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The Red Terror in Soviet Russia was the campaign of mass arrests and executions conducted by the Bolshevik government. 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.^[1][2] The mass repressions were conducted without judicial process by the secret police, the Cheka,^[3], together with elements of the Bolshevik military intelligence agency, the GRU.^[4]

The term "Red Terror" was originally^[5] 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^[6] (historically this period has been known as the Great Terror (French: la Grande Terreur)).

The Council of People’s Commissars passed a resolution on red terror, calling it a temporary extraordinary measure of the country's self-defence, a response to white terror. The Cheka chairman Dzerzhinsky explained that this step was “nothing but an expression of the will of the poorest peasantry and the proletariat—to check all attempts at a revolt, and to win". ^[7] An explanation by the Procuracy and KGB of the USSR maintains that "the implementation of the Red terror was limited in character. In essence, through- out most of the country, this terror ended in the months of September-October 1918." ^[8]

The author Robert Conquest claims that the terror was planned in advance. ^[9] Some other historians argue that Lenin was not a violent person. In 1917 he said the "workers should refrain using violence unless it was used agains them first". But he argues that repression and violence is justifiable if it was done in the name of the workers revolution. ^[10]

The decree "On the Red Terror" insisted that it had become "absolutely essential to secure the rear areas by means of terror." The Cheka would "shoot all persons involved with White Guard organizations, conspiracies, and uprisings." The resolution warned "all counerrevolutionaries and all those inspiring them will be held responsible" for attempts on he life of "Soviet leaders and champions of the ideals of the revolution." ^[11]

Some officials of the Cheka emphasized the social status of suspects, especially their background and occupation. ^[12]

By the summer of 1918, there was full-scale civil war and foreign intervention in Russia. Shortly after the Russian Revolution, the countries of the Entente imposed a blockade on Russia. In March 1918, American, British, and French soldiers invaded Murmansk and Archangel and prepared to invade Petrograd and Moscow. In May, there was a mutiny of the Czechoslovak Corps with the support of the Entente. SR-peasant revolts broke out in Central Russia. ^[13]

The White Armies, foreign forces, and other opponents of the Soviet Government carried out mass violence against the population, tortured and shot people suspected of being associated with the soviets, destroyed villages, and tormented Red Army prisoners. After each town was captured, there was a protracted massacre of suspected opponents. There was a massacre at a munitions factory in Samara where more than 1,500 men, women, and children were sabred down. Bands of Kornilov’s officers left behind more than 500 dead in a Don village. ^[14]

There were terrorist actions against the Soviet Government and its supporters. More than 4140 people associated with the soviets had been killed by July 1918. In the period August-September, more than 6350 were killed. ^[15]

Even before the Red Army was formed, the White Guard leader Lavr Kornilov promised, "the greater the terror, the greater our victories." He vowed that the goals of his forces must be fulfilled even if it was needed "to set fire to half the country and shed the blood of three-fourths of all Russians." ^[16]

The campaign of mass repressions was officially initiated as retribution for the assassination of Petrograd Cheka leader Moisei Uritsky, and attempted assassination of Vladimir Lenin by Fanya Kaplan on August 30, 1918. While recovering from his wounds, Lenin instructed: "It is necessary - secretly and urgently to prepare the terror" ^[17]

Before the assassinations and after a peasant revolt broke in Central Russia on August 5, 1918, Lenin sent telegrams calling for resolute measures in fighting "kulaks, priests and whiteguards" ^[18]

Five hundred "representatives of overthrown classes" were executed immediately by the Bolshevik communist government after the assassination of Uritsky ^[3]. 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" ^[2] . 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.^[17] Casualties in the first two months 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 the 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, conducted requisitions of food, put down peasant rebellions, riots by workers, and mutinies in the Red Army, which was plagued by desertions ^[2]

One of the main organizers of the Red Terror for the Bolshevik government was 2nd Grade Army Commissar Yan Karlovich Berzin (1889-1938), whose real name was Kyuzis Peteris. He took part in the October Revolution and afterwards worked in the central apparatus of the Cheka.^[4] During the Red Terror, Berzin initiated the system of taking and shooting hostages^[4] to stop desertions and other "acts of disloyalty and sabotage". Chief of a special department of the Latvian Red Army (later the 15th Army), Berzin played a part in the suppression of the Russian sailors' mutiny at Kronstadt in March 1921.^[4] He particularly distinguished himself in the course of the pursuit, capture, and liquidation of captured sailors.^[4]

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.^[2] 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."^[2]

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".^[2]

During the suppression of the Tambov Rebellion, estimates suggest that around 100,000 peasant rebels and their families were imprisoned or deported and perhaps 15,000 executed.^[19]

This campaign marked the beginning of the Gulag, and some scholars have estimated that 70,000 were imprisoned by September, 1921. Conditions in these camps led to high mortality rates, and there were "repeated massacres." The Cheka at the Kholmogory camp adopted the practice of drowning bound prisoners in the nearby Dvina river.^[20] Occasionally, entire prisons were “emptied” of inmates via mass shootings prior to abandoning a town to White forces.^[21][22]

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 trial during the 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 privileges for Communists, freedom of press, and free elections. All strikes were mercilessly suppressed by Cheka using arrests and executions.^[2]

In the city of Astrakhan, the strikers and Red Army soldiers who joined them were loaded onto barges and then thrown by the hundreds into the Volga with stones around their necks. Between 2,000 and 4,000 were shot or drowned from 12 to 14 of March 1919. In addition, the repression also claimed the lives of some 600 to 1,000 bourgeoisie. Recently published archival documents indicate this was the largest massacre of workers by the Bolsheviks before the suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion.^[2]

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." ^[2] 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 formented by Polish spies". The strikes were eventually stopped after a series of arrests, executions, and the taking of hostages.

During the Russian civil war, there were allegations made by emigre newspapers and opposition political organizations against the Soviet Government. Claims were made that people were tied to planks and slowly fed into furnaces. Allegedly, the skin was peeled off victims' hands to produce "gloves"; naked people were supposedly rolled around in barrels studded with nails; ^{[23] [24]}

Likewise, there were allegations of abuses against opponents of the Soviet Government. According to Maxim Gorky, there were instances of Communists being nailed to trees with railroad spikes and their half-crucified bodies being left to flop about and dangle in agony. According to rebel eyewitnesses, captured workers were buried alive up to their necks after having been charged with "religious apostasy". ^[25]

According to historians, the Red Terror evolved ad hoc as the Bolsheviks struggled to retain political power amid spiralling political, social, economic, and military crises. ^[26]

Some Russian historians emphasized because it had to suppress the overthrown classes and, above all, the terror unleashed by counter-revoluton, the Soviet Government had to react to it. Red Terror was declared to be in reply to White Terror<source?>. It was argued that the revolutionaries used Red Terror because it had to suppress the resistance of counterrevolutionary forces. According to Lenin, “Our Red terror is a defence of the working class against the exploiters, the crushing of resistance from the exploiters." ^[27].

Historians from the anti-Communist school^[28] Richard Pipes and Robert Conquest claim that terror was motivated by Marxist ideology and was inevitable. ^{[29] [30]}

The Social Democratic leader Karl Kautsky argued 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".^[31]

Red Terror was significant as the first of numerous Communist terror campaigns which followed in Russia and many other countries. ^[32]. It also unleashed Russian Civil War according to historian Richard Pipes ^[30]. 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." ^[2]

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 the usage of the term "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 (Ethiopia) during Mengistu Haile Mariam's rule.
• In China, Mao Zedong wrote: "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."^[33]
• The Nandigram violence in Nandigram, West Bengal in November 2007 was called "Red Terror" by critics of the actions by the local administration alluding at the Communist Party of India ruling in West Bengal.^[34] The situation was described as one of "Red Terror" by media.^[35]

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

• 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
• George Leggett, The Cheka: Lenin’s Political Police. Oxford University Press, 1987, ISBN 0198228627
• Melgounov, Sergey Petrovich (1925) The Red Terror in Russia. London & Toronto: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd.

• 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
• The Record of the Red Terror by Sergei Melgunov