Red Terror

On 5 September 1918 the Council of People’s Commissars, meeting in the Kremlin, heard a report from the chairman of the Cheka, Felix Dzerzhinsky, and adopted a short resolution “On the Red Terror”. It stated that in the present situation “securing the rear by means of terror is a direct necessity”. Five days after the attempt on Lenin’s life and the assassination of the head of the Petrograd Cheka, Moisei Uritsky, the mass repression that had already been going on throughout the country for several days was given a basis in a government act. 5 September is usually regarded as the official beginning of the Red Terror.

Content of the resolution

The document was only one sentence long. In it the Council of Commissars declared that as many “responsible party comrades” as possible should be sent to the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission, to strengthen its work and make it more systematic. The Soviet Republic was to be protected against “class enemies” by isolating them in concentration camps. Liable to be shot were “all persons connected with White Guard organisations, conspiracies and rebellions”. The names of those shot and the reasons for the executions were to be published. The resolution was signed by the People’s Commissar for Justice, Dmitry Kursky, and the People’s Commissar for Internal Affairs, Grigory Petrovsky.

The wording was so general that almost anyone could be brought under “connection with White Guard organisations”. The resolution made no provision for a trial or the right to a defence. Dzerzhinsky later said that the laws of 3 and 5 September had at last given the Cheka the right to do what some party comrades had until then protested against: to deal with the counter-revolution at once, without asking anyone’s permission.

Hostages and executions

The resolution completed a series of acts from the first days of September. On 2 September the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, chaired by Yakov Sverdlov, declared Soviet Russia a single military camp and announced mass terror. On 3 September Izvestia printed an appeal from the Cheka, written by Dzerzhinsky and his deputy Jēkabs Peters, calling on the working class to “crush the hydra of counter-revolution with mass terror”. Anyone caught bearing arms was to be shot on the spot, and anyone who dared to engage in the slightest propaganda against Soviet power was to be arrested and confined in a camp. On 4 September the paper published Petrovsky’s order to the local soviets: to arrest at once all known Right Socialist Revolutionaries, to take a “significant number” of hostages from among the bourgeoisie and officers, and at the slightest attempt at resistance to resort to mass shootings. “An immediate end must be put to slackness and sentimentality,” the commissar wrote.

The executions ran in parallel with the resolution. In Petrograd the authorities announced at the beginning of September the shooting of more than five hundred hostages, and the published list named 512 people, mostly former officials, officers and the well-to-do. According to some accounts about 400 people, mainly former officers, were shot in a single night in Kronstadt. On 5 September, the day the resolution was adopted, the Moscow Cheka carried out a public execution in Petrovsky Park of a group of hostages from the former elite of the Empire. Among those killed were the former Minister of Justice and last chairman of the State Council, Ivan Shcheglovitov, the former Ministers of the Interior Nikolai Maklakov and Aleksei Khvostov, the former director of the Police Department Stepan Beletsky, Archpriest John Vostorgov and Bishop Ephraim (Kuznetsov). None of them had anything to do with the assassination attempts of 30 August. They were hostages, chosen because of who they had been before the revolution.

Class terror

The Bolsheviks made no secret of the fact that the aim was to intimidate whole social groups. In mid-September Grigory Zinoviev told a party conference in Petrograd that the Bolsheviks must carry with them 90 million of the hundred million inhabitants of Soviet Russia, and that with the rest there was nothing to discuss: they had to be annihilated. On 17 September Dzerzhinsky instructed the local extraordinary commissions to “speed up and conclude, that is, liquidate” pending cases. The Cheka, until then one of many institutions of the new regime, became its most dangerous instrument, and further commissions with the power of life and death were set up in the districts and provinces.

The number of victims in the first weeks is not known. According to tallies from the Cheka press, cited by the authors of The Black Book of Communism, between 10,000 and 15,000 people were shot in the space of two months. The head of the Petrograd Cheka, Gleb Bokii, reported in mid-October that in Petrograd alone 800 people had been shot and more than 6,000 imprisoned. Formally the campaign was ended by an amnesty proclaimed in November 1918 by the Sixth Congress of Soviets, but in practice the Red Terror continued throughout the Civil War, and the anniversary of the resolution of 5 September is today observed as a day of remembrance for its victims.