Thus came into existence a central institution of the totalitarian regime:
Trotsky and Lenin were the inventors and the creators of the new form of the concentration camp. [This means not only] that they created establishments called “concentration camps.” … The leaders of Soviet communism also created a specific method of legal reasoning, a network of concepts that implicitly incorporated a gigantic system of concentration camps, which Stalin merely organized technically and developed. Compared with the concentration camps of Trotsky and Lenin, the Stalinist ones represented merely a gigantic form of implementation [Ausfiihrungsbestimmung]. And, of course, the Nazis found in the former as well as the latter ready-made models, which they merely had to develop. The German counterparts promptly seized upon these models. On March 13, 1921, the then hardly known Adolf Hitler wrote in the Völkischer Beobachter: “One prevents the Jewish corruption of our people, if necessary, by confining its instigators to concentration camps.” On December 8 of that year, in a speech to the National Club in Berlin, Hitler expressed his intention of creating concentration camps upon taking power.136
The Red Terror had many aspects, but the historian’s first and foremost concern must be with its victims. Their number cannot be determined, and it is unlikely that it ever will be, for it is almost certain that Lenin ordered the Cheka archives destroyed.137 The closest to an official Soviet figure for the number executed between 1918 and 1920, furnished by Latsis, is 12,733. This figure, however, has been challenged as a vast underestimation on the grounds that, according to Latsis’s own admission, in the twenty provinces of central Russia in a single year (1918) there were 6,300 executions, 4,520 of whose victims had been shot for counterrevolutionary activity.138 Latsis’s figures are entirely disproportionate to the statistics available for some of the major cities. Thus, William Henry Chamberlin had seen at the Prague Russian Archive (now in Moscow) a report of the Ukrainian Cheka for the year 1920—by which time the death penalty had been formally abolished—listing 3,879 executions, 1,418 of them in Odessa and 538 in Kiev.139 Inquiries into Bolshevik atrocities in Tsaritsyn came up with an estimate of 3,000 to 5,000 victims.140 According to Izvestiia, between May 22 and June 22, 1920, the Revolutionary Tribunals alone—that is, without Cheka victims being taken into account—condemned to death 600 citizens, including 35 for “counterrevolution,” 6 for spying, and 33 for dereliction of duty.* Using such figures, Chamberlin estimates a total of 50,000 victims of the Red Terror, and Leggett, 140,000.141 All one can say with any assurance is that if the victims of Jacobin terror numbered in the thousands, Lenin’s terror claimed tens if not hundreds of thousands of lives. Victims of the next wave of terror, launched by Stalin and Hitler, would be counted in the millions.
To what purpose this carnage?
Dzerzhinskii, supported by Lenin, was given to boasting that terror and its instrument, the Cheka, had saved the Revolution. This appraisal is probably correct, as long as “the Revolution” is identified with the Bolshevik dictatorship. There exists solid evidence that by the summer of 1918, when the Bolsheviks launched the terror, they were rejected by all strata of the population except for their own apparatus. Under these circumstances, “merciless terror” was indeed the only way of preserving the regime.
This terror had to be not only “merciless” (can one even conceive of “merciful” terror?) but also indiscriminate. If the opponents of the Bolshevik dictatorship had been an identifiable minority, then one could have targeted them for surgical removal. But in Soviet Russia it was the regime and its supporters that were a minority. To stay in power, the dictatorship had first to atomize society and then destroy in it the very will to act. The Red Terror gave the population to understand that under a regime that felt no hesitation in executing innocents, innocence was no guarantee of survival. The best hope of surviving lay in making oneself as inconspicuous as possible, which meant abandoning any thought of independent public activity, indeed any concern with public affairs, and withdrawing into one’s private world. Once society disintegrated into an agglomeration of human atoms, each fearful of being noticed and concerned exclusively with physical survival, then it ceased to matter what society thought, for the government had the entire sphere of public activity to itself. Only under these conditions could a small minority subjugate millions.
But the price of such a regime was not cheap, either for its victims or for its practitioners. To stay in power against the wishes of the overwhelming majority, the Bolsheviks had to distort that power beyond all recognition. Terror may have saved communism, but it corroded its very soul.
Isaac Steinberg noted with a keen eye the devastating impact of the Red Terror on both the citizens and the authorities. Traveling in a streetcar in 1920, he was struck by an analogy between that packed vehicle and the country at large:
Does not our land resemble today’s streetcars, which drag themselves along Moscow’s dreary streets, worn out and creaking from old age, weighed down with people hanging on to it? How tightly these people are squeezed, how difficult it is to breathe here, as if after an exhausting fight. How hungry is the look in their eyes! See how shamelessly they steal seats from one another, how this mass of humanity, accidentally chained together, seems to lack all sense of mutual sympathy and understanding, how everyone sees in his fellow man only a rival! … Mindless hatred for the streetcar conductor—this expresses the feeling of this casual mass toward the government, the state, the organization. Indifference and irony toward those who crowd at the car’s entrance hoping to get in—this is their attitude toward the community, toward solidarity. When one observes them more intently one realizes that at bottom they are close to one another: the same thought, the same spark shines fraternally in their hostile eyes; the same pain weeps in them all. But now, here, they are pitiless enemies.142
But he also notes the effect of terror on its perpetrators:
When the terror strikes the class enemy, the bourgeois, when it tramples his self-esteem and the feeling of love, when it separates him from his family or confines him to his family, when it torments his spirit and causes it to wilt—whom does this terror strike? Only the class nature of the enemy, unique only to him and destined to disappear along with him? Or does it also, at the same time, strike something general, something that concerns all mankind, namely man’s human nature? The feelings of pity and suffering, the longing for the spirit and for freedom, the attachment to the family, and the yearning for the far away—all that which makes “men” out of men—these things, after all, are known and common to both camps. And when the terror stamps out, banishes, and exposes to ridicule feelings common to mankind in one group, then it does the same everywhere, in all souls.… The sense of dignity violated in the camp of the enemy, the suppressed feelings of pity for the enemy, the pain inflicted on some enemy, rebound, through a psychological reflex, back to the camp of the victors.… Slavery produces the same effect in the soul of the victor as in that of the vanquished.143