Red Terror of 1918 – 1921: What Was its Goal?

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                               Red Terror of 1918 – 1921: What Was its Goal?  
                                                           Introduction
      On November 7, of 1917, the Bolshevik revolution, an event that had a drastic effect on the course of the world history, occurred in Petrograd, Russia. How could the Bolsheviks, a relatively small group of people, hold power in such a vast ad diverse country as Russia? Richard Pipes and some other scholars believe that it was possible only due to a policy of mass terror. “Such a party could not rule by consent but had to make permanent use of terror”, Pipes states in the A concise history of the Russian revolution (Pipes, 217). Pipes believes that the goal of mass terror was to create a “pervasive atmosphere of lawlessness…which impressed on ordinary citizens a sense of outer powerlessness” (Pipes, 217). Other historians think that the terror was a harsh necessity of the Civil War: the only way to survive. Let us take a look at the development of Red Terror in the Soviet Russia and try to find out where the truth is.
                                                    The Decree of December 5
      Pipes believes that the first step in the introduction of mass terror was the “abolition of law”. The Sovnarkom’s Decree issued on December 5 (November 22, old style) of 1917, abolished nearly all existing general state institutions including courts, and destroyed the imperial legal system.
      Particularly, the decree abolished okruzhniye sudi (analog of American district courts), sudebniye palati (courts of appeals for okruzhniye sudi), and “the senate with all its departments” (roughly equivalent to the Supreme Court of the United States). The decree also eliminated the institution of mirovikh sudei (analog of magistrates’ courts). They were replaced by Local Courts and Revolutionary Tribunals (Decree of December 5, 1917).
       The Local Court consisted of three people, a judge and two members of the jury. They were to be selected by “direct democratic elections”.  Former magistrates had a right to become Local Judges (Decree of December 5, 1917).
       Local Courts exercised their jurisdiction over majority of civil and all minor (the maximum punishment - up to two years’ imprisonment) criminal matters. More serious criminal and civil offenses were supposed to be dealt with by courts that did not exist. Those courts were due to be crated later, by a separate decree (Decree of December 5, 1917).
         Imperial law officials were dismissed. The decree ordered Local Judges to investigate offenses that were under Local Courts jurisdiction. It was a temporarily measure. New organization was supposed to be formed by a separate decree in the future (Decree of December 5, 1917).
        A person could be arrested only if there was an agreement between all three members of the court. Any citizen who had “full citizen’s rights” could defend or accuse an offender during the trial (Decree of December 5, 1917).
       A considerable part of the population, primarily, former members of “exploiting classes” had limited citizens’ rights. However, “if a worker did not want to work for [the state, he would be considered] no longer a worker, but rather a hooligan, an enemy to the same degree as an exploiter (Shubin, 2001). “Dictatorship is iron-clad power; it is bold and swift in a revolutionary way, and it is merciless in suppression of both exploiters and hooligans” (Lenin, cited in Shubin, 2001).
       Judges of Local Courts were instructed to make decisions and pass sentences “by the laws of the overthrown government only to the extent that they have not been annulated by the Revolution and do not contradict the revolutionary conscience” (Pipes, p.219). People who had the power to mete imprisonment were not required to have a formal education.
       All activities that were considered being harmful to the state were handled by Revolutionary Tribunals of Workers and Peasants. This category of crimes embraced a wide variety of activities including speculation and sabotage. The Revolutionary Tribunal consisted of seven people: a chairman and six members. Those people were elected by local Soviets of Peasants and Workers Deputies’ (Decree of December 5, 1917).
                                        Why did the situation of lawlessness occur?
       As we can see, after the revolution, the Soviet Russia had courts, but did not have any laws to guide them; people were tried by amateur judges for crimes that were not defined in any legal code. Why?
       I see two reasons for it. First, the law reforms were consistent with the main Bolsheviks’ doctrine: Power to workers. Lenin wrote,
“Democracy introduced with maximal completeness and all conceivable consistency is transformed from a bourgeois democracy into a proletarian one, from the state (i.e., a special force for the suppression of a certain class) into something that is not the state proper. Such a democracy meant transfer of power directly to the organs of the workers’ and peasants’ self-government and liquidation of the bureaucratic superstructure: “Full electivity, removability of all officials, without exception, at any time, reduction of their salary to the regular ‘wages’ of a worker—all these simple and ‘self-explanatory’ democratic measures, while uniting the interests of the workers and the majority of the peasants, at the same time serve as a bridge leading from capitalism to socialism.” (Lenin, cited in Shubin, 2001).
 Lenin thought that Russia would be not a state of government officials, but rather a state of armed workers who would control the process of governing through the Soviets. Lenin imagined control as something very simple (Shubin, 2001).
      Second, we should remember that the Soviet Russia did not exist in a vacuum, but was surrounded by enemies. Most of the country was controlled by the Bolsheviks’ adversaries. Citizens were dying of hunger. The Bolsheviks simply had no time to create an elaborate legal system.
                               The Bolsheviks’ doctrine and a value of a human life.
       V. Chernov compared a social model of the Bolshevism with “a colossal machine in which history conquers available people along with their weaknesses, habits, passions, and opinions as human “raw material,” subject to merciless processing (Chernov cited in Shubin, 2001).
       The Lenin’s attitude towards human lives is illustrated in some of his writings. For example after a murder of Volodarsky, a commissar of propaganda, Lenin wrote to Zinoviev, “Comrade Zinoviev! Only today we in TsK heard that in Peter[sburg] the workers wanted to respond to Volodarsky’s murder with mass terror, and you. . . . restrained them. I protest strongly. We have to encourage the energy and mass expressions of the terror against counterrevolutionaries (Lenin cited in Shubin, 2001).
       Also, on August 19 of 1918, Lenin sent the following telegram, “In Nizhni [Novgorod] preparation for a White Guard uprising is clearly under way. You have to gather all the forces, form a troika of the dictators, and institute mass terror immediately; shoot and deport hundreds of prostitutes (who make drunkards out of the soldiers), former officers, and so on” (Lenin cited in Shubin, 2001).
      Here is another Lenin’s telegram, “Conduct merciless mass terror against the kulaks, priests, and the White Guards; lock the suspicious ones in a concentration camp outside the city.” On 22 August, Lenin gave orders “to shoot the conspirators and the wavering ones, never asking for anyone’s permission and without bureaucratic delays.” “Thus, not only “enemies” but even “wavering ones” became subject to destruction” (Shubin, 2001). It seems that an era of mass terror was inevitable.
                                                     The Beginning.
      Officially, a campaign of Red Terror was announced on September 5 of 1918. This policy was proclaimed by “two decrees…issued…on September 4, [and] on September 5” (Pipes, p.223). (Actually, the document issued on September 4, which Pipes cited in his book is not a decree but the order of Peoples’ Commissar of the Interior Petrovsky; Sovnarkom’s decree of September 4 was “On Nationalization of Private Railroads”).
       The order of September 4 states, “all right SR known to the 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 of resistance or the least stir in White Guard circles, resort must be had at once to mass executions…” (Pipes, 223).
       The document declares that the Red Terror was a response to “murders of Volocharsky, Uritsky, an attempted murder of the chairman of Soviet of Peoples’ Commissars’ Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, mass executions of tens of thousands of our comrades in Finland, the Ukraine, and…in the Don region…” (order of Peoples’ Commissar of the Interior of September 4, 1918).
      The Sovnarkom’s decree of September 5 ordered class enemies to be committed to concentration camps, and all people “linked to White Guard organization conspiracies, and seditious actions to be summarily executed” (Pipes, p.223).
      In the very first month, thousands were executed; most of them were guilty only of belonging to “counterrevolutionary” classes and social movements.
“M. Latsis, one of the Cheka leaders, expressed his view of the red terror,…: “Do not search for evidence in each case—whether he [i.e., the accused—A.Sh] has opposed the Soviet [regime] by arms or by words. First of all, you have to ask him to what class he belongs, what are his origins, education, and profession. Those are the questions that should decide the fate of the accused.” (Latsis cited in Shubin, 2001).
 Lenin criticized Latsis for those words. But that “did not stop the bacchanalia of murders rolling throughout the territory under the Bolsheviks’ control” (Shubin, 2001).
     It is now difficult to establish the scale of the terror, but “materials collected by a prominent Russian historian of the terror, S. Melgunov, allow one to estimate the number of victims as involving at least hundreds of thousands” (Shubin, 2001).
                                           All-Russian Extraordinary Commission
        A main tool of the Bolsheviks’ policy of Red Terror was the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission (VChK, or Cheka).  It was formed on December 7, of 1917. The organization combined the functions of judicial investigation and trial. “The Cheka arrested, and that same Cheka conducted investigations, trials, and executions. Arbitrariness was total; it was important not so much to find culprits as to instill fear in the entire nation. In fact, the red terror was not a class terror: its blows fell on all strata of the population” (Shubin, 2001).
       Pipes compares the Cheka with the tsarist security police (okhrana), “The security police was another important organization that the Bolsheviks adopted from tsarism”. “Tsarist Russia was unique in that she alone had two police formations, one to defend the state” interests, and the other to fight crime. Offense against the state were not clearly defined, “little distinction being drawn between intention and deed”. The tsarist “state police developed sophisticated methods of surveillance, infiltrating society through a network of paid informers and the opposition parties with the help of professional agents”. These methods were all very familiar to Russian revolutionaries who, “on coming to power, adopted them and turned them against their enemies”. The Cheka “assimilated the practices of the tsarist state police to such an extent that, as late as the 1980s, the KGB distributed to its staff manuals prepared by the Okhrana nearly a century earlier” (Pipes, 1994).
      The methods used by the Cheka could be understood from the words of Felix Dzerzhinsky, its firest leader, “Don’t think I am in search of forms of revolutionary justice; we don’t need justice right now. . . . I suggest, I demand, the organization of revolutionary reprisal against the counterrevolutionaries” (Shubin, 2001).
      It seems to be obvious that the Extraordinary Commission was created as an instrument of terror. Here is an interesting fact, however. “On 10 December, there was the first trial in the history of the new regime, a trial against Countess S. Panina, who hid Ministry of Education funds from the Bolshevik government. There were no repressions: all ended in a “public reprimand” (Shubin). Perhaps, the Cheka became an “instrument of terror” later, in a response to certain circumstances during the civil war. 
                                                             White Terror.
      An honest study of the Red Terror is impossible without discussion of the White Terror, a policy conducted on a territory controlled by White Guards.
      “The White “cause” was initiated by the almost saintly; but how did it end? My God! . . . Initiated by the “almost saintly”, it fell into the hands of “almost bandits” (Shulgin cited in Shubin, 2001).
       Shubin also mentions that “the “Whites” treated Jews in the same way the Bolsheviks treated the “bourgeois,”… they had applied terror to peasants and had established an open dictatorship of militarization”. He once again cited Shulgin, “The other movement, the “white” one, strove for dictatorship of the old elite that had been degraded under the influence of war and was infected with racism. The authoritarianism of the “white” movement gravitated toward forms of early fascism (Shulgin cited in Shubin, 2001).
       It is far from clear that the number of innocent victims on one side was lower than that of the other. For example, “landlords who return to reclaim their lost property often carried out the most brutal revenge – with the aid of White soldiers – on the peasants who dared to take landlord property. It was Denikin’s Cossacks who buried Jews up to their necks and rode horseback over their protruding heads” (Kenez, 1990).
                                                   Alternatives: Mahno?
         Could the Bolsheviks’ regime survive in the Civil War without its policy of mass terror and one party dictatorship? It is a question that has no answer, but there was an interesting precedent in the Russian History.
Sometimes, during the Civil War, there emerged  sociopolitical systems capable of defending their territory for a long time. The largest of such formations was the “Makhno region.” Their self-governing bodies were established within peasant communes, insurgent detachments, and collectives of workers and were developed by the Makhnovians in the form of soviets. As early as in February 1919, Makhnovian congresses of soviets began to criticize the Bolsheviks’ dictatorship openly, even though the “Whites” remained their main enemy. Demanding from the Bolsheviks restoration of civic freedom and real rather than abstract Soviet power, Makhnovian congresses introduced democratic order in their area. The Cheka was not admitted in the region; there was no food dictatorship, and no monopoly on power was held by any one party. With all that, even V. Antonov-Ovseenko, commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian front, had to admit that the region was one of the best among the flourishing regions of the Ukraine (Shubin).
                                                    Aftermath and conclusion
       Pipes and some other historians believe that terror is a vital part of a communist regime; without this policy, a government simply would not be able to rule. They argue that Leninsm and Stalinism are the same things. Stalin just continued the Lenin’s deed, and Lenin’s Red Terror of the Civil War was a preparation for a much bigger Stalin’s terror. I do not think so.
In point of fact, we know that the early Soviet state incarcerated very few workers and a relatively a small number of its citizens. Recently published GPU summaries, from 1922 to 1928, report over 3,000 strikes but mention only six incidents in which authorities arrested striking workers. The entire Soviet prison population only exceeded 100,000 in 1925, with a tiny minority imprisoned for political offenses. In her Pulitzer Prize-winning study of the Gulags, Anne Applebaum reluctantly acknowledges that, by the end of 1927, only 300,000 Soviet citizens were incarcerated and political prisoners received special privileged status until 1925 (Murphy, 2007).
To compare, in 2007, a prison population of the democratic USA without those on probation and parole was about 2.3 million people (New York Times).
      I think that Lenin used Red Terror to win the Civil War. When the war was over, Lenin did not need Red Terror to govern the country. The policy of terror was not as essential as Mr. Pipes believes. Perhaps, Lenin recognized a weakness of his political theory. In 1921, he introduced the New Economic Policy trying to combine elements of capitalism and socialism. A quiet similar situation can be observed in a modern China today.








                                                         References

Decree of September 5, 1918    http://hronos.km.ru/dokum/terror1918.html

Decree of December 5, 1917   http://www.hist.msu.ru/ER/Etext/DEKRET/o_sude1.htm

Order of September 4, 1918 on Hostages signed by by Petrovsky, People's Commissar of  the Interior http://www.hrono.info/dokum/zalozh1918.html

Kenez, P. (1991, July). The prosecution of Soviet history: A critique of Richard Pipes' The Russian Revolution. Russian Review, 50(3), 345. Retrieved May 10, 2009, from Academic Search Premier database

Murphy K. J., (2007) Can We Write the History of the Russian Revolution? Historical Materialism 15, 3–195 Retrieved May 10, 2009, from Academic Search Premier database.

Pipes, R., (1994, Spring). Did the Russian Revolution have to happen? American Scholar, 00030937,Vol. 63, Issue 2 Retrieved May 10, 2009, from Academic Search Premier database.

Pipes, R., (1995). A concise history of the Russian revolution Vintage Books, a division of Random House, New York

Shubin, A. (2001, November). Russian Revolution and the Bolshevik Dictatorship. Journal of Russian & East European Psychology, 39(6), 41. Retrieved May 10, 2009, from Academic Search Premier database
Books on Red Terror: