Creation of the Cheka

On 20 December 1917 (7 December by the Julian calendar) the Council of People’s Commissars at the Smolny heard a report by Felix Dzerzhinsky on how to combat “sabotage” and counter-revolution. At the same meeting it set up the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission under the Council of People’s Commissars for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage, abbreviated VChK and commonly known as the Cheka. Dzerzhinsky became its chairman. Thus was born the institution which within a few years became the main instrument of Soviet terror.

For the first weeks after the coup the struggle against opponents had been conducted by the Military Revolutionary Committee (PL) of the Petrograd Soviet, a temporary body. On 18 December (5 December Old Style) it announced its own dissolution. Meanwhile the new government was meeting the resistance that worried it most. Since November the officials of the ministries and the employees of banks and state institutions had been on strike or refusing to carry out the commissars’ orders, and the Bolsheviks feared a general strike of officials. On 19 December Lenin raised the matter at a meeting of the government, and Dzerzhinsky was instructed to assemble a commission to work out countermeasures. In a letter attached to the draft decree, written after Dzerzhinsky’s report, Lenin accused the bourgeoisie and the “higher officials” of sabotaging work and organising strikes intended to frustrate the socialist reforms. They are sabotaging even the food supply, he wrote, exposing millions of people to hunger.

According to the minutes, the Cheka was to “suppress and liquidate all counter-revolutionary and sabotage attempts and actions throughout Russia, no matter from whom they come”, hand saboteurs and counter-revolutionaries over to trial by revolutionary tribunals, and conduct only the preliminary investigation. It was also to watch the press, the parties deemed counter-revolutionary and the striking officials. It could apply confiscation of property, expulsion, withdrawal of ration cards and publication of lists of “enemies of the people”. Dzerzhinsky invited a dozen or so trusted Bolsheviks to work on the commission, among them the Latvian Jēkabs Peterss, Ivan Ksenofontov, Sergo Ordzhonikidze and Józef Unszlicht, a native of Mława. Three departments were created: information, organisation, and combating counter-revolution and sabotage. In its first weeks the Cheka had only a few dozen staff and a few detachments of soldiers and Red Guards, and in practice operated only in Petrograd.

Dzerzhinsky, then forty years old, was a Pole from a noble family from the estate of Dzierżynowo in present-day Belarus. He grew up in Vilna and joined the socialist movement while still a grammar-school pupil. He was one of the leaders of the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania, which was hostile to the cause of Polish independence, and spent more than ten years in tsarist prisons, penal servitude and exile. The February Revolution freed him from Moscow’s Butyrka prison. In August 1917 he joined the Bolshevik Central Committee, and during the coup he was active in the Military Revolutionary Committee. Lenin valued his severity and asceticism. According to Peterss’s memoirs, he called him a “proletarian Jacobin” at that meeting.

At first the Cheka formally only prepared cases for the tribunals, and its punishments were relatively mild. It soon began, however, to arrest, try and carry out sentences itself. In February 1918, during the German offensive, it gave itself the right to shoot on the spot, and by the autumn of 1918 it was already conducting the Red Terror. Dzerzhinsky headed it and its successors until his death in 1926. The abbreviation of its name gave rise to the term for officers of the Soviet political police: “Chekists”.