Why did the Red Terror begin? Red Terror (civil war)

It is generally accepted that the Red Terror was a response to the White Terror, that is, to the terrorist attacks of bourgeois elements against the Communists. But in fact, the Red Terror began from the moment the Bolsheviks seized power.

Having begun their government activities for demagogic purposes with the abolition of the death penalty, the Bolsheviks immediately restored it.

Already on January 8, 1918, the announcement of the Council of People's Commissars spoke of “the creation of battalions for digging trenches from the bourgeois class of men and women, under the supervision of the Red Guards. Those who resist are to be shot.”

In other words, the death penalty was restored on the spot, without trial or trial. A month later, an announcement by the later famous All-Russian Extraordinary Commission appeared: “...counter-revolutionary agitators... all those fleeing to the Don to join the counter-revolutionary troops... will be mercilessly shot by a detachment of the commission at the scene of the crime.”

Threats began to pour in as if from a cornucopia: “bag makers will be shot on the spot” (in case of resistance), those posting leaflets “will be shot immediately,” etc. One day the Council of People's Commissars sent out railways an emergency dispatch about some special train traveling from Headquarters to Petrograd: “If there is a delay in the train on the way to St. Petersburg, the culprits will be shot.”

“Confiscation of all property and execution” await those who decide to circumvent the laws on exchange, sale and purchase issued by the Soviet government. There were various death threats. And it is characteristic that orders for executions were issued not only by the central body, but by all kinds of revolutionary committees: in the Kaluga province it was announced that they would be shot for non-payment of indemnities imposed on the rich; in Vyatka - “for leaving the house after 8 o’clock”; in Bryansk - for drunkenness; in Rybinsk - for crowding on the streets, and, moreover, “without warning.”

They threatened not only with execution - the city commissioner of Zmiev imposed an indemnity on the city and threatened that those who failed to pay “will be drowned with a stone around their neck in the Dniester.” Even more expressive: Commander-in-Chief Krylenko, future chief prosecutor at the Supreme Revolutionary Tribunal, guardian of the rule of law in Soviet Russia, announced on January 22:

“I suggest to the peasants of the Mogilev province that they deal with the rapists according to their own judgment.” Commissioner of the Northern Region and Western Siberia, in turn, published: “If the perpetrators are not extradited, then for every 10 people one will be shot, without any understanding of whether he is guilty or not.”

However, the official date of the beginning of the Red Terror is considered to be August 17, 1918, when in St. Petersburg, the People's Commissar of the Northern Commune, the head of the St. Petersburg Emergency Commission, Uritsky, was killed by a former student, a cadet during the war, and the socialist Kannegiesser. The official document about this act reads: “During interrogation, Leonid Kannegiesser stated that he killed Uritsky not by order of the party or any organization, but by his own motive, wanting to take revenge for the arrest of the officers and the shooting of his friend Pereltsweig.”

In response to these two terrorist attacks, the Soviet government announced the start of an entire campaign of terror. At the same time, the object of mass executions was not individuals, not any class (like the nobility during the Great French Revolution), but entire strata

population, namely, everyone who did not belong to the working class or the poorest peasantry.

We do not know and will probably never know the exact number of these victims. It is safe to say, however, that the actual figure is significantly higher than the figure given later in the semi-official announcement (no official announcement was ever published). In fact, on March 23, 1919, the English military chaplain Lombard reported to Lord Curzon: “In the last days of August, two barges filled with officers were sunk, and their corpses were thrown out on the estate of one of my friends, located on the Gulf of Finland; many were tied in twos and threes with barbed wire.”

One of the eyewitnesses of the Petrograd events reported the following details: “As for Petrograd, a quick count of the number of executed reaches 1300, although the Bolsheviks admit only 500, but they do not count those many hundreds of officers, former servants and private individuals who were shot in Kronstadt and Peter and Paul Fortress in Petrograd without a special order from the central government, at the will of local council; in Kronstadt alone, 400 people were shot in one night. Three large pits were dug in the courtyard, 400 people were placed in front of them and shot one after another.”

One of the leaders of the Cheka, Peter, called these days in Petrograd “hysterical terror” in an interview given to a newspaper correspondent in November. “Contrary to popular belief,” he said, “I am not at all as bloodthirsty as they think.” In St. Petersburg, “the soft-bodied revolutionaries were thrown out of balance and began to be overzealous. Before the murder of Uritsky, there were no executions in Petrograd, and after it there were too many and often indiscriminately, while Moscow, in response to the assassination attempt on Lenin, responded only by shooting several tsarist ministers.” And then, however, the not too bloodthirsty Peter threatened: “I declare that any attempt by the Russian bourgeoisie to once again raise its head will meet such a rebuff and such reprisal, before which everything that is understood as the Red Terror will pale.”

However, just a few days before, a very shortened list of those executed for the attempt on Lenin was published in the Cheka Weekly (No. 6). There were 90 of them.

Among them were ministers, officers, employees of cooperative institutions, attorneys, students, priests, etc. And in total these days in Moscow, according to general information, more than 300 people were shot.

Not only St. Petersburg and Moscow responded for the assassination attempt on Lenin with hundreds of murders. This wave swept throughout Soviet Russia - both in large and small cities, towns and villages.

Characteristic is the emergency bulletin of the Cheka on the fight against counter-revolution in Morshansk, issued regarding the events that took place. It, by the way, read: “Comrades! They hit us on one cheek, we return it a hundredfold and give a blow to the whole face. An anti-infectious vaccination has been performed, i.e. red terror... This vaccination was done throughout Russia, in particular in Morshansk, where the murder of comrade. Uritsky and the wounding of Comrade Lenin were responded by shooting... (4 people are listed), and if there is another attempt to assassinate our leaders of the revolution and, in general, workers in responsible positions from the communists, then cruelty will manifest itself in an even worse form... We must respond to the blow with a blow ten times stronger.”

And for the first time, it seems, an official statement appeared about the hostages who would be “immediately shot” at “the slightest counter-revolutionary action.” “Hundreds of heads of the bourgeoisie and all its henchmen must fall for the head and life of one of our leaders,” read the announcement “to all citizens of the city of Torzhok and the district,” issued by the local district Cheka. Next came a list of those arrested and imprisoned as hostages: engineers, merchants, priests and... right-wing socialist-revolutionaries. Only 20 people. In Ivanovo-Voznesensk, 184 people were taken hostage, etc. In Perm, 50 people were shot for Uritsky and Lenin.

Thousands of innocent people really died for Uritsky and Lenin. Thousands across Russia were taken hostage.

A year has passed during which terror has taken horrific forms in Russia.

On September 25, 1919, in the Bolshevik party premises in Moscow, on Leontyevsky Lane, a pre-prepared explosion was carried out, destroying part of the house. Several prominent communists were killed and wounded in the explosion. The next day, a threat was published in Moscow newspapers signed by Kamenev: “White Guards” who committed a “heinous crime” will “suffer terrible punishment.”

In a note by People's Commissar of Internal Affairs Dzerzhinsky, submitted to the Council of People's Commissars on February 17, 1922,

among other things, it was said: “On the assumption that the centuries-old, old hatred of the revolutionary proletariat against the enslavers will inevitably result in a whole series of unsystematic bloody episodes, and the excited elements of popular anger will sweep away not only enemies, but also friends, not only hostile and harmful elements, but also strong and useful, I sought to systematize the punitive apparatus of the revolutionary government.”

Lenin, back in the spring of 1917, argued that it is very simple to carry out a social revolution: you just need to destroy 200-300 bourgeoisie. It is known that Trotsky, in response to Kautsky’s book “Terrorism and Communism,” gave an “ideological justification for terror,” which, however, boiled down to an overly simple truth: “The enemy must be neutralized; during wars this means destroyed.”

“Intimidation is a powerful means of politics, and one would have to be a hypocritical hypocrite not to understand this.” And Kautsky was right when he said that it would not be an exaggeration to call Trotsky’s book “a hymn of praise to the glory of inhumanity.”

There could be nothing more outrageous than the case of Captain Shchastny, which was considered in Moscow in May 1918 in the so-called Supreme Revolutionary Tribunal. Captain Shchastny saved the rest of the Russian fleet in the Baltic Sea from surrender to the German squadron and brought it to Kronstadt. He was nevertheless accused of treason. The accusation was formulated as follows: “Shchastny, by performing a heroic feat, thereby created popularity for himself, intending to subsequently use it against the Soviet regime.” Trotsky acted as a witness against Shchastny. Shchastny was shot “for saving the Baltic Fleet.” This sentence established the death penalty already in court.

The death penalty by court or administrative procedure, as practiced by the Extraordinary Commission on the territory of Soviet Russia and until September 1918, that is, until the official announcement of the “Red Terror,” cannot be considered isolated facts. There were not even dozens, but hundreds.

“Let’s throw away all the long, fruitless and idle speeches about the Red Terror... It’s time, before it’s too late, not in words, but in deeds to carry out the most merciless, strictly organized mass terror...” called for the “VChK Weekly.”

As they moved away from the center, the bloodthirstiness of the Cheka increased - they started with hundreds, reached tens of thousands. In Kyiv, “RedMech” was published, the organ of the VUCHK, which was headed by Latsis. In No. 1 we read an article by editor Lev Krainiy: “The bourgeois snake’s sting must be torn out by the roots, and if necessary, its greedy mouth must be torn apart, its fat womb ripped open. The mask must be torn off from the sabotaging, lying, treacherously pretending to be sympathetic (?!) non-class intellectual speculators and speculatory intelligentsia. For us there are not and cannot be the old principles of morality and humanity, invented by the bourgeoisie for the oppression and exploitation of the lower classes.” “The declared Red Terror,” a certain Schwartz immediately echoes him, “must be carried out in a proletarian way...”

All of Russia was covered with a network of emergency commissions to combat counter-revolution, sabotage and profiteering. There was no city, there was no volost, where branches of the all-powerful All-Russian Emergency Commission would appear, which from now on became the main nerve government controlled and absorbs the last remnants of law. Pravda itself, the official organ of the Central Committee of the Communist Party in Moscow, should have noted on October 18: “all power to the soviets” is being replaced by the slogan “all power to the extraordinary people.”

District, provincial, city (at first volost, rural and even factory) emergency commissions, railway, transport, etc., front-line or special departments of the Cheka for matters related to the army. Finally, all kinds of “field military”, “military revolutionary” tribunals and “emergency” headquarters, “punitive expeditions”, etc., etc. - all this was created to carry out the Red Terror.

The Constantinople correspondent of “Common Cause” L. Leonidov, in a series of essays “What is happening in Odessa,” presented stunning pictures of life in Odessa in those days. According to him, the number of those executed, according to official data, reached 7,000. They shot 30-40 people a night, and sometimes 200-300. Then the machine gun was active, because there were too many victims to shoot one by one.

They shot all the officers who were captured on the Romanian border, who were not allowed to cross the Dniester by the Romanians and who did not have time to join the troops of General Bredov. There were up to 1200 of these; they were imprisoned in concentration camps and gradually executed; on May 5, the largest mass execution of these officers was carried out. At night, “funeral” bells were heard in the churches. A number of priests, according to the author of the message, were brought to trial by the Revolutionary Tribunal for this and sentenced to 5-10 years of forced labor.

In some emergency commissions, they say, a special position was created - “head teacher,” that is, the head of “body registration.”

It is interesting that the overwhelming number of Red executioners did not die a natural death, but were swept away by another wave of terror, now Stalinist, and died in the dungeons of the NKVD as quickly as they themselves exterminated their victims in the dungeons of the Cheka. And this, probably, has its own, special logic of History.

“...We must turn Russia into a desert inhabited by white blacks, to whom we will give such tyranny that the most terrible despots of the East have never dreamed of. The only difference is that this tyranny will not be on the right, but on the left, and not white, but red, for we will shed such streams of blood, before which all the human losses of capitalist wars will shudder and turn pale.” (Leon Trotsky)

What is the Red Terror?

Red Terror - punitive measures taken by the Bolsheviks during the Civil War (1918-1923) to suppress the resistance of class enemies and hostile actions of internal and external counter-revolution.

The Red Terror was carried out in post-revolutionary Russia by the Cheka, led by Felix Dzerzhinsky and some units of the Red Army. The reason for carrying out punitive measures was the unsuccessful attempt to assassinate Lenin (August 30, 1918). As a result, this was, to a certain extent, the justification for the creation of the secret police and some parts of the army, dealing with people allegedly involved in one or another counter-revolutionary or political activity.

The Red Terror was officially declared on September 2, 1918 by Yakov Sverdlov in an appeal to the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and confirmed by a resolution of the Council of People's Commissars of September 5, 1918 as a response to the assassination attempt on V. Lenin on August 30, as well as to the murder on the same day of the chairman of the Petrograd Cheka M. Uritsky.

End justifies the means. This phrase, attributed to Machiavelli, became an unspoken justification for the actions of the Bolshevik authorities during the reign of terror.

The essence of the red terror

The essence of this social and political institution is that there was a total extermination of people, social elements who did not agree with the existing regime in the state and the activities of the Bolsheviks.

1918, November 1 - the Red Terror newspaper frankly published: “We are not waging war against individuals. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class. During the investigation one should not look for materials and evidence that the accused acted in deed or word against the Soviet Government. The first question you need to ask him is what class he belongs to, what origin, upbringing or profession he is. Such questions should determine the fate of the accused. This is the meaning and essence of the Red Terror.”

Right to be shot

Terror in Russia began long before the October Revolution. Since February - in the form of soldier-sailor lynchings, village pogroms of landowners and “world-eaters”. And by the autumn of 1918 it had grown to a very significant scale. Commissars sent to form a military unit or perform other important tasks were given a mandate with the right to be shot. Terrible cruelty reigned on the fronts civil war, during the suppression of uprisings and simply during the destruction of undesirables.

Repressions were initiated by the central and local bodies of the Bolsheviks, but no less often they were manifestations of the cruelty of ordinary military personnel. “A special commission to investigate the “atrocities of the Bolsheviks,” which worked in 1919 under the command of the baron, revealed numerous cases of cruel, bordering on sadism, treatment of the population and prisoners by the Red Army. On the Don, in the Kuban, in the Crimea, the commission was able to obtain materials indicating the mutilation and murder of the wounded in hospitals, the arrests and executions of everyone who was pointed out as opponents of the Bolsheviks - often together with their families. All executions were usually accompanied by the requisition of property.

The historical reality of the “Red Terror”

After the February revolution, the country's population stopped taking the law seriously. Also, the activities of the Cheka were not regulated at all. Dzerzhinsky could, without any reason, seize and execute 800 people in St. Petersburg. There was no judicial trial, no evidence of guilt, a person could die only because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Such actions of the Cheka found the support of many statesmen those times, namely Lenin and Zinoviev. They encouraged this activity in every possible way and even considered it necessary for building a new statehood.

Given the confusion in 1918 about official records and the secrecy of many aspects of police activity, it is difficult to find accurate data on casualties during the Red Terror. There is an interesting opinion that if the main goal of the activities of the Cheka and the police was to intimidate the population, then the data may be deliberately inflated, but be that as it may, the figures are quite staggering. It is believed that about 10 - 15 thousand people were executed by the Cheka from September to October 1918 in areas that were in fact under the control of the Bolsheviks. There is also an opinion that the figures are in some way underestimated, since there are some facts that essentially fall under the concept of “red terror”, and which are simply colossal in scale. For example, Lenin’s order to shoot 50 thousand people in Crimea.

In addition to a wide variety of sanctions against direct participants in the anti-Bolshevik movements, they widely used the hostage system. For example, after the murder of M. Uritsky, 900 hostages were shot in Petrograd, and the reaction to the murder (in Berlin!) of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht was to shoot all the hostages under arrest. And after the assassination attempt on Lenin, several thousand people were executed in various cities. The anarchist terrorist attack on Leontyevsky Lane in Moscow (September 1919) resulted in the execution of a large number of those arrested, who in the overwhelming majority had nothing to do with the anarchists.

From the event archive. Torture

Each locality during the civil war had its own specific features in the sphere of manifestation of human atrocity. The forms of abuse and torture are innumerable.

Bolsheviks in Kharkov. There was such terror there that many people went crazy from all the nightmares they were experiencing. They shot mercilessly, not excluding women and children.

On two streets and in the basements of some houses, corridors were dug, at the end of which they placed those to be shot and, when they fell, they were covered with earth. The next day they shot the next ones there, and again covered them with earth, and so on up to the top. Then they started the next row of the same corridor. In one of these corridors, about 2 thousand people were found shot. Some women were shot only because they did not accept the advances of the Bolsheviks. In the basements people were found crucified on the floor and screwed to the floor. Many women had the skin removed from their arms and legs in the form of gloves and stockings and all the skin from the front.

Penza - the chairman of the Cheka was a woman, Evgenia Bosh, who committed such atrocities in 1919 that she was even recalled by the center.
In Penza and the surrounding area, Bosch’s cruelty during the suppression of peasant uprisings was remembered decades later. She called those communists who tried to prevent the massacre of people “weak and soft-bodied,” accusing them of sabotage.

Torture in the so-called “Chinese” Cheka in Kyiv:

“The person was tied to a wall or post; after that, an iron pipe several inches wide was tightly tied to it at one end”... “A rat was put into it through another hole, the hole was immediately covered with a wire mesh and a fire was brought to it. Driven to despair by the heat, the animal began to eat into the human body in order to find a way out. This torture continued for hours, sometimes until the next day, until the victim died.” This kind of torture was also used: “a person was buried in the ground up to his head and left there as long as the unfortunate person could stand it. If the unfortunate person lost consciousness, they dug him up, laid him on the ground until he came to his senses, and buried him again in the same way”...

Voronezh - the unfortunate people were put naked in barrels studded with nails and rolled around. A pentagonal star was burned on the forehead; Priests had wreaths made of barbed wire placed on their heads.

Tsaritsyn and Kamyshin sawed bones.

Poltava and Kremenchug - all the priests were impaled. “In Poltava, where “Grishka the prostitute” was in charge, 18 monks were impaled in one day.” “Residents reported that here (on charred pillars) Grishka the prostitute burned particularly rebellious peasants, while he himself... sat on a chair and enjoyed the spectacle.”

Ekaterinoslav - preferred crucifixion and stoning.

Odessa - officers were tortured, tied with chains to boards, slowly inserted into a firebox and fried, others were torn in half by the wheels of winches, others were lowered in turn into a cauldron of boiling water and into the sea, and then thrown into the firebox.

Kyiv - the victim was placed in a box with decomposing corpses, they shot at her, then they announced that they would bury him alive in the box. The box was buried, half an hour later it was opened again and... then the interrogation was carried out. And they did this several times in a row. Is it any wonder that people really went crazy?

Vologda - the chairman of the Cheka, a 20-year-old young man, loved this reception. He sat on a chair on the river bank; they brought bags; They took the interrogated people out of the Cheka, put them in bags and lowered them into the ice hole. He was later declared insane in Moscow when rumors of his atrocities reached the center.

“The Bolsheviks ordered the unfortunates to kneel and stretch their necks. After which they struck with sabers. Among the executioners there were incompetent ones, unable to deliver a fatal blow with one swing, and then the victim was hit five times, or even more.” Or “first they chopped off the arms and legs, and then the heads”

VICTIMS OF THE RED TERROR

It is generally accepted that the Red Terror was a response to the White Terror, that is, to the terrorist attacks of bourgeois elements against the Communists. But in fact, the Red Terror began from the moment the Bolsheviks seized power.

Having begun their government activities for demagogic purposes with the abolition of the death penalty, the Bolsheviks immediately restored it. Already on January 8, 1918, the announcement of the Council of People's Commissars spoke of “the creation of battalions for digging trenches from the bourgeois class of men and women, under the supervision of the Red Guards. Those who resist are to be shot.” And further: counter-revolutionary agitators should be “shot at the scene of the crime.”

In other words, the death penalty was restored on the spot, without trial or trial. A month later, an announcement by the later famous All-Russian Extraordinary Commission appeared: “...counter-revolutionary agitators... all those fleeing to the Don to join the counter-revolutionary troops... will be mercilessly shot by a detachment of the commission at the scene of the crime.”

Threats began to pour in as if from a cornucopia: “bag makers will be shot on the spot” (in case of resistance), those posting leaflets “will be shot immediately,” etc. One day, the Council of People's Commissars sent out an emergency dispatch to the railways about a special train traveling from Headquarters to Petrograd: “If there is a delay in the train on the way to St. Petersburg, the culprits will be shot.” “Confiscation of all property and execution” await those who decide to circumvent the laws on exchange, sale and purchase issued by the Soviet government. There were various death threats. And it is characteristic that orders for executions were issued not only by the central body, but by all kinds of revolutionary committees: in the Kaluga province it was announced that they would be shot for non-payment of indemnities imposed on the rich; in Vyatka – “for leaving the house after 8 o’clock”; in Bryansk - for drunkenness; in Rybinsk - for crowding on the streets, and, moreover, “without warning.” They threatened not only with execution - the city commissioner of Zmiev imposed an indemnity on the city and threatened that those who failed to pay “will be drowned with a stone around their neck in the Dniester.” Even more expressive: Commander-in-Chief Krylenko, the future chief prosecutor at the Supreme Revolutionary Tribunal, guardian of the rule of law in Soviet Russia, announced on January 22:

As a sacrifice to the International. White Guard caricature. 1919

“I suggest to the peasants of the Mogilev province that they deal with the rapists according to their own judgment.” The Commissioner of the Northern Region and Western Siberia, in turn, published: “If the perpetrators are not extradited, then for every 10 people one will be shot, without any understanding of whether he is guilty or not.”

However, the official date of the beginning of the Red Terror is considered to be August 17, 1918, when in St. Petersburg, the People's Commissar of the Northern Commune, the head of the St. Petersburg Extraordinary Commission, Uritsky, was killed by a former student, a cadet during the war, and the socialist Kannegiesser. The official document about this act reads: “During interrogation, Leonid Kannegiesser stated that he killed Uritsky not by order of the party or any organization, but by his own motive, wanting to take revenge for the arrest of the officers and the shooting of his friend Pereltsweig.”

In response to these two terrorist attacks, the Soviet government announced the start of an entire campaign of terror. At the same time, the objects of mass executions were not individuals, not any class (like the nobility during the Great French Revolution), but entire sections of the population, namely, everyone who did not belong to the working class or the poorest peasantry.

We do not know and will probably never know the exact number of these victims. It is safe to say, however, that the actual figure is significantly higher than the figure given later in the semi-official announcement (no official announcement was ever published). In fact, on March 23, 1919, the English military chaplain Lombard reported to Lord Curzon: “In the last days of August, two barges filled with officers were sunk, and their corpses were thrown out on the estate of one of my friends, located on the Gulf of Finland; many were tied in twos and threes with barbed wire.”

One of the eyewitnesses of the Petrograd events reported the following details: “As for Petrograd, a quick count of the number of executed reaches 1300, although the Bolsheviks admit only 500, but they do not count those many hundreds of officers, former servants and private individuals who were shot in Kronstadt and Peter and Paul Fortress in Petrograd without a special order from the central government, at the will of the local Soviet; in Kronstadt alone, 400 people were shot in one night. Three large pits were dug in the courtyard, 400 people were placed in front of them and shot one after another.”

One of the leaders of the Cheka, Peters, called these days in Petrograd “hysterical terror” in an interview given to a newspaper correspondent in November. “Contrary to popular belief,” he said, “I am not at all as bloodthirsty as they think.” In St. Petersburg, “the soft-bodied revolutionaries were thrown out of balance and began to be overzealous. Before the murder of Uritsky, there were no executions in Petrograd, and after it there were too many and often indiscriminately, while Moscow, in response to the assassination attempt on Lenin, responded only by shooting several tsarist ministers.” And then, however, the not too bloodthirsty Peters threatened: “I declare that any attempt by the Russian bourgeoisie to once again raise its head will meet such a rebuff and such reprisal, before which everything that is understood as the Red Terror will pale.”

However, just a few days before, a very shortened list of those executed for the attempt on Lenin was published in the Cheka Weekly (No. 6). There were 90 of them.

Among them were ministers, officers, employees of cooperative institutions, attorneys, students, priests, etc.

And in total these days in Moscow, according to general information, more than 300 people were shot.

Not only St. Petersburg and Moscow responded for the assassination attempt on Lenin with hundreds of murders. This wave swept throughout Soviet Russia - both in large and small cities, towns and villages.

Characteristic is the emergency bulletin of the Cheka on the fight against counter-revolution in Morshansk, issued regarding the events that took place. It, by the way, read: “Comrades! They hit us on one cheek, we return it a hundredfold and give a blow to the whole face. An anti-infectious vaccination has been performed, i.e. red terror... This vaccination was done throughout Russia, in particular in Morshansk, where the murder of comrade. Uritsky and the wounding of Comrade Lenin were responded by shooting... (4 people are listed), and if there is another attempt to assassinate our leaders of the revolution and, in general, workers in responsible positions from the communists, then cruelty will manifest itself in an even worse form... We must respond to the blow with a blow ten times stronger.” And for the first time, it seems, an official statement appeared about the hostages who would be “immediately shot” at “the slightest counter-revolutionary action.” “Hundreds of heads of the bourgeoisie and all its henchmen must fall for the head and life of one of our leaders,” read the announcement “to all citizens of the city of Torzhok and the district,” issued by the local district Cheka. Next came a list of those arrested and imprisoned as hostages: engineers, merchants, priests and... right-wing socialist-revolutionaries. Only 20 people. In Ivanovo-Voznesensk, 184 people were taken hostage, etc. In Perm, 50 people were shot for Uritsky and Lenin.

Thousands of innocent people really died for Uritsky and Lenin. Thousands across Russia were taken hostage.

A year has passed during which terror has taken horrific forms in Russia.

On September 25, 1919, in the Bolshevik party premises in Moscow, on Leontyevsky Lane, a pre-prepared explosion was carried out, destroying part of the house. Several prominent communists were killed and wounded in the explosion. The next day, a threat was published in Moscow newspapers signed by Kamenev: “White Guards” who committed a “heinous crime” will “suffer terrible punishment.”

In the note of the People's Commissar of Internal Affairs Dzerzhinsky, submitted to the Council of People's Commissars on February 17, 1922, it was said, among other things: “On the assumption that the centuries-old, old hatred of the revolutionary proletariat against the enslavers will inevitably result in a whole series of unsystematic bloody episodes, and the excited elements of popular anger will sweep away not only enemies, but also friends, not only hostile and harmful elements, but also strong and useful ones, I sought to systematize the punitive apparatus of the revolutionary government.”

Lenin, back in the spring of 1917, argued that it is very simple to carry out a social revolution: you just need to destroy 200-300 bourgeoisie. It is known that Trotsky, in response to Kautsky’s book “Terrorism and Communism,” gave an “ideological justification for terror,” which, however, boiled down to an overly simple truth: “The enemy must be neutralized; during wars this means destroyed.”

“Intimidation is a powerful means of politics, and one would have to be a hypocritical hypocrite not to understand this.” And Kautsky was right when he said that it would not be an exaggeration to call Trotsky’s book “a hymn of praise to the glory of inhumanity.”

There could be nothing more outrageous than the case of Captain Shchastny, which was considered in Moscow in May 1918 in the so-called Supreme Revolutionary Tribunal. Captain Shchastny saved the rest of the Russian fleet in the Baltic Sea from surrender to the German squadron and brought it to Kronstadt. He was nevertheless accused of treason. The accusation was formulated as follows: “Shchastny, by performing a heroic feat, thereby created popularity for himself, intending to subsequently use it against the Soviet regime.” Trotsky acted as a witness against Shchastny. Shchastny was shot “for saving the Baltic Fleet.” This sentence established the death penalty already in court.

The death penalty by court or administrative procedure, as practiced by the Extraordinary Commission on the territory of Soviet Russia and until September 1918, that is, until the official announcement of the “Red Terror,” cannot be considered isolated facts. There were not even dozens, but hundreds.

“Let’s throw away all the long, fruitless and idle speeches about the Red Terror... It’s time, before it’s too late, not in words, but in deeds to carry out the most merciless, strictly organized mass terror...” called for the “VChK Weekly.”

As they moved away from the center, the bloodthirstiness of the Cheka increased - they started with hundreds, reached tens of thousands. In Kyiv, the “Red Sword” was published, the organ of the VUCHK, which was headed by Latsis. In No. 1 we read an article by editor Lev Krainiy: “The bourgeois snake’s sting must be torn out by the roots, and if necessary, its greedy mouth must be torn apart, its fat womb ripped open. The mask must be torn off from the sabotaging, lying, treacherously pretending to be sympathetic (?!) non-class intellectual speculators and speculatory intelligentsia. For us there are not and cannot be the old principles of morality and humanity, invented by the bourgeoisie for the oppression and exploitation of the lower classes.” “The declared Red Terror,” a certain Schwartz immediately echoes him, “must be carried out in a proletarian way...”

All of Russia was covered with a network of emergency commissions to combat counter-revolution, sabotage and profiteering. There was no city, no volost, where branches of the all-powerful All-Russian Extraordinary Commission would appear, which from now on became the main nerve of public administration and absorbed the last remnants of law. Pravda itself, the official organ of the Central Committee communist party in Moscow, should have noted on October 18: “all power to the soviets” is being replaced by the slogan “all power to the extraordinary people.”

District, provincial, city (at first volost, rural and even factory) emergency commissions, railway, transport, etc., front-line or special departments of the Cheka for matters related to the army. Finally, all kinds of “field military”, “military revolutionary” tribunals and “emergency” headquarters, “punitive expeditions”, etc., etc. - all this was created to carry out the Red Terror.

The Constantinople correspondent of “Common Cause” L. Leonidov, in a series of essays “What is happening in Odessa,” presented stunning pictures of life in Odessa in those days. According to him, the number of those executed, according to official data, reached 7,000. They shot 30-40 people a night, and sometimes 200-300. Then the machine gun was active, because there were too many victims to shoot one by one.

They shot all the officers who were captured on the Romanian border, who were not allowed to cross the Dniester by the Romanians and who did not have time to join the troops of General Bredov. There were up to 1200 of these; they were imprisoned in concentration camps and were gradually shot; on May 5, the most massive execution of these officers was carried out. At night, “funeral” bells were heard in the churches. A number of priests, according to the author of the message, were brought to trial by the Revolutionary Tribunal for this and sentenced to 5-10 years of forced labor.

In some emergency commissions, they say, a special position was created - “head teacher,” that is, the head of “body registration.”

It is interesting that the overwhelming number of Red executioners did not die a natural death, but were swept away by another wave of terror, now Stalinist, and died in the dungeons of the NKVD as quickly as they themselves exterminated their victims in the dungeons of the Cheka. And this, probably, has its own, special logic of History.