"all those involved in White Guard organizations, conspiracies and insurrections." 37 The method of suppressing the political opposition by "mass terror," introduced by Lenin in 1918, became a standard system of the Soviet government and subsequently was widely used by Stalin. The execution of hundreds of avowedly innocent persons without trial was "to teach a lesson" and stop the anti-Bolsheviks from committing terroristic acts. Authentic reports on the Cheka's part in carrying out the Red Terror during the early autumn of 1918 are contained in its Ezhenedeľ'nik [Weekly], six numbers of which were issued during September and October. Each issue contains reports on arbitrary arrests and executions and the mass murder of hostages, persons admittedly innocent of any crime but marked by the Bolsheviks for extermination because of their social origin. These actions were approved by the VCheka and the Party leaders, as was the use of torture for the extraction of information and confessions. The Cheka's methods and the character of its personnel soon made it the object of criticism, not only among opponents of the Soviet regime but in the government and Party as well. That work in the Cheka attracted criminals, sadists and degenerates was openly admitted by the Cheka itself. Its Weekly candidly noted that "reports are coming in from all sides that not only unworthy but outright criminal individuals are trying to penetrate the... Chekas." A high-ranking Chekist, Martin Latsis, later complained that "work in the Cheka, conducted in an atmosphere of physical coercion, attracts corrupt and outright criminal elements which, profiting from their position as Cheka agents, blackmail and extort, filling their own pockets. . . . However honest a man is, however crystal-clear his heart, work in the Cheka, which is carried on with almost unlimited rights and under conditions greatly affecting the nervous system, begins to tell. Few escape the effect of the conditions under which they work." 38 Lenin always approved the Cheka's activities, if only because he himself was its creator; he prodded and incited the head of the Cheka, Feliks Dzerzhinski, to severity and mercilessness. Replying to criticisms of the Cheka directed against just these features of its work, Lenin told a conference of Cheka representatives in November 1918 that notwithstanding the presence of "strange elements" in its ranks, the Cheka was "putting into practice the dictatorship of the proletariat, and in this respect its role is invaluable, there is no other path to the freeing of the masses than the suppression of the exploiters by force. The Cheka is engaged in this, and in this consists its service to the proletariat." 39 In almost all cases—and there were plenty of them—of a conflict between a state agency and the Cheka the latter won out. More serious, because they raised fundamental questions of the structure. and function of the government and because they were made by prominent 87 Ibid., pp. 5, 6. Ibid., p. 6. Party leaders, were criticisms of the Cheka's unbridled claims to autonomy. Typical of such claims was a VCheka order of September 20, 1918, which declared, "In its activities the VCheka is absolutely autonomous, carrying out searches, arrests and executions, and reporting ex post facto to the Council of People's Commissars and the All-Russian Central Executive Committee." Claims of this kind inevitably brought the Cheka into conflict with other agencies of the Soviet government, particularly the Commissariat of Justice, which naturally claimed a leading role in determining who should be arrested and under what conditions. During the early period of Soviet rule the Commissariat of Justice was headed not by a Bolshevik but by a Left Socialist Revolutionary, [Isaac] Steinberg. As was to be expected, Steinberg's repeated protests against the Cheka's arbitrary arrests and executions were rejected or ridiculed by Lenin. The protests continued, however, under Steinberg's Bolshevik successors, reaching a climax at a conference of jurists in November 1918.40 The few Bolsheviks appointed by the Central Committee of Lenin's party to head the Cheka were so sure of themselves and felt so superior to other leaders and agencies that they dared to defy any attempt to check their activities or curtail their powers. In an effort to settle the dispute and define the place of the Cheka in the Soviet system the Council of People's Commissars issued a decree on November 2, 1918, prescribing that representatives of the Commissariats of Justice and Internal Affairs should be members of the collegium (central board) of the Cheka. This attempt ended in failure, however, for the representatives of the Commissariat of Justice soon walked out in protest against the treatment they received in the Cheka, with the result that there was a permanent rupture of "diplomatic relations" between the two bodies. 41 However, not every non-Communist party of the great country could be entirely and definitely suppressed within the short period of a year or even two of the Soviet regime. Opposition did sometimes emerge in the Soviets; across the frontiers of the civil war information penetrated to the population of Soviet Russia. As if making a concession Lenin's government pretended to be turning to legality. The campaign of criticism of the Cheka grew in intensity during late 1918 and early 1919, leading to the promulgation on February 17, 1919, of a decree which transferred to the Revolutionary Tribunals the right to impose sentences in cases initiated by the Cheka. Unlike the trials conducted by the Cheka, the sessions of the tribunals were to take place in public and in the presence of the accused. The curbs which the decree appeared to place on the Cheka were of slight avail, however, for the Cheka retained the approval of the Party leadership for its exercise of full freedom of action in all cases which it considered to involve a threat to the Soviet regime. The real position of affairs was made clear a few weeks before the February 17 "Ibid., pp. 6, 7. “ Ibid., p. 7. decree in an open letter from the Central Committee of the Party, "To the Communist Workers of All the Chekas," in which critics of the Cheka in the Party were reminded that the organs of the Cheka were "established, exist and work only as direct agencies of the Party, under its directives and under its control." 3942 Actually the new legality was a pretense: there were no legal codes, either prerevolutionary or newly introduced, to serve the courts, the tribunals or the Cheka. Rather, under the guise of "in the interests of the revolution" they were free to indict, sentence and mete out any punishment: The law of February 17 was not permitted in any case to curb the Cheka in its task of defending the dictatorship. This fact was graphically demonstrated by a law passed in October 1919, establishing a 3-man Special Revolutionary Tribunal under the VCheka to deal with major cases of speculation and economic malfeasance. The tribunal was to be guided "exclusively by the interests of the revolution" and was specifically exempted from "any judicial forms whatsoever." Its decisions were not subject to appeal. In January 1920, in a propaganda move designed mainly to influence foreign public opinion, the VCheka sponsored a decree abolishing the death penalty, but the decree made no essential difference in its methods and powers. 43 By that time the Cheka, initially presented as an "extraordinary," rather temporary institution, had stabilized, becoming, contrary to all promise, one of the pillars of the Soviet system. Under Dzerzhinski's energetic direction the Cheka rapidly extended its controls into the most diverse fields. No significant aspect of Soviet economy and administration escaped its scrutiny, or was safe from its extralegal methods of repression. It was particularly active in the fields of transportation and industry. By 1921 it had assumed responsibility for guarding the Soviet frontier. It built up its own armed force. In the regular army it established its "Special Sections"-secret representatives to spy and hunt out potential disloyalty or disaffection, a practice which initiated the traditional hatred of the secret police by the army. A task of major importance assumed by the Cheka during the Civil War was the detection and frustration of anti-Soviet plots. During this period the Cheka initiated a practice which later became characteristic, the fabrication or inflation of plots by provocation. It was during the Civil War period also that the foundations were laid of an extensive and powerful espionage and subversion network abroad, manned not only by Communists and Communist sympathizers, but by professional spies, adventurers and persons over whom the Cheka exerted a hold. "Ibid., pp. 7, 8. "Ibid., p. 8. Wherever the Soviet power spread to the Ukraine, the Transcaucasus and elsewhere the Cheka was one of the first governmental organs to be established. Strictly subordinated to the central VCheka in Moscow, the Chekas of the outlying republics played an essential role in establishing and maintaining Soviet power there.** It is impossible to indicate the number of victims of the Cheka during the early period, 1917-21. Reporting on the first 19 months (January 1918 to July 1919) of the Cheka's operations, Martin Latsis, one of its then ranking leaders, gave the following data: 344 uprisings were suppressed in which 3,057 persons were killed; 412 "counter-revolutionary" organizations were uncovered; 8,389 persons were executed; 9,496 persons were sent to concentration camps; 34,334 were imprisoned. The total number of arrests was 86,893.45 However, The figures of Cheka shootings and imprisonings given by Latsis are obviously far too small. He did not even bother to add them up correctly, and they are contradicted by other official figures. The figures produced by the Whites are even more obviously far too large. According to Denikin [The White Army, London, 1930, p. 292], "the Special Judiciary Commission of Inquiry into the Bolshevik atrocities" reckoned the number of victims of the Bolshevist terror in 1918-19 at 1,700,000. "But," admitted Denikin, "their actual number is known to God alone.” . . . The savagery increased as the civil war went on, and the Cheka was its chief agent on the Bolshevik side. Latsis already in August had announced that there were no laws in civil war except one, according to which enemy wounded should be shot and no prisoners should be taken. Countless victims fell to the special Cheka troops ("Vokhr" or "Vnus") which carried out punitive expeditions and raids throughout the war, and also assisted in suppressing the Kronstadt rebellion, and, later, the Antonov peasant rising in Tambov. . . . According to all accounts the Tribunals had a far smaller share than the Cheka in the terror, yet the available evidence (which is probably more reliable than that concerning the Cheka) concerning their activity is impressive. Even after the end of the Civil War, during the first half of 1921, the Tribunals are stated [N. K. Yustitsii, Otchet IX-omu Vserossiskomu S'ezdu Sovetov-Report to the Ninth All-Russian Congress of Soviets-1921, p. 23] to have been passing death sentences at the rate of over 100 a month, and prison sentences at the rate of nearly 1,600 a month. Nearly 150,000 arrests were made by the organs of the Commissariat of Justice (i.e. by the Tribunals and the People's Courts) in the first half of 1919. The prisons of the Commissariat in February 1919 held 22,000 persons, 16,794 of whom still had their cases under investigation. Nearly "Ibid., pp. 8, 9. "M. [Martin] Ya. Latsis (Sudrabs), Dva Goda Borby na Vnutrennem Fronte (Two Years of Fighting on the Internal Front) (Moscow: Gosizdat (State Publishing House), 1920), pp. 75–76. half of these cases were being investigated by the Cheka, and the rest by the Tribunals or People's Courts. [Sovetskaya Yustitsiya (Soviet Justice) — edited by Dimitri Kursky, 1919, p. 22.] " 46 Among the Cheka's methods of investigation, a widely used one was torture of arrested persons; the Cheka leaders considered this a necessity in many cases. When the British diplomat R. Bruce Lockhart, who was suspected of counter-revolutionary activities, was arrested in the fall of 1918 and then released, a group of Bolsheviks and Cheka leaders from Nolinsk submitted a joint protest which appeared in the official Cheka Weekly. "The Cheka has still not got away from petty-bourgeois ideology, the cursed inheritance of the pre-revolutionary past. Tell us, why didn't you subject Lockhart to the most refined tortures, in order to get information and addresses, of which such a bird must have had very many? Tell us why you permitted him to leave the building of the Cheka 'in great confusion,' instead of subjecting him to tortures, the very description of which would have filled counter-revolutionaries with cold horror? "Enough of being soft; give up this unworthy play at 'diplomacy' and 'representation.' "A dangerous scoundrel has been caught. Get out of him what you can and send him to the other world." The reply, for which the central organization of the Cheka is responsible, is even more significant than the outburst of a remote country Cheka, which was apparently well versed in the practise of "refined tortures." It read: "Not at all objecting in substance to this letter, we only want to point out to the comrades who sent it and reproached us with mildness that the 'sending to the other world' of 'base intriguers' representing 'foreign peoples' is not at all in our interest." 47 5. Lenin and Terrorism There is no doubt that the real ideologist and initiator of terrorism was Lenin himself. His notion of a popular revolution, which followed very much the pattern of France in 1793, implied a wide use, only on a greatly enlarged scale, of all means of terrorism. He not only created the Cheka, but constantly and publicly rationalized the use of extreme violence, and instigated and prodded the Cheka leadership to greater activity. To Lenin, the role of the Communist party, being the same as the dictatorship of the working class, meant power based directly upon force and unrestricted by any laws. 48 E. J. Scott, "The Cheka," Soviet Affairs, Number One, St. Antony's Papers, No. 1 (London: Chatto & Windus Ltd., 1956), pp. 11, 12. "Chamberlin, op. cit., vol. II, p. 71. "Lenin, "The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky" (November 10, 1918), Selected Works, vol. VII, p. 123. |