolsheviks, who were normally punctilious about bureaucratic proprieties, made a significant exception in the case of the secret police. This institution, which was subsequently credited with saving the regime, had for a long time no legal standing.37 Ignored in the Collection of Laws and Ordinances (Sobranie Uzakonenii i Rasporiazhenii) for 1917–18, it lacked a formal identity. This was deliberate policy. In early 1918, the Cheka forbade any information to be published on it except with its approval.38 The injunction was not strictly observed, but it gives an idea of the Cheka’s conception of itself and its role in society. In this, the Bolsheviks followed the precedent set by Peter the Great, who had established Russia’s first political police, the Preobrazhenskii Prikaz, without a formal ukaz.*
The Cheka began with a small staff of officials and some military units. In March it moved with the rest of the government to Moscow, where it took over the spacious quarters of the Iakor Insurance Company on Bolshaia Lubianka 11. At the time it claimed to have only 120 employees, although some scholars estimate the true figure to have been closer to 600.39 The Chekist Peters conceded that the Cheka had difficulty recruiting personnel because Russians, with the tsarist police fresh in mind, reacted “sentimentally,” and unable to distinguish persecution by the old regime from that of the new, refused to join.40 * As a consequence, a high proportion of Cheka functionaries were non-Russians. Dzerzhinskii was a Pole, and many of his closest associates were Latvians, Armenians, and Jews. The guards the Cheka used to protect Communist officials and important prisoners were recruited exclusively from the Latvian Rifles because Latvians were considered more brutal and less susceptible to bribery. Lenin strongly favored this reliance on foreigners. Steinberg recalls his “fear” of the Russian national character. He thought that Russians lacked firmness: “ ‘Soft, too soft is the Russian,’ he would say, ‘He is incapable of applying the harsh measures of revolutionary terror.’ ”41
Employing foreigners had the additional advantage that they were less likely to be bound to their potential victims by ties of kinship or inhibited by opprobrium of the Russian community. Dzerzhinskii, for one, had grown up in an atmosphere of intense Polish nationalism: as a youth he wanted to “exterminate all Muscovites” for the suffering they had inflicted on his people.† The Latvians looked on Russians with contempt. During his brief internment by the Cheka in September 1918, Bruce Lockhart heard from his Latvian guards that Russians were “lazy and dirty” and in battle always “let them down.”42 Lenin’s reliance on foreign elements to terrorize the Russian population recalled the practice of Ivan the Terrible, who had also filled his terror apparatus, the Oprichnina, with foreigners, mostly Germans.
To remove some of the odium which attached to the political police in a socialist country, the Bolsheviks combined the Cheka’s primary mission, which was political, with the task of fighting ordinary crime. Soviet Russia was in the grip of murders, lootings, and robberies, which the citizens desperately wanted to stop. To make the new political police more acceptable, the regime also assigned the Cheka responsibility for eradicating ordinary crimes, including banditry and “speculation.” In an interview with a Menshevik daily in June 1918, Dzerzhinskii laid stress on the Cheka’s twin missions:
[The task of the Cheka] is to fight the enemies of Soviet authority and of the new way of life. Such enemies are both our political opponents and all bandits, thieves, speculators, and other criminals who undermine the foundations of the socialist order.43
Bridling at the limitations which its mandate imposed, the Cheka sought unrestricted freedom to deal with political undesirables. This led to a conflict with the Commissariat of Justice.
From the day of its foundation, the Cheka arrested on its own authority persons suspected of engaging in “counterrevolution” and “speculation.” The prisoners were delivered under guard to Smolnyi. This procedure did not suit Commissar of Justice Steinberg, a twenty-nine-year-old Jewish lawyer who had received his degree in Germany with a dissertation on the Talmudic concept of justice. On December 15 he issued a resolution forbidding further delivery of arrested citizens either to Smolnyi or to the Revolutionary Tribunal without prior approval of the Commissariat of Justice. Prisoners in the Cheka’s custody were to be released.44
Apparently confident of Lenin’s backing, Dzerzhinskii ignored these instructions. On December 19, he arrested the members of the Union for the Defense of the Constituent Assembly. As soon as he learned of Dzerzhinskii’s action, Steinberg countermanded it, ordering the prisoners set free. The dispute was placed on the Sovnarkom’s agenda for that evening. The cabinet sided with Dzerzhinskii and reprimanded Steinberg for releasing Cheka prisoners.45 But Steinberg, undeterred by this defeat, asked the Sovnarkom to regularize relations between the Commissariat of Justice and the Cheka, and presented the Sovnarkom with a draft project, “On the Competence of the Commissariat of Justice.”46 The document forbade the Cheka to carry out political arrests without prior sanction from the Commissariat of Justice. Lenin and the rest of the cabinet approved Steinberg’s proposal, for the Bolsheviks did not want at this time to quarrel with the Left SRs. The resolution adopted required that all orders for arrests “with prominent political significance” carry the countersignature of the Commissar of Justice. Presumably the Cheka could carry out ordinary arrests on its own authority.
But even this limited concession was almost immediately withdrawn. Two days later, probably responding to Dzerzhinskii’s complaints, the Sovnarkom approved a very different resolution. While confirming that the Cheka was an investigatory body, it enjoined the Commissariat of Justice and all other bodies from interfering with its power to arrest important political figures. The Cheka had merely to inform the commissariats of Justice and of the Interior of its actions after the fact. Lenin added a stipulation that persons already under arrest be either turned over to the courts or released.47 The next day, the Cheka arrested the center which directed the strike of white-collar employees in Petrograd.48
As part of the agreement with the Bolsheviks, concluded in December 1917, the Left SRs received the right to have representatives on the Cheka governing board, known as the Collegium. This concession ran contrary to the Bolshevik intention to keep the Cheka 100 percent Bolshevik, but Lenin agreed to it over Dzerzhinskii’s objections. The Sovnarkom appointed a Left SR deputy director of the Cheka and added several members of this party to the Collegium.49 The Left SRs further secured acceptance of the principle that the Cheka would carry out no executions except with the unanimous consent of the Collegium, which gave them a veto over death sentences. On January 31, 1918, the Sovnarkom confirmed, in an unpublished resolution, that the Cheka had exclusively investigatory responsibilities: