Bolshevist spokesmen frequently declare that the Terror was the outcome of “popular indignation against counter-revolution,” and that only because of pressure exercised upon it by the working-classes did the Bolshevist Party resort to terrorist measures. Still more frequently do they assert that at least did terrorism, when assumed as a weapon by the State, “legalise and normalise” popular activities which otherwise were taking the law into their own hands.

A more pharisaical attitude it is not easy to conceive. But at least it is easy to bring forward facts illustrative of the gulf between it and the truth.

On February 17, 1922, Dzherzhinsky, “People’s Commissary of the Interior,” and the real creator and director of the Red Terror, said in a memorandum addressed to the Council of People’s Commissaries:

Well, let me demonstrate the true character of Dzherzhinsky’s “wise direction” or “systematisation” of a State poorly provided with punitive apparatus. As early as by December 7, 1917, his organisation of an All-Russian Che-Ka based upon “historical research into past epochs” stood worked out, and had been made to agree with Bolshevist-deduced theories. And during the previous spring Lenin had remarked that it would be quite easy to carry out a social revolution in Russia, since all that would be necessary would be to exterminate two or three hundred of the bourgeoisie. And we know Trotsky’s reply to Kautsky’s Terrorism and Communism wherein he, Trotsky, proffered a metaphysical justification of terrorism which can be reduced to the formula: “The enemy needs to be rendered harmless. And in time of war that means that the enemy needs to be destroyed. To which end the most potent weapon is terrorism. To deny its power is to be a dissimulating hypocrite.” Naturally, Kautsky was at least entitled to retort that Trotsky’s book had better have been entitled “A Hymn of Praise to Inhumanity.” “For,” added Kautsky, “bloodthirsty appeals are worthy only of the worst and lowest phases of revolution.”

Also, the Bolshevists so far flout facts as to maintain that they resorted to terrorism only because early attempts had been made upon the lives of “proletarian leaders,” and in 1918, when brazenly extolling the Soviet Government’s “exceptional humanity,” Latzis, a Lett, and a particularly ruthless member of the Che-Ka, declared that “though thousands of our people have been murdered, we have never gone beyond making arrests”; whilst Peters impudently asserted, as we have seen, that up to the time of Uritsky’s assassination not a single case of capital punishment had occurred in Petrograd.

Well, even if we grant that the Bolshevists did begin their rule by abolishing (for propaganda purposes, of course) the capital penalty, it was not long before that penalty came into its own again.[27] For as early as January 8, 1918, we find the Soviet of People’s Commissaries issuing an Order that battalions “for trench digging” should be formed, and be composed of men and women members of the bourgeoisie, and officered by Red Guards. And,” added the Soviet, “Any man or woman of the bourgeois class who shall resist this Order shall be shot, even as ... all counter-revolutionary agitators are to be shot.”

Hence, for all intents and purposes, summary capital punishment, execution without trial or inquiry, became reinstated.

A month later (for the Che-Ka needed to win its spurs) a second Order notified that “all counter-revolutionary agitators, persons fleeing to the Don country, and persons joining the Counter-Revolutionary Army shall be shot without mercy by detachments empowered by the Che-Ka.” And in time so broadcast did these threats come to be that they flowed like water from the cornucopia of a fountain. “Sackmen (?) resisting shall be shot”; “Persons posting up unauthorised proclamations shall be shot.” There was no end to them.[28]

Once the Council of People’s Commissaries sent the following urgent telegram along a line of railway—a telegram relating to a special train which at the moment was en route from Stavka to Petrograd: “If the train which is now proceeding towards Petersburg shall experience the smallest delay, the person or persons responsible for that delay shall be executed out of hand.” And another notice said:

Hence Bolshevist threats of capital punishment were as many as they were varied. Nor, be it remarked, was the right of pronouncing death sentences confined to the central authorities alone, for local revolutionary committees also could—or at all events did—pronounce them, and in Kalouga Province we encounter a notice of the coming execution of a well-to-do citizen for having failed to furnish his contribution to a monetary levy; in Viatka, a case of a man being executed for “leaving his home after eight o’clock at night”; and, in Rybinsk, a case of a man being executed for “having, with others, assembled in a public street”—not even a warning seeming to have been thought necessary. Nor did threats of death involve shooting alone, for we read that the Bolshevist committee of the town of Loniev intimated, after fixing the rate of contribution to be paid by its local citizens, that anyone who should refuse to pay it “will be drowned in the Dniester with a stone about his neck.”

And still more brutally did Krylenko, the Bolshevists’ Commander-in-Chief, and subsequently Chief Government Advocate before the Supreme Revolutionary Tribunal (and therefore the man who of all others should have upheld law and order in Soviet Russia)—still more brutally did this Krylenko announce on January 22: “I would suggest that the peasantry of Mohilev Province be left to deal with their oppressors as they may think fit.” Lastly, we find the Chief Commissary of the Northern Region and Western Siberia proclaiming in a certain instance that, “unless the offenders be handed over, every tenth person, regardless of guilt or of innocence, shall be shot.”

Such were some of the orders, decrees, and announcements issued by the Soviet Government on the subject of the capital penalty! They mean that as early as 1918 capital punishment became re-established on a scale which even the Tsarist régime had never beheld, as a first result of Dzherzhinsky’s “wise direction” of “a Revolutionary Government’s punitive apparatus,” and of the Government’s showing the way in disregarding human rights and morality by issuing a manifesto which proclaimed, on February 21, 1918, when the German forces were advancing, that “the (Soviet) Fatherland is in danger, and therefore from now onwards the death penalty shall be applied to all enemy agents, spies, looters, profiteers, hooligans, and counter-revolutionary agents.”

But the most revolting incident of all was the trial of Captain Stchasny before the Supreme Revolutionary Tribunal in May, 1918. Earlier he had been the means of saving the remnant of the Russian Baltic Fleet from surrender to the German Squadron, and bringing it safely back to Kronstadt; yet no sooner had he done so than he was arraigned for “treason”: the indictment against him said: “Although he has accomplished what would seem to have been a heroic deed, his object was none other than that he might thereby earn popularity for subsequent use against the Soviet Government!” Trotsky acted as chief, in fact, sole, witness for the prosecution, and the end was that on May 22 Stchasny was shot for having saved his country’s warships in the Baltic! At a stroke, also, the verdict created for the Bolshevists the precedent for award of the death sentence by a legal tribunal which they were needing. And thenceforth it was not in isolated cases that capital punishment began to occur, whether in pursuance of a legal verdict, or in execution of an “administrative order” (the Che-Ka’s ad hoc judicial weapon up to the September of 1918, the date of the Red Terror’s official proclamation), for we can now begin to count cases of capital punishment awarded by formal sentence by the score and by the hundred. To which there should be added both the executions consequent upon quellings of peasant risings, and the results of military firings upon street demonstrations, and those many governmental irregularities of which the slaughter of officers in Finland and the Crimea during the October of 1917, and the shootings of thousands of persons in localities where civil war broke out, and the Che-Ka’s orders and decrees could be implemented in full, are examples.

In 1919, however, Latzis, statistician to the Government, did furnish some official totals of executions, and they appeared in a series of articles in the Kievan and Muscovite editions of the Izvestia before being re-issued in book form under the title of Two Years’ Fighting on the Home Front. The articles stated that during the first half of 1918 (which constituted the first six months of the Che-Ka’s existence) the number of persons shot in Soviet Russia (which as yet included only the old twenty provinces of the centre) amounted to “22,” and that similar moderation would have continued to be observed if the country had not “become swept with a wave of conspiracies,” and if “the counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie had not resorted to a White Terror.”[29] A statement of the kind could have been made only in a land whence all normal sources of social information for the statement’s contradiction had been swept away. But it happened that at that period (1918) I too was making shift to keep a record of executions: and though usually I could avail myself of figures published by the Bolshevists themselves, this applied, for the most part, to the centre of the country alone, and only in a slighter degree to the provinces, where my sole resource was (1) returns published at irregular and uncertain intervals in one or another local journal, and (2) such information from other sources as stood subject to subsequent verification. Yet even these casual data provided me with a card-index library of 884 items. Hence I am as well aware as was Latzis himself that, though the All-Russian Che-Ka was not officially established until December 7, Che-Ka activity began long before that date, since at the taking of the Winter Palace the Bolshevists had thrown Prince Toumanov, ex-Assistant Minister of War, into the Neva, and on the day after the fall of Gatchina Mouraviev had issued an official order for the lynching of recalcitrant Tsarist officers, and the Bolshevists had brought about Doukhonin’s and Shingarev’s and Kokoshkin’s deaths, and Lenin had caused two student brothers named Ganglez (?) to be shot for the crime of being found to be wearing epaulets on their shoulders, and frequently the Military-Revolutionary Tribunal (the forerunner of the All-Russian Che-Ka) had made use of “extraordinary decrees” for the extermination of its opponents.

So who shall credit Latzis’ statement that “those executed up to the middle of 1918 belonged mostly to the criminal underworld,” or his further statement that they numbered only “22”?

Besides, the Latzian statistics overlooked statements made by the Che-Ka itself: they overlooked the fact that already the Che-Ka’s own organ, the Weekly, had admitted that the Che-Ka of the Urals alone had shot 35 persons during the period above specified. Besides, were his statements meant to convey the impression that no executions at all had taken place during the second half of the year named? For, if so, how are we to reconcile such forbearance of slaughter with an interview which, on June 8, 1918, the two chiefs of the All-Russian Che-Ka, Dzherzhinsky and Zachs, accorded to a representative of Gorky’s journal Novaya Zhizn?[30] For during that interview the two chiefs informed the journalist that “mercy towards our enemies does not come within our purview,” and spoke of executions as “carried out by unanimous decree of our Che-Ka Committee.”

At all events we know that on August 28, 1918, the Muscovite Izvestia issued official intimation that 43 persons had been shot in six provincial towns, and that inasmuch as, in October of the same year, Bokia, Uritsky’s successor on the Che-Ka of Petrograd, reported at a conference of Che-Kas of the Northern Commune that up to the previous March 12, when the seat of the All-Russian Che-Ka had been transferred from Petrograd to Moscow, 800 persons had been arrested, and the number of hostages estimated to be alive during September had amounted only to 500, at least 300 must have been shot between March and September.[31]

Moreover, are we to discredit an entry in Margoulies’ diary which says: “I have just been told by Peters (Secretary to the Danish Legation) that Uritsky goes about boasting of having signed twenty-three death warrants in a day”?[32] And Uritsky, be it remembered, was one of those who affected to be “regularising” the Terror!

At least it may be said with safety that the only difference between the first half and the second half of 1918 lay in the fact that during the second half propaganda on behalf of a Red Terror became open and universal propaganda, and that immediately upon the attempt upon Lenin’s life the Terror was announced urbi et orbi. Yet at a meeting of “workers’ soviets” held as late as December 7, 1918, Lounacharsky had the hypocrisy to say: “We do not wish for a Red Terror, but are as opposed as ever to capital punishment, to the scaffold.” To public capital punishment, to the public scaffold, yes: but not to slaughter in hidden torture-chambers. Radek alone seems to have thought that there was no sense in concealing his predilection for public, rather than for secret, executions, for he wrote in an article entitled “The Red Terror”[33]:

Nor could the Commissary of Justice’s[34] one-time insistence upon the “magnanimity” which he declared to be inspiring Bolshevist tribunals save him from having later to admit that “the period between March, 1918 and the end of August was a veritable (though unofficial) reign of terror.”

So sanguinary, such an orgy of slaughter, did that reign become as at first even to disgust more than one convinced Communist. And the first protestant of the kind was the sailor Dybenko who later achieved “fame” in connection with the Stchasny affair. On July 31 he sent to the journal Anarchism a letter as follows:

However, it is only fair to state that eventually Dybenko got over what Lounacharsky called his “sentimentality”; for three years later, after the failure of the Kronstadt rising, he is seen taking an active part in the slaughter of his comrades there. “There must be no shilly-shallying with the villains.” During the first day alone of the shootings 300 “villains” were executed.

Other voices too were raised in protest, but soon fell as silent as Dybenko’s, and left the perpetrators of the Terror free to continue their course of action unchecked—a course as impossible of moral as of metaphysical justification.

The only Bolshevist hardy enough really to oppose inclusion of capital punishment in the criminal code which the Bolshevists evolved in 1922 was Riazanov. Incidentally, he had, at the time of the Lenin attempt, visited the Butyrka Prison, and told the Socialists confined there that “I and the other leaders of the proletariat are experiencing great difficulty in controlling our followers, since the recent assault upon Lenin has rendered them eager to break into the Prison, and wreak popular vengeance upon you Socialist traitors.” And Dzherzhinsky told me the same thing when I was brought before him in September. And so did other Communists. As for the string pullers in Petrograd, they worked for the desired impression by causing the local press to publish references to certain “demands for terrorism which are reaching us from political groups.” But the end was that excessive use of the one stage effect deceived nobody: rather, it came to be looked upon as a stereotyped propagandist detail of the demagogy by which Bolshevism had been created and was being upheld.

However, as though to the swing of a conductor’s baton, identical sets of spurious and belated resolutions (“belated” because the Red Terror had long been openly proclaimed) continued to be passed at meetings, and suitable battle cries to be given out at the meetings, and on wall posters, and in the press.[35] All that was necessary was that the original resolutions should be passed, and caused everywhere to be locally repeated, and then have suitable catch phrases for slaughter evolved for them—such catch phrases as “Death to the capitalists!” and “Death to the bourgeoisie!” But at Uritsky’s funeral the catch phrases increased in pungency. “A thousand lives for the life of each leader!” was largely used there, and so were “A bullet for every workers’ foe!” and “Death to all hirelings of Anglo-French capital!” Moreover, from every page of every Bolshevist journal there began to arise the reek of blood-thirst. Cried the Petrograd Krasnaya Gazeta, the “Red Gazette,” of August 31, à propos of Uritsky’s assassination:

And on the Lenin attempt being made, the journal fairly shrieked. Its words were:

And the Izvestia, for its part, screamed: “The proletariat must respond to Lenin’s wound in a way that shall make the bourgeoisie shrink and tremble!” And in an article which Radek, the Bolshevists’ star press-man, contributed to the Izvestia, à propos of a current symposium on Red terrorism, he cried:

Whence, adding to it Lenin’s winged words, “Even if ninety per cent. of the people perish, what matter if the other ten per cent. live to see revolution become universal?” we gain a fairly clear idea of what Red terrorism may mean to the Communist mentality. The Pravda, for its part, wrote: “Henceforth the hymn of the working-classes should be solely a pæan of hatred and revenge”; whilst a proclamation issued by the “Muscovite Provincial Military Commissariat” on September 3 stated that

And, finally, the All-Russian Central Executive Committee led the way by convening a meeting for September 2 whereat it was resolved

In harmony with this decree was a resolution which the Soviet of People’s Commissaries adopted in support of the Che-Ka’s policy. It ended with the words: “Be it resolved also that any person found to be connected with a White Guard organisation, or conspiracy, or rebellion, be shot.” And at about the same period Petrovsky, People’s Commissary of the Interior, issued a telegram which, for its bizarre terminology, even as for its sweeping sanction of illegality, deserves to become historic. Later the telegram was published in No. 1 of the Central Che-Ka’s Weekly. Entitled “An Order relating to Hostages,” it ran:

In the same issue of the Weekly (for the Weekly was a journal specially designed to inculcate and popularise the Che-Ka’s ideas and policy) there appeared an article entitled “The Question of Capital Punishment.” The article said:

This, with the notorious Order issued by Petrovsky, obviates any stressing of the moral of the idea that the working-classes should be their leaders’ avengers, or any enlarging upon Dzherzhinsky’s “humane principles” in his work of Che-Ka organisation. Lack of journalistic conscience alone could have enabled Radek to assert in the Izvestia of September 6 that, “but for the faith of the working-classes that their Government can adequately retaliate for the blow, we should now be finding ourselves confronted with massacres of the bourgeoisie on a wholesale scale.”

And what are we to think of a resolution passed by Communists in the province of Vitebsk which called for a thousand victims whenever a soviet worker should be assassinated, or of a request from a Communist nucleus of employees of a small tramway company that any assassination of a Communist should be followed with shootings of a hundred hostages, and any assassination of a Red soldier with slaughterings of a thousand Whites, or of a resolution of September 13, passed by a Communist nucleus of the Che-Ka of the Western District, that “infamous murderers [of soviet officials] should be wiped from the face of the earth,” or of a resolution of Red Guard employees of the Ostrogorod Che-Ka that “for the death of each Communist our foes must be slain by the hundred, and, for each attempt upon the life of a leader, by the thousand, and by the ten thousand, as though we were exterminating parasites”? In passing, be it observed how, the further we go from the centre, the more bloodthirsty becomes the local unit, until “by the hundred” has swelled to “by the ten thousand.” The cause of this is that catch phrases uttered by, in the first instance (to judge from official reports), employees of the Central Che-Ka underwent repetition until they became stereotyped arguments, and, thus robed in hackneyed, outré terms, spread to one locality after another in proportion as the Bolshevists wrested further territory from their opponents, and Latzis, head of the All-Russian Che-Ka, further extended his jurisdiction.

In Kiev the local Che-Ka’s sheet, the Krasny Mech (“Red Sword”), served a purpose identical with the purpose served in Moscow by the Weekly. Its opening issue contained an interesting article from the pen of the editor himself—Lev Krasny, who said, amongst other things:

This a writer named Schwartz capped with:

On December 31 Kamenev stated: “The Terror has been forced upon us. The working-classes created it, and not the Che-Ka.” Lenin, for his part, said to the Seventh Congress of Soviets, earlier in the year: “The Entente rendered the Terror necessary.” And as he spoke he lied, for the Terror was created by the Che-Ka, and by the Che-Ka alone, through the method of covering Russia with a network of subordinate Che-Kas and “extraordinary commissions for combating counter-revolution and sabotage and speculation,” until not a town or a village lacked its branch of the omnipotent Che-Ka of the centre, and the latter could act as the Government’s all-connecting nerve until the last remnant of social right had become absorbed. And on October 18 even the Pravda, the official organ of the Central Committee, admitted[36] that by that time the catch phrase “All power to the Soviet!” had given place to the catch phrase “All power to the Che-Ka!” For by degrees, district, provincial, urban, cantonal, village, and factory Che-Kas; railway, transport, and “battle front” Che-Kas; “special branches of the Central Che-Ka for military affairs”; “headquarters courts-martial”; “military-revolutionary headquarters”; “extraordinary headquarters”; and punitive expeditions all became combined into a single main instrument for carrying on the Red Terror, so that Nilostonsky, author of Der Blutrausch des Bolschewismus (“The Blood Lust of Bolshevism”), estimated that Kiev possessed sixteen Che-Kas to its own cheek, and that all of them could pass death sentences, and all perpetrate mass executions in slaughter-houses identifiable only by ciphers.