Terror spread to the countryside in connection with the government’s declaration of war on the village. We have cited Lenin’s exhortations to the workers to kill “kulaks.” It is impossible to form even an approximate notion of the number of peasants who perished in the summer and fall of 1918 trying to save their grain from food detachments: given that the victims on the government side ran into the thousands, they were unlikely to have been smaller.
Lenin’s associates now vied with each other in using language of explicit brutality to incite the population to murder and to make murder committed for the cause of the Revolution appear noble and uplifting. Trotsky, for instance, on one occasion warned that if any of the ex-tsarist officers whom he drafted into the Red Army behaved treasonably, “nothing will remain of them but a wet spot.”78 The Chekist Latsis declared that the “law of the Civil War [was] to slaughter all the wounded” fighting against the Soviet regime: “It is a life-and-death struggle. If you do not kill, you will be killed. Therefore kill that you may not be killed.”79
No such exhortation to mass murder was heard either in the French Revolution or on the White side. The Bolsheviks deliberately sought to brutalize their citizens, to make them look on some of their fellow citizens just as frontline soldiers look on those wearing enemy uniforms: as abstractions rather than human beings.
This murderous psychosis had already attained a high pitch of intensity by the time bullets struck down Uritskii and Lenin. These two terrorist acts—as it turned out, unrelated, but at the time seen as part of an organized plot—unleashed the Red Terror in its formal sense. The majority of its victims were hostages chosen at random, mainly because of their social background, wealth, or connections with the old regime. The Bolsheviks considered these massacres necessary not only to suppress concrete threats to their regime but also to intimidate the citizens and force them into psychic submission.
The Red Terror was formally inaugurated with two decrees, issued on September 4 and 5, over the signatures of the commissars of the Interior and of Justice.
The first instituted the practice of taking hostages.* It was a barbarian measure, a reversion to the darkest of ages, which international tribunals after World War II would declare a war crime. The Cheka hostages were to be executed in reprisal for future attacks on Bolshevik leaders or any other active opposition to Bolshevik rule. In fact, they were lined up before firing squads around the clock. The official sanction for these massacres was given in the “Order Concerning Hostages” signed by Grigorii Petrovskii, the Commissar of the Interior, on September 4, 1918, one day before the Red Terror decree, and cabled to all provincial soviets:
The killing of Volodarskii, the killing of Uritskii, the attempt to kill and the wounding of the chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, Vladimir Ilich LENIN, the mass executions of tens of thousands of our comrades in Finland, in the Ukraine, on the Don, and in [areas controlled by] the Czechoslovaks, the continuous discovery of conspiracies in the rear of our armies, the open admission by Right SRs and other counterrevolutionary scum [of their involvement] in these conspiracies, and, at the same time, the exceedingly insignificant number of serious repressions and mass executions of White Guardists and bourgeois by the soviets, show that, notwithstanding the constant talk of mass terror against the SRs, White Guardists, and bourgeoisie, the terror, in fact, does not exist.
This situation must be decisively ended. An immediate stop must be put to slackness and pampering. All Right SRs known to local soviets must be immediately arrested. It is necessary to take from among the bourgeoisie and officers numerous hostages. In the event of the least attempts at resistance or the least stir in White Guard circles, resort must be had at once to mass executions. Executive Committees of local provincial soviets ought to display in this regard particular initiative.
Administrative offices, using the militia and Chekas, must take all measures to identify and arrest all those who hide behind false names. All persons involved in White Guard work are subject to mandatory execution.
All indicated measures are to be carried out immediately.
All indecisive action in this regard by one or another organ of local soviets must be instantly communicated … to the People’s Commissariat of the Interior.
The rear of our armies must be finally completely rid of all White Guardists and all vile conspirators against the authority of the working class and the poorer peasantry. Not the slightest hesitation, not the slightest indecisiveness, in the application of mass terror.
Confirm acceptance of the aforesaid telegram. Pass on to uezd soviets.
Commissar of the Interior, Petrovskii.80
This extraordinary document not only permitted but required indiscriminate terror under the threat of punishment for what it termed displays of “slackness and pampering”—in other words, humaneness—toward its designated victims. Soviet officials were required to perpetrate mass murder or else risk being charged with complicity in the “counterrevolution.”
The second decree instituted the Red Terror with the adoption on September 5, 1918, of a “Resolution” approved by the Sovnarkom and signed by the Commissar of Justice, D. Kurskii.81 It stated that the Sovnarkom, having heard a report from the director of the Cheka, decided that it was imperative to intensify the policy of terror. “Class enemies” of the regime were to be isolated in concentration camps and all persons with links to “White Guard organizations, conspiracies, and seditious actions [miatezh]” were subject to immediate execution.
Communist documentary and historical literature passes over in silence the origins of these orders: they are not to be found in collections of Soviet decrees. Lenin’s name has been scrupulously disassociated from them, although he is known to have insisted on hostage-taking as essential to class war.82 Who, then, was the author of these decrees? On the face of it, Lenin was at the time too weak from the loss of blood to take part in affairs of state. Yet it is difficult to believe that measures of such importance could have been taken by two commissars without his explicit approval. The suspicion that Lenin authorized the two decrees that launched the Red Terror receives support from the fact that on September 5 he managed to affix his signature to a very minor decree dealing with Russo-German relations.83 If its existence does not conclusively prove Lenin’s personal involvement, then at least it removes physical disability as a counterargument.
On August 31, even before official instructions to this effect had been issued, the Cheka at Nizhnii Novgorod rounded up 41 hostages identified as from the “enemy camp” and had them shot. The list of victims indicated that they consisted mainly of ex-officers, “capitalists,” and priests.84 In Petrograd, Zinoviev, as if wishing to make up for the “softness” for which Lenin had reprimanded him, ordered the summary execution of 512 hostages. This group included many individuals associated with the ancien régime who had spent months in jail and therefore could have had no connection with the terrorist assaults on the Bolshevik leaders.85 In Moscow, Dzerzhinskii ordered the execution of several high officials of the tsarist government held in prison since 1917: among them, one minister of justice (I. G. Shcheglovitov), three ministers of the interior (A. N. Khvostov, N. A. Maklakov, and A. D. Protopopov), one director of the Police Department (S. P. Beletskii), and a bishop. All were has-beens of no threat whatever to the regime. One cannot, therefore, escape the impression that their murder was Dzerzhinskii’s personal revenge for the many harsh years he had spent in prison while these men had been in charge of justice and the police.*