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The most common use of Red Terror in English refers to the campaign of mass arrests, deportations, and executions conducted by the Bolshevik government in early Soviet Russia. In Soviet historiography the Red Terror is described as officially announced on September 2, 1918 by Yakov Sverdlov and ended in about October 1918. However many historians, beginning with Sergei Melgunov apply this term to repressions for the whole period of the Russian Civil War, 1918-1922. The mass repressions were conducted without judicial process by the state security organization, Cheka.

The term "Red Terror" was originally used to describe the last six weeks of the "Reign of Terror" of the French Revolution, ending on July 28, 1794 (execution of Robespierre), to distinguish it from the subsequent period of the White Terror (historically this period has been known as the Great Terror (French: la Grande Terreur)).

Purpose of the Soviet Red Terror

The stated purpose of this campaign was struggle with counter-revolutionaries considered to be enemies of the people. Many Russian communists openly proclaimed that Red Terror was needed for extermination of entire social groups, the former oppresive ruling classes to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat. Vladimir Lenin dedicated several pamphlets to the dictatorship of the proletariat, in one of these works he said that it would be "the economic system of Russia in the era of the dictatorship of the proletariat represents the struggle of labour, united on communist principles on the scale of a vast state and making its first steps—the struggle against petty commodity production and against the capitalism which still persists and against that which is newly arising on the basis of petty commodity production."  Being a studied Marxist, Lenin knew that the terror would need to be untilized eventually, lest Russia's liberation go the way of the Paris Commune. Communist leader Grigory Zinoviev declared in September 1918: 

"To dispose of our enemies, we will have to create our own socialist terror. For this we will have to train 90 million of the 100 million of Russians and have them all on our side. We have nothing to say to the other 10 million; we will have to get rid of them."

Because the Red Terror was the manifestation of deeply-burried class tensions, the Bolsheviks were unapalogenic about executing people simply for their status in the Russian class-stratus, irrelevant of their deeds. Martin Latsis, chief of the Ukrainian Cheka, explained in newspaper "Red Terror":

"Do not look in the file of incriminating evidence to see whether or not the accused rose up against the Soviets with arms or words. Ask him instead to which class he belongs, what is his background, his education, his profession. These are the questions that will determine the fate of the accused. That is the meaning and essence of the Red Terror."

History

Tensions for the campaign began with the devestating civil war raging accross Russia as the capitalist powers tried desperately to squish the first ever workers' state. However it was the assassination of Petrograd Cheka leader Moisei Uritsky, and attempted assassination of Vladimir Lenin by Fanya Kaplan on August 30, 1918 that was the spark that awake the leadership to the lengths that their enemies were willing to go to eleminate them. While recovering from his devestating wounds, Lenin though hardly able to move, bravely instructed: "It is necessary - secretly and urgently to prepare the terror" Even before the assassinations, Lenin was sending telegrams to "to introduce mass terror" in Nizhny Novgorod in response to a suspected civilian uprising there, and "crush" peasants in Penza who protested, sometimes violently, to requisition of their grain by military detachments:

Comrades!... You must make example of these people. (1) Hang (I mean hang publicly, so that people see it) at least 100 kulaks, rich bastards, and known bloodsuckers. (2) Publish their names. (3) Seize all their grain. (4) Single out the hostages per my instructions in yesterday's telegram.

Five hundred "representatives of overthrown classes" were executed immediately after assassination of Uritsky . The first official announcement of Red Terror, published in Izvestiya, "Appeal to the Working Class" on September 3 1918 called for the workers to "crush the hydra of counterrevolution with massive terror! ... anyone who dares to spread the slightest rumor against the Soviet regime will be arrested immediately and sent to concentration camp" . This was followed by the decree "On Red Terror", issued September 5 1918 by the Cheka. On 15 October, checkist Gleb Bokiy, summing up the officially ended Red Terror, reported that in Petrograd 800 alleged enemies had been shot and another 6,229 imprisoned. Casualties in the fall of 1918 were between 10,000 and 15,000 based on lists of summarily executed people published in newspaper "Cheka Weekly" and other official press.

On 16 March 1919 all military detachments of Cheka were combined in a single body, the Troops for the Internal Defense of the Republic which numbered 200,000 in 1921. These troops policed labor camps, ran the Gulag system, conducted requisitions of food, put down peasant rebellions, riots by workers, and mutinies in the Red Army, which was plagued by desertions

Repressions against peasants

The Internal Troops of Cheka and the Red Army practiced the terror tactics of taking and executing numerous hostages, often in connection with desertions of forcefully mobilized peasants. It is believed that more than 3 million deserters escaped from the Red Army in 1919 and 1920. Around 500,000 deserters were arrested in 1919 and close to 800,000 in 1920 by Cheka troops and special divisions created to combat desertions. Thousands of deserters were killed, and their families were often taken hostage. According to Lenin's instructions,

"After the expiration of the seven-day deadline for deserters to turn themselves in, punishment must be increased for these incorrigible traitors to the cause of the people. Families and anyone found to be assisting them in any way whatsoever are to be considered as hostages and treated accordingly."

In September 1918, only in twelve provinces of Russia, 48,735 deserters and 7,325 bandits were arrested, 1,826 were killed and 2,230 were executed. A typical report from a Cheka department stated:

"Yaroslavl Province, 23 June 1919. The uprising of deserters in the Petropavlovskaya volost has been put down. The families of the deserters have been taken as hostages. When we started to shoot one person from each family, the Greens began to come out of the woods and surrender. Thirty-four deserters were shot as an example".

This campaign marked the beginning of the Gulag, and some scholars have estimated that 70,000 were imprisoned by September, 1921.

Repressions against Russian industrial workers

On 16 March 1919 Cheka stormed the Putilov factory. More than 900 workers who went to a strike were arrested. More than 200 of them were executed without trail during next few days. Numerous strikes took place in the spring of 1919 in cities of Tula, Orel, Tver, Ivanovo, and Astrakhan. The starving workers sought to obtain food rations matching those of Red Army soldiers. They also demanded the elimination of privilleges for Communists, freedom of press, and free elections. All strikes were mersilessly suppressed by Cheka using arrests and executions. .

In the city of Astrkhan, the strikers and Red Army soldiers who joined the strikers were thrown by hundreds into Volga with stones around their necks. Between 2,000 and 4,000 of them were executed from 12 to 14 March of 1919.

However strikes continued. On January 1920, Lenin sent a telegram to a city of Izhevsk telling that "I am surprised that ... you are not immediately executing large numbers of strikers for the crime of sabotage" . On 6 June 1920, female workers in Tula who refused to work on Sunday were arrested and sent to labor camps. The refusal to work during the weekend was claimed to be a "counter-revolutionary conspiracy formeted by Polish spies".

Atrocities of Red Terror

Noting the barbarity of their enemies, the Bolsheviks had to use the most effective methods available to them in order to fight on equal grounds. Cheka interrogators employed tortures of "scarcely believable barbarity". Allegedly, people were tied to planks and slowly fed into furnaces; the skin was peeled off victims' hands to produce "gloves"; naked people were rolled around in barrels studded with nails; "in Kiev, cages of rats were fixed to prisoners' bodies and heated until the rats gnawed their way ino the victims' intestines".

According to the aristrocrat Edvard Radzinsky, "it became a common practice to take a husband hostage and wait for his wife to come and purchase his life with her body". The Pyatigorsk Cheka organized a "day of Red Terror" to execute 300 people in one day. They ordered local Communist Party organizations to draw up execution lists. According to one of chekists, "this rather unsatisfactory method led to a great deal of private settling of old scores... In Kislovodsk, for lack of a better idea, it was decided to kill people who were in the hospital".

Interpretations by historians

Most Western historians claim that Bolsheviks simply had no other means except mass terror to stay in power, because they had no popular support. Bolsheviks only got a quarter of the vote at the height of their popularity in the elections. Massive strikes by counterrevolutionary Russian workers were "mercilessly" suppressed during the Red terror. Bolsheviks saw the bourgeoisie, landowners, and peasantry in Russia as class enemies of the industrial workers, who's liberation they fought for. However, industrial workers comprised only 1 to 2% of Russia's population, and only 5.3% of them were members of Bolshevik party.

Robert Conquest concluded that "unprecedented terror must seem necessary to ideologically motivated attempts to transform society massively and speedily, against its natural possibilities."

Richard Pipes said that despotism and violence were the intrinsic properties of every Communist regime in the world. He also argued that Communist terror follows from Marxism teaching that considers human lives as expendable material for construction of the brigher future society. He cited Marx who once wrote that "The present generation resembles the Jews whom Moses led through the wilderness. It must not only conquer a new world, it must also perish in order to make a room for the people who are fit for a new world".

Edvard Radzinsky noted that Joseph Stalin himself wrote a nota bene "Terror is the quickest way to new society" beside the following passage in a book by Marx: "There is only one way to shorten and ease the convulsions of the old society and the bloody birth pangs of the new - revolutionary terror".

Marxist Karl Kautsky recognized that the Red Terror represented a variety of terrorism, because it was indiscriminate, intended to frighten the civilian population, and included taking and executing hostages. He said: "Among the phenomena for which Bolshevism has been responsible, Terrorism, which begins with the abolition of every form of freedom of the Press, and ends in a system of wholesale execution, is certainly the most striking and the most repellent of all".

Historical significance of Red Terror

Red Terror was significant as the first of numerous Communist terror campaigns which folowed in Russia and many other countres. . It also unleashed Russian Civil War according to historian Richard Pipes . Menshevik Julius Martov wrote about Red Terror:

"The beast has licked hot human blood. The man-killing machine is brought into motion... But blood breeds blood... We witness the growth of the bitterness of the civil war, the growing bestiality of men engaged in it." .

The term Red Terror came to refer to other campaigns of violence carried out by communist or communist-affiliated groups. Often, such acts were carried out in response to (and/or followed by) similar measures taken by the anti-communist side in the conflict. See White Terror.

Examples of these other "Red Terrors" include

• Red Terror (Hungary) The executions of 590 people accused of involvement in the counterrevolutionary coup against the Hungarian Soviet Republic on June 24, 1919.
• Red Terror (Spain) during the Spanish Civil War.
• Red Terror in China during Mao Zedong's rule: "Red terror ought to be our reply to these counter-revolutionaries. We must, especially in the war zones and in the border areas, deal immediately, swiftly with every kind of counter-revolutionary activity" - Mao
• Red Terror (Ethiopia) during Mengistu Haile Mariam's rule.

See also

• Decossackization
• Lenin's Hanging Order
• Mass graves in the Soviet Union
• Great Purge
• Khmer Rouge

Notes

1. Serge Petrovich Melgunov, Red Terror in Russia, Hyperion Pr (1975), ISBN 0-883-55187-X
2. ^ Nicolas Werth, Karel Bartošek, Jean-Louis Panné, Jean-Louis Margolin, Andrzej Paczkowski, Stéphane Courtois, The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, Harvard University Press, 1999, hardcover, 858 pages, ISBN 0-674-07608-7 Cite error: The named reference "Black" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
3. ^ Edvard Radzinsky Stalin: The First In-depth Biography Based on Explosive New Documents from Russia's Secret Archives, Anchor, (1997) ISBN 0-385-47954-9, pages 152-155
4. Jan ten Brink (1899) English translation by J. Hedeman "Robespierre and the Red Terror", reprinted in 2004, ISBN 1402138296
5. French Revolution
6. taken fromV.I. Lenin, Economics and Politics in the Era of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat</
7. Yevgenia Albats and Catherine A. Fitzpatrick. The State Within a State: The KGB and Its Hold on Russia - Past, Present, and Future, 1994. ISBN 0-374-52738-5.
8. ^ Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin (2000). The Mitrokhin Archive: The KGB in Europe and the West. Gardners Books. ISBN 0-14-028487-7, page 34.
9. Black Book, pages 86-87
10. Black Book, page 90.
11. The KGB in Europe, page 38.
12. ^ Richard Pipes Communism: A History (2001) ISBN 0-812-96864-6, pages 39. Cite error: The named reference "Pipes" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
13. ^ Robert Conquest Reflections on a Ravaged Century (2000) ISBN 0-393-04818-7, page 101
14. Karl Kautsky, Terrorism and Communism Chapter VIII, The Communists at Work, The Terror
15. Andrew, Christopher (2005). The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the Third World. Basic Books. ISBN 0-465-00311-7. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
16. "Black book of Communism", page 736
17. Denis Twitchett, John K. Fairbank "The Cambridge history of China",ISBN 0521243386 p. 177

References and further reading

• Nicolas Werth, Karel Bartosek, Jean-Louis Panne, Jean-Louis Margolin, Andrzej Paczkowski, Stephane Courtois, Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, Harvard University Press, 1999, hardcover, 858 pages, ISBN 0-674-07608-7. Chapter 4: The Red Terror
• Melgounov, Sergey Petrovich (1925) The Red Terror in Russia. London & Toronto: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd.

External links

• Red Terror Spartacus Schoolnet collection of primary source extracts relating to the Red Terror
• Terrorism or Communism book by Leon Trotsky on the use of Red Terror.
• Down with the Death Penalty! by Yuliy Osipovich Martov, June/July 1918

• Russian Civil War
• Political repression in the Soviet Union