The first official to say what was on the minds of many rank-and-file Bolsheviks was Olminskii, a member of the Pravda editorial staff. In early October 1918 he accused the Cheka of considering itself to be above the party and the soviets.100 Officials of the Commissariat of the Interior, who were supposed to supervise the provincial administration, expressed displeasure that provincial and uezd Chekas ignored the local soviets. In October 1918, the commissariat sent out an inquiry to the provincial and uezd soviets asking how they envisioned their relationship with the local Chekas. Of the 147 soviets that responded, only 20 were content to have the local Cheka acting independently; the remaining 127 (85 percent) wanted them to operate under their supervision.101 No less annoyed was the Commissariat of Justice, which saw itself eliminated from the process of trying and sentencing political offenders. Its head, N. V. Krylenko, was an enthusiastic proponent of terror, an advocate of executing even innocents, and later a leading prosecutor at Stalin’s show trials. But he quite naturally wanted his commissariat to have a hand in the killings. In December 1918 he presented the party’s Central Committee with a project which called for the Cheka to confine itself to its original function—namely, investigation—and leave to the Commissariat of Justice the task of trying and sentencing.102 For the time being, the Central Committee shelved this proposal.
Criticism of the Cheka continued in the winter of 1918–19. There was widespread revulsion at the publication in the Cheka Weekly, without editorial comment, of a letter from a group of provincial Bolshevik officials expressing anger that Bruce Lockhart, whom the authorities had accused of complicity in the attempt on Lenin’s life, had been released instead of being subjected to the “most refined tortures.”103 Olminskii returned to the fray in February 1919. One of the few prominent Bolsheviks to protest the executions of innocents, he wrote: “One can hold different opinions of the Red Terror. But what now goes on in the provinces is not Red Terror at all, but crime, from beginning to end.”104 Moscow gossip had it that the motto of the Cheka was: “Better execute ten innocent people than spare one who is guilty.”105
The Cheka fought back. The task fell to Dzerzhinskii’s Latvian deputies, Latsis and Peters, for early in October Dzerzhinskii left for a one-month vacation in Switzerland. He had been back on the job for six weeks, supervising the Lenin Days of the Red Terror, when something happened to him. He shaved off his beard and quietly slipped out of Moscow. Traveling by way of Germany to Switzerland, he joined his wife and children, whom he had settled in the Soviet mission in Berne. There exists a photograph of him, taken in October 1918, at the height of the Red Terror, posing in elegant mufti with family on the shores of Lake Lugano.106 His apparent inability to stand the carnage is the best thing known of this grand master of terror: he would never again display such un-Bolshevik weakness.
In responding to the criticism, Cheka spokesmen defended their organization but also counterattacked. They called the critics “armchair” politicians who had no practical experience in combating the counterrevolution and failed to understand the necessity of conceding the Cheka unrestrained freedom of action. Peters charged that behind the anti-Cheka campaign stood “sinister” elements, “hostile to the proletariat and the Revolution,” a hint that criticizing the Cheka could bring charges of treason.107 To those who claimed that by acting independently of the soviets the Cheka violated the Soviet Constitution, the editorial board of the Cheka Weekly responded that the constitution could take effect only “after the bourgeoisie and counterrevolution have been totally crushed.”*
But the Cheka apologists did not confine themselves to defending their institution: they glorified it as essential to the triumph of “proletarian dictatorship.” Developing Lenin’s theme of “class war” as a conflict that knew no frontiers, they depicted themselves as a counterpart of the Red Army, the sole difference between the two being that whereas the Red Army fought the class enemy outside Soviet boundaries, the Cheka and its armed forces combated him on the “domestic front.” The notion of the Civil War as “war on two fronts” became one of the favorite themes of the Cheka and its supporters: those who served in the Red Army and those who served in the Cheka were said to be comrades-in-arms, fighting, each in his own way, the “international bourgeoisie.”108 This analogy allowed the Cheka to claim that its license to kill within Soviet territory paralleled the right, indeed the duty, of army personnel to kill on sight enemy soldiers at the front. War was not a court of justice: in the words of Dzerzhinskii (as reported by Radek), innocents died on the home front just as innocents died on the field of battle.109 It was a position deduced from the premise that politics was warfare. Latsis pushed the analogy to its logical conclusion:
The Extraordinary Commission [Cheka] is not an investigatory commission, nor is it a court or a tribunal. It is an organ of combat, active on the internal front of the Civil War. It does not judge the enemy: it smites him. It does not pardon those on the other side of the barricade but incinerates them.110
This analogy between police terror and military combat ignored, of course, the critical difference between the two—namely, that a soldier fights other armed men at the risk of his life, whereas Cheka personnel killed defenseless men and women at no risk to themselves. The “courage” which the Chekist had to display was not physical or moral courage, but the willingness to stifle his conscience: his “toughness” lay in the ability not to bear suffering but to inflict it. Nevertheless, the Cheka grew very fond of this spurious analogy, with which it sought to rebut criticism and overcome the loathing with which Russians regarded it.
Lenin had to step into the fray. He liked the Cheka and approved of its brutality, but agreed that some of its most egregious abuses had to be curbed, if only to improve its public image. Appalled by the item in the Cheka Weekly demanding the application of torture, he ordered this organ of Latsis’s closed even as he called Latsis an outstanding Communist.† On November 6, 1918, the Cheka was instructed to release all prisoners who had not been charged or against whom charges could not be brought within two weeks. Hostages were also to be let go, except “where needed.”* The measure was hailed by Communist organs as an “amnesty” although it was nothing of the kind, since it applied to individuals who not only had not been tried and sentenced but had not even been charged. These rules remained a dead letter: in 1919 Cheka jails continued to overflow with prisoners incarcerated for no stated reason, many of them hostages.
Toward the end of October 1918, the government moved halfheartedly to limit the Cheka’s independence by bringing it into a closer relationship with other state institutions. The Moscow headquarters of the Cheka was ordered to admit representatives of the commissariats of Justice and of the Interior; provincial soviets were authorized to appoint and dismiss local Cheka officials.111 The only meaningful curtailment of police abuses, however, was the dissolution, on January 7, 1919, of the Chekas in the uezdy, the smallest administrative entities, which had acquired notoriety for committing the worst atrocities and engaging in large-scale extortion.112
The authorities were finally shaken from their complacency by signs of disaffection in the Moscow Committee of the Party, whose meeting on January 23, 1919, heard strong protests against the uncontrolled operations of the Cheka. A motion was introduced to abolish the Cheka: it was defeated as “bourgeois,” but a point had been made.113 A week later, the same committee, the country’s most important, voted with a plurality of 4 to 1 to deprive the Cheka of the right to act as tribunal and to limit it to its original function of an investigatory body.114