Under these conditions, the deification of the founding father served the Bolsheviks as the next-best thing to true legitimacy and a surrogate for the missing popular mandate. Historians of antiquity have noted that in the Middle East, institutionalized cults of rulers began on a large scale only after Alexander of Macedon had conquered diverse non-Greek peoples over whom he could not claim legitimate authority, and who, furthermore, were bound neither to the Macedonians nor to each other by bonds of ethnic identity. Alexander, and even more so his successors, as well as the Roman emperors, had recourse to self-deification as a device for securing with appeals to celestial authority that which terrestrial authority refused to grant them:
The successors of Alexander were Greek Macedonians who occupied, by right of conquest and force of arms, thrones usurped from autochthonous sovereigns. In these countries of ancient and refined civilization, the power of the sword was not everything and the law of the stronger might not have provided adequate legitimation. For sovereigns, in general, love to legitimize themselves, because this often means reinforcing their position. Was it not wise on their part to present themselves as the titled heirs of these powers based on divine right, the heritage of which they had captured? To identify themselves as gods—was this not a way, presumed clever, to reap the veneration of their subjects, to unite their disparate populations under the same banner, and, in the ultimate analysis, to consolidate their dynastic position?71
To a dynasty … deification meant legitimacy, the regularizing of right acquired by the sword. It meant, further, the elevation of the royal family above the ambition of men who had recently been their peers, the strengthening of the rights of sovereigns by fusing them in a single whole with the prerogatives of their divine predecessors, the presentation to subjects everywhere of a symbol round which they might, perchance, rally through religious sentiment since they could not do so through their national sentiment.72
How conscious the Bolsheviks were of these precedents and how aware of the conflict between their pretense at being “scientific” and their appeals to the most primitive craving for idol worship, it is difficult to tell. The chances are that they acted instinctively. If so, their instincts served them well, for these appeals proved much more successful in winning them mass support than all the talk of “socialism,” “class struggle,” and the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” To the people of Russia “dictatorship” and “proletariat” were meaningless foreign words that most of them could not even pronounce. But the tales of the miraculous rise from the dead of the country’s ruler evoked an instant emotional response and created something of a bond between the government and its subjects. This is why the cult of Lenin would never be abandoned, even if, for a time, it would be eclipsed by the state-fostered cult of another deity, Stalin.*
The Bolsheviks had practiced terror from the day they seized power, intensifying it as their power grew and their popularity declined. The arrest of the Kadets in November 1917, followed by the unpunished murder of the Kadet leaders Kokoshkin and Shingarev had been acts of terror, as was the closing of the Constituent Assembly and the shooting of the demonstrators marching in its support. The Red Army troops and Red Guards who in the spring of 1918 dispersed and manhandled, in one city after another, the soviets that had voted the Bolsheviks out of power, perpetrated acts of terror. The executions, mainly carried out by provincial and district Chekas under the mandate given them by Lenin’s decree of February 22, 1918, pushed terror to a still higher level of intensity: the historian S. Melgunov, then residing in Moscow, compiled from the press evidence of 882 executions in the first six months of 1918.73
Early Bolshevik terror, however, was unsystematic, rather like the terror of the Whites later on in the Civil War, and many of its victims were ordinary criminals as well as “speculators.” It began to assume a more systematic political character only in the summer of 1918, when Bolshevik fortunes sank to their lowest. Following the suppression of the Left SR uprising on July 6, the Cheka carried out its first mass executions, the victims of which were members of Savinkov’s secret organization, arrested the previous month, and some participants in the Left SR uprising. The expulsion of the Left SRs from the Cheka Collegium in Moscow removed the last restraints on the political police. In the middle of July, many officers who had taken part in the Iaroslavl uprising were shot. Frightened of military conspiracies, the Cheka now began to hunt down officers of the old army and execute them without trial. According to Melgunov’s records, in the month of July 1918 alone, the Bolshevik authorities, mainly the Cheka, carried out 1,115 executions.74
The murder of the Imperial family and their relatives represented a further escalation of terror. Cheka agents now arrogated to themselves the right to shoot prisoners and suspects at will, although judging by subsequent complaints from Moscow, the provincial authorities did not always make use of their powers.
Notwithstanding this intensification of government terror, Lenin was still dissatisfied. He wanted to involve the “masses” in such action, presumably because pogroms which involved both agents of the government and the people helped bring the two closer together. He kept on badgering Communist officials and the citizenry to act more resolutely and rid themselves of all inhibitions against killings. How else could “class war” turn into reality? As early as January 1918, he complained that the Soviet regime was “too gentle”: he wanted “iron power,” whereas it was “inordinately soft, at every step more like jelly than iron.”75 When told in June 1918 that party officials in Petrograd had restrained workers from carrying out a pogrom to avenge the assassination of Volodarskii, he fired off an indignant letter to his viceroy there. “Comrade Zinoviev!” he wrote:
The Central Committee has learned only today that in Petrograd workers wanted to react to the murder of Volodarskii with mass terror and that you (not you personally but the Petrograd Central Committee or Regional Committee) held them back. I protest decisively! We compromise ourselves: even in Soviet resolutions we threaten mass terror, and when it comes to action, we impede the entirely correct revolutionary initiative of the masses. This is im-per-mis-si-ble!76
Two months later, Lenin instructed the authorities in Nizhnii Novgorod to “introduce at once mass terror, execute and deport hundreds of prostitutes, drunken soldiers, ex-officers, etc.”77 These terribly imprecise three letters—“etc.”—gave agents of the regime a free hand in selecting their victims: it was to be carnage for the sake of carnage as an expression of the indomitable “revolutionary will” of the regime, which was fast losing ground under its feet.