The Workshop Of The Revolution. I. N. Steinberg 1953
Before considering Bolshevik terror, it is only right to retrace our steps from the October, 1917, period and to recall the beginning of the Russian Revolution in February of 1917. Among historians, both Russian and foreign, the opinion is widespread that the February Revolution had been “bloodless,” peaceable, almost an idyll of good will. The fall of czarism and the transition to democratic government is, for the most part, described as a model of nonviolent revolution, in sharp contrast to the brutalities and outrages of the October rebellion.
This picture is far from historic truth. Those spring days of 1917 were darkened by many acts of violence committed – by the masses of the people against representatives of the czarist regime-but little, almost nothing, has been said about them. General Denikin, Commander of the White Armies, for instance, has published five volumes on the “Russian Chaos,” as he calls the revolution; but this issue is mentioned briefly and offhandedly. “The number of victims in the capital during the first days of the Revolution was not large,” Denikin writes. “There were 1,443 dead and wounded in Petrograd; among them 869 were army personnel, sixty of them officers. Naturally, this figure does not include all the wounded.” That is all. The figure of about fifteen hundred dead and wounded in Petrograd alone is dismissed as being “not large.” And we know that bloody events occurred in Moscow and in other large cities; we remember the wholesale retributions by sailors of the Baltic Fleet against their commanding officers. Yet these holocausts on the altar of the revolution have been silently passed over. You seek in vain for detailed accounts of them, or for expressions of regret in the works of authoritative Russian politicians and historians-men like Paul Miliukov, Victor Chernov, Alexander Kerensky. The champions and eulogists of that period never condemned, but rather contemplated calmly -as sad but unavoidable facts-the bloodshed and the sufferings of the victims. Psychologically they were able to do so, because they accepted the bourgeois-democratic revolution as a whole. For them, social interests and political theories submerged the moral issues.
The violent events, however, must be viewed and judged in fairness. They had been impulsive acts of the anonymous masses, that is to say, they had definitely not been organized by anyone. In these outbreaks of political lynch-justice the masses, long enslaved and corrupted by oppressive regimes, gave rebellious expression to their pent-up spirit of protest. Such outbursts of the people’s wrath often took cruel forms, which must never be hushed up or ignored. But these paroxysms never lasted, precisely because they were spontaneous. In stormy, short convulsions the people gratified their impulses of rage-and then came to their senses. Within a little while, feelings of friendship, comradeship and solidarity gained the ascendant. Then the victorious people displayed a rare capacity for forgiveness toward their former enemies. Instead of anger and hatred, they now felt for them only pity-or contempt.
One important historic fact confirms this quality in the Russian people. The world knows with what deadly hatred they abhorred the czarist order. Yet there was no outspoken desire in the masses to settle accounts with the Czar himself and his family. Not once, in those days, was an aggressive proposal made in the Soviets that the Czar stand public trial. The obvious analogy of the French Revolution, with its dramatic decapitation of Louis XVI and its guillotine parades in Paris, evoked no sympathetic echo in the mind of the Russian revolutionary populace.
And this is perhaps the moment to recall the only occasion when the fate of the Czar’s family was discussed in the Council of People’s Commissars during the coalition of Bolsheviks and Left Social-Revolutionaries. It was in the dangerous days of February, 1918, when the German armies had resumed their advance on Russia, that this question was suddenly raised. Representatives of the Peasant Congress appeared at a session of the Commissars and introduced a motion demanding that the czarist family be brought back from Tobolsk (in Siberia) for public trial. It was not hard to understand the motives behind this demand; its authors believed that, with such a historic performance, they would cheer and encourage the people who were deeply alarmed at the new military danger.
It was normal for the meeting to turn to the Commissar of Justice, who would have to plan and stage this grandiose spectacle of right and retribution. But I had several arguments against the entire project. Most important was the reminder that monarchy was no longer a live issue with the people, and that a trial of the former Czar-however solemn and theatrical-would add neither joy nor courage. The social revolution, I said, has different purposes and different symbols. In addition, I warned that the Czar’s long transport from Siberia might tempt the lynch-justice of fanatics or self-styled revolutionists.
Several other members of the Council expressed their views,and finally all eyes turned to Lenin, who presided over the session. And, strangely enough, for once he agreed with me. Calmly he said that he also doubted the timeliness of such a trial; that the masses were too preoccupied with other concerns, and that it would be well to postpone the matter. In the meantime, the Commissariat of Justice should be charged with the preparation of the pertinent documents for future use. Lenin, of course, had his own political calculations in the stand he took. That night, however, the issue was waived, and that is where the matter rested. The Commissariat of Justice never troubled to “prepare the documents.”
During the February phase of the revolution, despite numerous acts of violence, the people as a whole proved themselves generous and humane. But this was equally true eight months later, during the October rising. In fact, the number of spontaneous acts of violence-wholesale or individual-was incomparably smaller in October than it had been eight months before. And this is the more remarkable since the people entered the October Revolution with much bitterness in their hearts. Yet the exultant joy of social liberation was so great that it overpowered any avenging instinct in the masses. True, in the first triumphal days of October, there were again cruel and senseless murders of officers in the Baltic and Black Sea Fleets. General Dukhonin, Commander in Chief of the Army, was lynched. And in January, 1918, two former Kadet ministers were brutally murdered (See Chapter VI). But the vindictive violence did not spread. Soon the angry rush of popular fury receded and the shameful acts of political lynch-justice ceased.
To be sure, the historians and memorialists of the October rebellion never stop exclaiming over its brutal blood-stained path. But once again: this is the voice of political passion rather than the expression of an earnest search for historic truth. The same eyes that looked at February’s violence through a reducing glass, used magnifiers for their judgment of October.
But just because popular violence had been comparatively limited, proving it limitable, it was the moral task of revolutionary leaders to restrain further any possible lawlessness and quickly guide the people to the path of justice. Above all, there should have been no provocations to hatred and revenge from supreme government organs, from speakers’ forums and socialist newspapers. Unfortunately, however, one group did not understand, or wish to countenance, this truth. The party of the Bolsheviks viewed the issue in precisely opposite fashion; it preferred to steer the revolution by a deliberate appeal to the basest passions in the people. Furthermore, this demagogic incitement was directed at the masses by a party which had first gained their confidence because of its stand on peace, on the power of the proletariat and so forth. Thus the people came to accept not only the radical social policy of the Bolsheviks but, with it, almost imperceptibly, part of its nihilistic and cynical attitude toward the moral values of the revolution. Therein lay the danger.
From the very first days of October, Lenin strove to impress his colleagues with the absolute necessity for violence, execution, terror. In his book on Lenin, published in 1924, Leon Trotsky relates a number of incidents that bear witness to this. During the Soviet Congress, which ratified the October rebellion, the Bolshevik Kamenev suggested, with Trotsky’s concurrence, the abolition of the Kerensky decree which had reintroduced capital punishment at the front. The decree was duly revoked. When Lenin, a day later, learned of this first action of the Soviet, he was furious. “What nonsense,” he exclaimed.
“Can you make a revolution without executions? Do you think you'll defeat your enemies by disarming yourselves?” He “feared” the soft-hearted Russian character. He mistrusted its ability to be firm. “Soft, too soft is the Russian,” he declared. “He is not capable of applying the harsh measures of revolutionary terror.”
Later, during the sessions of the Commissars, Lenin spoke repeatedly in the same spirit. Thus, when the German Army launched its attack in February, 1918, the Government decided to exhort the people with a manifesto (February 21, 1918): “The Socialist Fatherland is in danger! “ Its author was Trotsky. And he proposed that this document, which appealed to the heroism of the Russian people, include the threat that all who opposed Government orders would be “destroyed on the spot.” When the People’s Commissars debated the text, I objected that this cruel threat killed the whole pathos of the manifesto. Lenin replied with derision, “On the contrary, herein lies true revolutionary pathos. Do you really believe that we can be victorious without the very crudest revolutionary terror?”
It was difficult even to argue with Lenin on this score, and we soon reached an impasse. We were discussing a harsh police measure with far-reaching terroristic potentialities. Lenin resented my opposition to it in the name of revolutionary justice. So I called out in exasperation, “Then why do we bother with a Commissariat of Justice? Let’s call it frankly the Commissariat for Social Extermination and be done with it!” Lenin’s face suddenly brightened and he replied, “Well put . . . that’s exactly what it should be . . . but we can’t say that.”
In my description of the Bolshevik terror I shall limit myself to the years 1918, 1919, 1920, though not because the terrorist flood reached its apex of power and bestiality during those years. The decades following, and particularly the 1930’s, were to witness terroristic waves on a scale no one could ever have imagined. But in the years between 1918 and 1920 the system of cynical terror, that has since become so familiar, was instituted and became entrenched. The events of those years formed the foundation upon which the Bolshevik state was later constructed. And the soil of revolutionary Russia was poisoned in that period; it was inevitable that in the future it should bear poisonous fruit.
The manifesto of February 21, 1918, which justified and incited summary shootings, cleared the way for the Cheka terror. It is not possible here to trace all the streams and rivulets of blood which then began flowing throughout the country. It is enough to read the long, and far from complete, lists of those executed published in the Weekly Bulletin of the Cheka, to realize what was being done “in the name of socialism.”
After the signing of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty with Germany (which caused the resignation of Left Social-Revolutionaries from the Government), the general deterioration of conditions and ensuing food crises led the regime to organize punitive and requisitioning units and send them into the villages, where these units used brutal means of coercion. No question: the period between March and the end of August, 1918, was one of factual, though not yet official, Red terror. It was during those months that the revolutionary tribunals received instructions revoking the abolition of capital punishment. Along with the “extra-legal” executions of the Cheka, the right to pronounce death sentences was now granted the tribunals. And the greatest achievement of the revolution, specifically confirmed by the Second Congress of Soviets in October, 1917, was thus swept aside. In this manner the activities of the Cheka, the tribunals, the punitive detachments and the Army groups charged with suppression of counter-revolutionary revolts, all combined to create an actual, though still sporadic, state of terror. Only some explosive pretext was required to fuse them into a permanent system.
The Bolsheviks got their pretext at the end of August, 1918. Uritzky, head of the Petrograd Cheka, was assassinated in that city, and in Moscow an attempt was made on Lenin’s life by the well-known revolutionary, Dora Kaplan. All the Bolsheviks’ fury and their drive for revenge was unleashed. Now the official press spoke out in blatant terms. “Thousands of enemies must pay for the death of our comrade,” wrote the Petrograd Krassnaya Gazeta. “Enough of sentimentalism. The foe is pitiless . . . we too shall be without mercy. We'll teach the bourgeoisie a bloody lesson that will finish them forever. Terror on the living! Comrade sailors, workers and soldiers! Destroy to the end the remnants of the White Guardists and the bourgeoisie. Let death to the bourgeoisie be the slogan of the day.” Pravda wrote: “Workers! The time has come when you must destroy the bourgeoisie, else it will destroy you. Prepare for inexorable measures against the enemies of the revolution. Cleanse the cities of the bourgeois rot. All the gentlemen bourgeois must be put under surveillance as were the gentlemen officers, and all who spell danger to the cause of the revolution must be liquidated. From now on the hymn of the working class will be a hymn of hatred and revenge, more terrible than the hymn which the Germans sing against Britain.”
And here are two commandments from the “Catechism of the Class Conscious Proletarian” (Numbers 8 and 10).[8]
“Take the gun in your hands, worker and pauper. Learn to shoot well. Be ready for uprisings in the hinterland by Kulaks and White Guardists. To the wall with all who agitate against the Soviet power. Ten bullets for everyone who raises his hand against it.”
“The bourgeoisie is an indefatigable foe. The power of capital will be extinguished only , with the death of the last capitalist, the last landowner, priest and officer.”
The newspaper clamor was followed by Government action. On September 2, 1918, at a meeting of the Soviet Central Executive Committee, the following resolution concerning the attempt on Lenin and the assassination of Uritzky was passed:
“The Central Executive solemnly warns all lackeys of the Russian and Allied bourgeoisie: All counter-revolutionaries and those who inspire them will answer for each attempt on members of the Soviet regime and bearers of the idea of the socialist revolution. To the white terror of the enemies of the Workers’ and Peasants’ State, the workers and peasants will reply with a mass red terror against the bourgeoisie and its agents.”
The next morning, September 3, Petrovsky, the People’s Commissar of the Interior, telegraphed the following order to all local Soviets: “There must be an immediate end to laxity and sentimentality. All Right Social-Revolutionaries, known to the local Soviets, are to be arrested at once. Considerable numbers of hostages are to be taken from among the bourgeoisie and the officer caste. The slightest attempt at resistance, or the slightest move in circles of the White Guardists, must at once be stifled by summary mass shooting. Provincial Executive Committees must exhibit special initiative in the matter. . . . No hesitations, no doubts in the application of mass terror.”
If the supreme organs of the regime spoke in such language, what could be expected from its executive organs, from its local offices? And indeed, while the decree of the Central Executive
Committee as yet confined itself to “warnings,” the locals were already wreaking vengeance.
In fact, the language of Petrovsky and the Chekists had been forecast by Lenin himself. A telegram sent by him on August 9, 1918, to the Soviet of the city of Nishni-Novgorod, provides a perfect sample of the terrorist mentality. The telegram was first made public twenty years later, in 1938.
“In Nishni-Novgorod an open uprising of White Guardists is clearly in preparation. You must mobilise all forces, establish a triumvirate of dictators, introduce immediately mass terror, shoot and deport hundreds of prostitutes who ply soldiers and officers with vodka. Do not hesitate for a moment. You must act promptly: mass searches, executions for hiding arms; mass deportations of Mensheviks and security risks.
Your Lenin.”
The attacks on Uritzky and Lenin had been made on August 30, and by September 1, the “Central Committee To Fight the Counter-Revolution” in Nishni-Novgorod had already shot forty-six people. “For every murder of a Communist,” wrote the Nishni-Novgorod Workers and Peasants Bulletin, “or for every attempt we shall reply with shooting the hostages of the bourgeoisie. For the blood of our murdered and wounded comrades cries out for revenge.”
The Petrograd Cheka immediately executed 512 people from among the hostages held. This monstrous number appalled some of the Bolsheviks, while it encouraged the licentiousness of others. This hecatomb to “madness and cowardice” led to a recoil even among some of the theoreticians of the Red terror, but it also cleared the way for the installation in all Russia of the system of hostages.
“In reply to the attempt on Comrade Uritzky and the leader of the world proletariat, Comrade Lenin, the All-Russian Cheka in Moscow shot fifteen men, and later an additional ninety.” [9] Among them were thieves accused of stealing from members of co-operatives or officials, small-time crooks and forgers-that is, a purely criminal element. Yet even in czarist Russia there had not been capital punishment for criminal offenses. The Bolshevik power, thus, had taken it upon itself to obliterate even this leniency of the old world and reintroduce the brutal ways of “justice” of the days before Catherine the Great.
“In answer to the assassination of Uritzky and the attempt on Lenin the Archangel Cheka executed nine men, and the Cheka in Kimry-twelve; in Vitebsk-two; Zebezh-seventeen; Velizh -two; Vologda-fourteen; Velsk-four; North-Dwinsk-five; Kursk-nine.” At the same time the Potchekhoni Cheka executed thirty-one men (including entire families-five Shalayevs, four Volkovs, two Semyonovs); in Penza-eight; in Chernij- three men who happened to be in jail for embezzlement; in Valanovsk-eight; in Novgorod-eight. The same events transpired in the provinces of Mstislav, Ryazan, Tambov, Lipetsk. In Smolensk the Cheka shot thirty-four men, including criminals, former landowners, officers and policemen and, to conduct the investigations, this Cheka introduced physical torture.
In Rybinsk the Executive Committee, after learning of the assassination in Berlin of the German revolutionist Karl Liebknecht, debated the question of retaliating with Red terror on the “local bourgeoisie.” All members of this Executive Committee were later tried and convicted for embezzlement, bribery and executions without trial. And so it went on, endlessly.
The crowning event in this stampede to “revolution” was the old-fashioned revenge upon the person who had dared raise her hand against the head of this system-against Lenin. Despite the fact that Lenin recovered from his wound, despite the well- known socialist past of the terrorist, who had spent years in czarist Katorga, despite the many historic precedents of mercy in similar cases-Dora Kaplan was executed.
“And yet,” Maria Spiridonova wrote at the time, “such mercy would have been more than just a fine gesture. It was essential for our revolution at a time of general madness and frenzy, when not a noble sound, not a single chord of love was heard.” [10]
Blood flowed, and terror multiplied the already heavy casualties at the fronts of the civil war, where masses of “Whites” and “Reds” were locked in bitter battles. As in all wars, men were dying on both sides. On August 2 3, 1918, Latzis, one of the most important officials of the Cheka, published an article in Izvestya, whose heading was eloquent enough-"There are No Laws in Civil War.” He proceeded
“In almost all periods, among almost all nations, the established customs of war were formulated in written laws. Capitalist war has its laws as stated in various conventions. Accordingly prisoners are not shot; peace delegations have the right to immunity; there is an exchange of prisoners. . . . But when you turn to our civil war, you will see nothing of this sort. It would be ridiculous to introduce, or demand the application of, these laws which once were considered sacred. Slaughter all who were wounded in the battle against you-that is a law of the civil war. The bourgeoisie has accepted it; but we have not yet mastered it. This is weakness. . . . The laws of the civil war are not yet written; only now, in this mad struggle, are they being adumbrated. Yet we must come to know them well. . . . They shoot us by the hundreds, by the thousands. We still shoot them singly, after long deliberations in commissions and tribunals. In civil war there must be no trials for the enemy. If you don’t break him, the enemy will break you. So smash him before he smashes you.”
That is what Latzis thought of the civil war. But here is another quotation from the same author, and it is obvious that the same red thread runs through his entire ideology. He was discussing the tribunals which tried disarmed counter-revolutionary prisoners, and he stated: “Do not seek in your accusations proof of whether the prisoner had rebelled against the Soviets with guns or by word. First you must ask him to what class he belongs, what his social origin is, what his education was and his profession. The answers must determine the fate of the accused. That is the meaning of the Red terror.”
No limits were staked to brutality in civil war, nor were any such applied to the internal terror. The provinces were soon to show how far the pendulum could swing once it was set in motion by frenzied hands. Official Government spokesmen in the capital may still have been using their whips on counterrevolutionists only, with the pretense of theoretical justification. But in the depths of the country these theories were monstrously distorted and bore down heavily on the people, on the villages, which had accepted the revolution in full. Here follows an account of a number of episodes, true ones, tiny fragments of Russia’s widespread and infinite grief.[11]
In the province of Kostroma, the village of Uranj, “the representative of the Executive Rekhalov and his closest colleagues really outdid themselves: the beating of petitioners in the Soviet was customary and flogging was carried on in all villages of the province. In Beryozovka, for instance, peasants were beaten with fists as well as sticks. They were forced to take off their boots and sit for hours in the snow. In Urensk region Rekhalov and company were not alone; they were joined by members of the Varnavinsk Executive Committee, Galakhov, Makhov and others. They were particularly obnoxious during the requisition of bread. As they approached a village, Galakhov’s and Makhov’s detachments would open fire to frighten the inhabitants. Peasants would put on five shirts and more not to feel the flogging; but that did not help much because the whips were of twisted wire, and it happened frequently that the shirts penetrated into the flesh and dried up so that they had to be soaked off with warm water.”
A Red Army soldier reported: “Makhov gave us orders to give it good to the arrested peasants, that is to whip them thoroughly. Instead of dragging them along with us, he said, whip them and let them remember the Soviet regime.” And a village assembly in the province of Kostroma wrote: “They are destroying us. They shackle our free will; they scorn us as if we were brainless cattle.”
And another report: “In the Khvalinsk region of Saratov province, Red Army and special food detachments arrived in the village. Three officials rounded up the peasants at night, ordered the village bathhouse heated and girls driven there. ‘The most beautiful girls, the young ones!’ The peasants started to yell and scream. Fighting broke out. One of the Red Armists fired a shot. All night they fought and the result was: one official killed and the other two ran away with their detachment.” That is how innumerable “peasant uprisings” came into being, uprisings which were later ruthlessly suppressed.
In some villages the Cheka locked masses of peasants in cold warehouses, stripped them and beat them with gun butts. Local officials said: “They told us in the center: better to oversalt than not to salt enough.”
“In the old days,” peasants reported from Makarayevo, “village policemen did not ride on the backs of the peasants, but now the Communists take joyrides on them.” In the Bielsk district of Vitebsk province, peasants were flogged on orders of the Local Executive. In Dukhovchina, Smolensk province, “the Executive was a drunken gang and entirely responsible for the uprising.” One Committee of Paupers received the following orders from the Food Commissar: “Announce to your citizens that I give them three days to supply 10,000 poods of bread. For non-compliance I will shoot all the men, as I have already shot one rascal in the village of Varvarinka tonight. The authorized agent ... is empowered, at non-compliance, to shoot- particularly in the despicable settlement of. . . .”
In Livny, Orel province, there was flogging and shooting for failure to deliver half the tax. “They took everything from us,” a peasant letter reported, “even the clothes and linens from the women; coats, boots and watches from the men. And, of course, the bread.” And another: “They bound our hands and flogged us. They killed one man, who would not submit. And he was insane. They left us a lot of leaflets and pamphlets. We burned them all. Nothing but lies and deceit.” [12]
Is this color enough to paint the picture of the revolutionary land? Can we conclude our description of this “transition to socialism? “ Have we reached the limits beyond which one cannot 20? No. The limits have not been reached. We must look further.
“We did not hide our bread,” another letter said. “As ordered by decree, we retained nine poods per year for each person. Then they sent us an order to retain only seven poods, and deliver another two. We complied. Then the Bolsheviks and their detachments came and destroyed everything. So we rose up against them. Things are bad in the Ukhnovsk district; artillery defeated us. Villages are in flames. They leveled our houses. Yet we had delivered everything. We wanted to do it in peace. We knew that the city was hungry, and we did not pamper ourselves.”
And still another: “They killed men frequently just because they were Left Social-Revolutionaries and insisted on remaining such. In Kotelnichy, for instance, they murdered Makhnov and Missuno only because they were Left Social-Revolutionaries. ... Yet they had been real children of the people’s revolution, had risen from its depths. They had straightened their backs and had worked in such manner that there were actual legends told about Missuno in all districts where he had appeared.” They were the “unknown heroes on whose shoulders we had carried the entire October Revolution,” Spiridonova added. “Missuno paid dearly before his execution for refusing to . . . dig his own grave with his hands. Makhnov agreed on condition that he would be permitted to say something before his death. His last words were: ‘Long live the world socialist revolution!’ “
In Kaluga province, Medinsk district, 170 men were shot as were four women teachers. They cried, as they were dying under the bullet fire, “Long live the purity of Soviet power!”
A report of another incident went: “In Shatsk district they have the Vicbinsk Icon of the Virgin, which is particularly revered by the people. The village was suffering from an epidemic which had infected the entire population. So the people organized a prayer meeting and a procession to the Icon to seek help. The chairman of the Cheka arrested the priest and impounded the Icon. At the office they mocked it, spat on it, dragged it across the floor and humiliated the priest in every way. The Shatsk district is very backward; the people lost their good sense and went to liberate Christ’s mother: women, old men and children together. The chairman of the Cheka opened fire on them.”
“I am a soldier,” a peasant witness wrote, in describing the Shatsk incident. “I have fought many battles against the Germans. But I have never seen anything like this. The bullets were cutting them down in rows. And forward they marched, unseeing, over the bodies of dead and wounded. Their eyes were filled with horror, women held their children in front of them, crying: ‘Holy Mother, save us, have pity. We'll all die for you.’ They had lost all fear. Many, many were killed that day by the desperate Bolsheviks.”
Let this be enough. We have not reached the limit, but then we never shall. Such descriptions could be continued indefinitely: they are so many, so varied, so cruelly eloquent. We shall not return to them. Let our memory, retaining these words and these acts, help our minds and our consciences later to draw the final conclusions about terror, the Bolshevik terror.