Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (14 page)

There was no question that, from the very start, the Cheka was intended to be used with complete ruthlessness and on a very large scale. A week before it came into official though secret existence, Trotsky was challenged about the growing numbers of arrests and searches. He defended them to the All-Russian Congress of Peasants’ Deputies, insisting that ‘demands to forgo all repressions at a time of civil war are demands to abandon the civil war’.
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The Cheka had a committee of eight under Dzerzhinsky and he quickly filled up its ranks, and the corps of senior inspectors and agents, with other fanatics. Many of them were fellow Poles or Latvians, such as the sinister Latsis, or ‘Peters’, brother of Peter the Painter of the Sidney Street Siege, perpetrator of a series of murders in Houndsditch, and Kedrov, a sadist who eventually went mad. The speed with which the force expanded was terrifying. It was recruiting people as fast as it could throughout December 1917 and January 1918, and one of its first acts was to see set up a nationwide intelligence service by asking all local Soviets for ‘information about organizations and persons whose activity is directed against the revolution and popular authority’. This decree suggested that local Soviets should themselves set up security committees to report back to professional agents, and from the first the Cheka was assisted by a growing horde of amateur and part-time informers. Its full-time ranks grew inexorably. The Tsar’s secret police, the Okhrana, had numbered 15,000, which made it by far the largest body of its kind in the old world. By contrast, the Cheka, within three years of its establishment, had a strength of 250,000 full-time agents.
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Its activities were on a correspondingly ample scale. While the last Tsars had executed an average of seventeen a year (for all crimes), by 1918–19 the Cheka was averaging 1,000 executions a month for political offences alone.
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This figure is certainly an understatement – for a reason which goes to the heart of the iniquity of the system Lenin created. Almost immediately after the Cheka came into being, a decree set up a new kind of ‘revolutionary tribunal’, to try those ‘who organize uprisings against the authority of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Government, who actively oppose it or do not obey it, or who call on others to oppose or disobey it’, and civil servants guilty of sabotage or concealment. The tribunal was authorized to fix penalties in accordance with ‘the circumstances of the case and the dictates of the revolutionary conscience’.
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This decree effectively marked the end of the rule of law in Lenin’s new state, then only weeks old. It dovetailed into the Cheka system. Under the Tsars, the Okhrana was
empowered to arrest, but it then had to hand over the prisoner to the courts for public trial, just like anyone else; and any punishments were meted out by the ordinary civil authorities. Under Lenin’s system, the Cheka controlled the special courts (which met in secret) and carried out their verdicts. Hence once a man fell into the Cheka’s hands, his only safeguard was ‘the dictates of the revolutionary conscience’. As the Cheka arrested, tried, sentenced and punished its victims, there was never any reliable record of their numbers. Within weeks of its formation, the Cheka was operating its first concentration and labour camps. These arose from a Sovnarkom decree directing ‘bourgeois men and women’ to be rounded up and set to digging defensive trenches in Petrograd.
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Camps were set up to house and guard them, and once the Cheka was given supervision over the forced labour programme, its prison-camps began to proliferate on the outskirts of towns, or even deep in the countryside—the nucleus of what was to become the gigantic ‘Gulag Archipelago’. By the end of 1917, when Lenin had been in power only nine or ten weeks, it would be correct to say that the Cheka was already a ‘state within a state’; indeed as regards many activities it was the state.

We can dismiss the notion that its origins and growth were contrary to Lenin’s will. All the evidence we possess points in quite the opposite direction.
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It was Lenin who drafted all the key decrees and Dzerzhinsky was always his creature. Indeed it was Lenin personally who infused the Cheka with the spirit of terror and who, from January 1918 onwards, constantly urged it to ignore the doubts and humanitarian feelings of other Bolsheviks, including many members of Sovnarkom. When Lenin transferred the government from Petrograd to Moscow for security reasons, and placed Sovnarkom within the Kremlin, he encouraged Dzerzhinsky to set up his own headquarters independently of Sovnarkom. A large insurance company building was taken over in Lubyanka Square; inside it an ‘inner prison’ was built for political suspects; and from this point on the Cheka was an independent department of state reporting directly to Lenin. He left its officials in no doubt what he wanted. In January 1918, three months before the civil war even began, he advocated ‘shooting on the spot one out of every ten found guilty of idling’. A week later he urged the Cheka publicly: ‘Until we apply the terror – shooting on the spot – to speculators, we shall achieve nothing.’ A few weeks later he demanded ‘the arrest and
shooting
of takers of bribes, swindlers, etc’. Any breach of the decree laws must be followed by ‘the harshest punishment’.
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On 22 February, he authorized a Cheka proclamation ordering local Soviets to ‘seek out, arrest and shoot immediately’ a whole series of categories of ‘enemies, speculators, etc’.
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He followed this general decree with his own personal instructions. Thus, by August 1918, he was telegraphing the
Soviet at Nizhni-Novgorod: ‘You must exert every effort, form a
troika
of dictators …
instantly
introduce
mass terror, shoot and transport
hundreds of prostitutes who get the soldiers drunk, ex-officers, etc. Not a minute to be wasted.’
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His example inspired others. The next month the army newspaper proclaimed: ‘Without mercy, without sparing, we will kill our enemies in scores of hundreds, let them be thousands, let them drown themselves in their own blood … let there be floods of blood of the bourgeois.’
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Lenin’s incitements brought their results. In the first six months of 1918 the Cheka executed, according to its official figures, only twenty-two prisoners. In the second half of the year it carried out 6,000 executions, and in the whole of 1919 some 10,000. W.H.Chamberlain, the first historian of the revolution, who was an eye-witness, calculated that by the end of 1920 the Cheka had carried out over 50,000 death sentences.
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However, the most disturbing and, from the historical point of view, important characteristic of the Lenin terror was not the quantity of the victims but the principle on which they were selected. Within a few months of seizing power, Lenin had abandoned the notion of individual guilt, and with it the whole Judeo-Christian ethic of personal responsibility. He was ceasing to be interested in
what
a man did or had done – let alone
why
he had done it – and was first encouraging, then commanding, his repressive apparatus to hunt down people, and destroy them, not on the basis of crimes, real or imaginary, but on the basis of generalizations, hearsay, rumours. First came condemned categories: ‘prostitutes’, ‘work-shirkers’, ‘bagmen’, ‘speculators’, ‘hoarders’, all of whom might vaguely be described as criminal. Following quickly, however, came entire occupational groups. The watershed was Lenin’s decree of January 1918 calling on the agencies of the state to ‘purge the Russian land of all kinds of harmful insects’. This was not a judicial act: it was an invitation to mass murder. Many years later, Alexander Solzhenitsyn listed just a few of the groups who thus found themselves condemned to destruction as ‘insects’. They included ‘former
zemstvo
members, people in the Cooper movements, homeowners, high-school teachers, parish councils and choirs, priests, monks and nuns, Tolstoyan pacifists, officials of trade unions’ – soon all to be classified as ‘former people’.
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Quite quickly the condemned group decree-laws extended to whole classes and the notion of killing people collectively rather than individually was seized upon by the Cheka professionals with enthusiasm. Probably the most important Cheka official next to Dzerzhinsky himself was the ferocious Latvian M.Y.Latsis. He came nearest to giving the Lenin terror its true definition:

The Extraordinary Commission is neither an investigating commission nor a tribunal. It is an organ of struggle, acting on the home front of a civil war. It does not judge the enemy: it strikes him …. We are not carrying out war against individuals. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class. We are not looking for evidence or witnesses to reveal deeds or words against the Soviet power. The first question we ask is – to what class does he belong, what are his origins, upbringing, education or profession? These questions define the fate of the accused. This is the essence of the Red Terror.
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Once Lenin had abolished the idea of personal guilt, and had started to ‘exterminate’ (a word he frequently employed) whole classes, merely on account of occupation or parentage, there was no limit to which this deadly principle might be carried. Might not entire categories of people be classified as ‘enemies’ and condemned to imprisonment or slaughter merely on account of the colour of their skin, or their racial origins or, indeed, their nationality? There is no essential moral difference between class-warfare and race-warfare, between destroying a class and destroying a race. Thus the modern practice of genocide was born.

While the Cheka was getting itself organized, Lenin proceeded to wind up the democratic legacy of the republic. The Constituent Assembly had been elected on 12 November 1917. Lenin made clear his attitude towards it on 1 December: ‘We are asked to call the Constituent Assembly as originally conceived. No thank you! It was conceived against the people and we carried out the rising to make certain that it will not be used against the people.’
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In his ‘Theses on the Constituent Assembly’, published anonymously in
Pravda
of 13 December, he contrasted a parliament, which ‘in a bourgeois republic … is the highest form of the democratic principle’, with a Soviet, which ‘is a higher form of the democratic principle’. Hence ‘any attempt… to look at the … Constituent Assembly from the formal, juridical standpoint, within the framework of bourgeois democracy’ was treason to the proletariat. Unless the Assembly made ‘an unconditional declaration of acceptance of the Soviet power’, it would face a crisis to be ‘solved only by revolutionary means’.
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This was not so much an argument as a blunt statement by Lenin that his regime would not accept any form of democratic control by a parliament. Four days later, to underline his point, he arrested the leader of the right-wing section of the Social Revolutionaries, Avksientiev, and his chief followers, ‘for the organization of a counter-revolutionary conspiracy’.
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By the time the Assembly met on 5 January 1918, Lenin had already put together the essentials of a repressive regime, albeit on a small scale as yet (the Cheka had only 120 full-time agents), and was
therefore in a position to treat the parliament with the contempt he felt it deserved. He did not put in an appearance but he had written the script down to the last line. The building was ‘guarded’ by the Baltic Fleet sailors, the most extreme of the armed groups at Lenin’s disposal.
Izvestia
had warned the deputies the day before they met that ‘all power in the Russian republic belongs to the Soviets and Soviet institutions’ and that if they sought to ‘usurp this or that function of state power’ they would be treated as counterrevolutionaries and ‘crushed by all means at the disposal of the Soviet power, including the use of armed force’.
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As soon as the deputies gathered, Lenin’s henchman, Sverdlov, simply pushed from the tribune its oldest member, who by a Russian tradition was about to open proceedings, and took charge. There followed a long debate, culminating in a vote after midnight which went against the Bolsheviks and their allies, 237–138. The Bolsheviks then withdrew, followed an hour later by their partners, the Left
SRS
. At 5 am on 6 January, following instructions sent direct from Lenin, the sailor in charge of the guard told the Assembly that its meeting must close ‘because the guard is tired’. It adjourned for twelve hours but never reassembled, for later that day, after a speech by Lenin, the Central Executive Committee formally dissolved it and a guard was placed on the doors to tell the deputies to go back to their homes. An unarmed demonstration in favour of the parliament was dispersed, several in the crowd being killed.
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Thus briefly and brutally did Lenin destroy parliamentary democracy in Russia. Three days later, in the same building and with Sverdlov presiding, the Soviets met to rubber-stamp the decisions of the regime.

By the end of January 1918, after about twelve weeks in authority, Lenin had established his dictatorship so solidly that nothing short of external intervention could have destroyed his power. Of course by this time the Germans were in a position to snuff him out without difficulty. They were advancing rapidly on all fronts, meeting little opposition. But on 3 March Lenin signed their dictated peace-terms, having argued down Trotsky and other colleagues, who wanted to pursue a ‘no war no peace’ line until the German workers’ revolution broke out. Thereafter, for the rest of the war, the Germans had an interest in keeping Lenin going. As their Foreign Minister, Admiral Paul von Hintze, put it in July 1918: ‘The Bolsheviks are the best weapon for keeping Russia in a state of chaos, thus allowing Germany to tear off as many provinces from the former Russian Empire as she wishes and to rule the rest through economic controls.’
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