---
title: 'The Record of The Red Terror'
url: 'https://samisdat.in/books/the-record-of-the-red-terror-1927/read'
markdown: 'https://samisdat.in/books/the-record-of-the-red-terror-1927/read.md'
lang: en
date: '1927-01-01'
description: 'The Record of the Red Terror By S. MELGUNOFF A PROMINENT RUSSIAN HISTORIAN; EDITOR OF THE Golos Minuvshago (Voice of the Past); AUTHOR OF The Red Terror in Russia RASNYI TERROR" (the Red Terror) is an official title which has been used more than once by the Communist régime in Russia even in its ad…'
---

# The Record of the Red Terror

By S. MELGUNOFF

A PROMINENT RUSSIAN HISTORIAN; EDITOR OF THE Golos Minuvshago (Voice of the Past);
AUTHOR OF The Red Terror in Russia

RASNYI TERROR" (the Red Terror) is an official title which has been used more than once by the Communist régime in Russia even in its administrative documents. The declaration of the Red Terror, appearing at that time or at other times during the past decade, was an indication of the ruthless and lawless methods used by the Bolshevist power to settle its accounts with its political enemies; it meant, to quote the words of an official document of 1918, "the annihilation of the idealists and leaders of the enemies of the proletariat." As a principle, the question was somewhat wider in scope. "We are not making war on individuals," wrote Latsis, one of the chief practical creators of this Red Terror; "we are exterminating the bourgeoisie, as a class."

the period of civil war, thus further widening the question, at the seventh meeting of the Soviets in 1919.

The facts, however, always speak for themselves. The plan of the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission, to create the Red Terror was drawn up by Dzerzhinsky on the basis given by Lenin personally (his own letter, handwritten, has been preserved) on Dec. 7, 1917, that is, before the calling and the dismissal of the Constituent Assembly, when no attacks on the life of the representatives of the Soviet power had yet been made, and when the civil war, in the precise sense of the word, had not yet begun. In February and March, 1918, the Red Terror, officially not declared as such actually was in operation on the territory covered by the Soviet power. We have the full right to make this assertion, for even in Izvestiya, the official organ of the Government (numbers 27, 30), reports of the Cheka (Extraordinary Commission) were published at that time regarding fugitives to the south, who had been caught, arrested and shot on the spot for their intention to join the counter-revolutionary agitation." \[In my book, The Red Terror in Russia (Dent London), the facts are presented and discussed, and official documents are cited, irrefutably confirming this statement\].

There is no possibility of drawing up even approximate statistics of the executions by shooting in the first months of the Extraordinary Commission's activity and that of its organs. The Government found itself still in a chaotic condition. All Russia was still in the throes of revolution; besides the official organs of the Government there arose everywhere all kinds of self-elected "revolutionary committees," whose activities were legalized by the Central Government. Moreover, the Government sometimes directly incited the population to take the law into its own hands. For instance, Krylenko himself, the Commander-in-Chief of the army, one of the leaders subsequently of the administration of Soviet justice and the guardian "of revolutionary law" in the Soviet State, on Jan. 22, 1918, declared: "I recommend to the peasants of the Mogilev Guberniya \[Admin-

istrative Department\] to take the law into their own hands." I am able categorically to refute the assertion of the official historian of the Cheka, Latsis (in his work, Two Years of Struggle on the Inner Front), that in the first six months of existence of the Extraordinary Commission only twenty-two men were shot. How far that is from the truth may be seen from the fact that while I was in Moscow, with opportunities to obtain only occasional data appearing in print, I had to enter in my card record of bloody statistics some 884 executions by shooting. Latsis intended the estimate of twenty executions to show the Government's humanity. "And this," he wrote, "would have continued had it not been for the great wave of conspiracy and unheard of terrorism launched by the counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie." But we must keep in view the fact that the first individual terroristic attack on the representatives of the Soviet Government occurred on Aug. 17, 1918, when Uritsky, Chairman of the Petrograd Extraordinary Commission, was killed by the Socialist, Kanegiser. On Aug. 28 followed the celebrated attack on Lenin, made by the Socialist-Revolutionary Kaplan.

#### DECLARATION OF "RED TERROR"

The terroristic acts of August, 1918, called forth from the Bolshevist authorities an official declaration of the so-called Red Terror, which spread all over Russia like a great wave. Wholesale arrests were made of the most diverse classes of the population. Thousands of those arrested were declared hostages and shot. (Statistics are given in my book, already cited). The character of the Terror in the days of September is revealed with remarkable clearness by the official statements of at least provincial Extraordinary Commissions, which are marked by their frankness of expression: "For the head and life of one of our leaders, we must cut off the heads of hundreds of the bourgeoisie and their adherents" (City of Torzhok). Such statements could be cited by tens and hundreds. The declarations of the press were even more bloodthirsty; the lives of thousands of hostages, "tens of thousands of these parasites" were demanded

The Central Government, as a matter of fact, directed the whole movement. In the name of the "working class," the Moscow War Commissary, for example, declared (Sept. 3) that "for every drop of proletariat blood \* \* \* there will be shed a stream of the blood of those who \* \* \* oppose the Soviets and the proletarian leads.

ers." He spoke of the pitiless mass Terror. Even the All-Russian Central Executive Committee at its sitting of Sept. 2 gave "a solemn warning to all slavish followers of the Russian and allied bourgeoisie to the effect that for 'every attack on the active leaders of the Soviet Government all counter-revolutionaries will be held responsible." The People's Commissary for the Interior, Petrovsky, sent at one time to all Soviets a telegraphic order "concerning hostages." "Laxness and softness must be immediately brought to an end," he wrote, declaring that "mass execution by shooting should be inexorably dealt out" to these hostages. And the All-Russian Cheka Daily, an organ which was to work out methods of struggle for the Extraordinary Commissions, in its first issue said: "Let us abandon all long, fruitless and futile speeches about the Red Terror. The time has come, not by words but by deeds, to carry on the most pitiless, sternly organized mass terror." Taking into account all such official declarations, it becomes absolutely impossible to agree with the Soviet publicist Radek, who wrote in Izvestiva on

![](https://samisdat.in/user/pages/03.books/1927%20-%20The%20Record%20of%20The%20Red%20Terror/read/_page_1_Picture_7.jpeg?g-16018011)

FELIX EDMUNDOVICH DZERZHINSKY Chairman of the Soviet Supreme Economic Council at his death on July 20, 1926, but better known as the head of the Cheka during the greater part of the Soviet régime

Sept. 6 that the measures taken by the Government prevented a "mass pogrom of the bourgeoisie." It is necessary to come to exactly the opposite conclusion.

#### PITILESS "SETTLEMENT OF ACCOUNTS"

The whole country was covered with a network of "Extraordinary Commissions for the Battle Against Counter-Revolution, Sabotage and Speculation," as they were officially designated. There was no city, no volost (administrative division of the uyezd, or county) in which there did not appear a branch of the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission, which became the nerve centre of the Government. The official organ of the Central Committee of the Communist Party in Moscow, Pravda, wrote on Oct. 18 that the battle-cry, "The whole power to the Soviets," will be transformed now into "The whole power to the Extraordinary Commissions."

(Georgia) in a collection of verse called

Even Latsis had to admit the need of constantly changing the personnel of the Cheka, for "no matter how honest a man may be \* \* \* the work of the Cheka, carried on under conditions inevitably acting on the nervous system and blunting the esthetic sensibilities, makes itself felt," "works degeneratively on many young Communists of weak character." Inevitably the activity of the Cheka was bound, on the other hand, to attract all outcast elements, drawn by greed and the possibility of wielding power. The penetration into the Cheka of this jailbird material of "criminal" elements even Krylenko had to admit. At first the conscience of individual Communist workers, not yet accustomed to horrors, was overcome by the Cheka's activity. No wonder that one of the old Bolsheviki, Olyminsky, openly came out on Feb. 3, 1919, with a protest against the drastic acts of the Cheka. He wrote: "We may all have different opinions about the Red Terror, but what is going on now in the province is not at all a Red Terror, but a capital crime."

I will not dwell on the picture of the excesses of the Terror, which fill the record of Russian life at that time. He who wishes to find confirmation in concrete facts may turn to my book, where hundreds of these facts are given, taken from the most varied sources. Life brought up again before us Russians well-known scenes of the history of the French Revolution of the eighteenth century in the period of the Jacobin Terror. We encounter here recorded facts of wholesale drownings on ships, of medieval torture-chambers of the most cynical forms, of wholesale shooting, compared with which the bloody battles recorded by history grow pale; of the erotic orgies of local kinglets, small despots, who, supported by their "revolutionary conscience," set themselves up as supreme rulers over the lives and destinies of those arrested and held as hostages. For in the name of attaining revolutionary aims and "their own desires," everything was permitted, as the Krasnyi Mech, the organ of the Ukrainian Extraordinary Commission, declared, repeating Lenin's words.

#### ARUSERS OF THE TERROR

The Central Power was essentially powerless to oppose those who may be called the abusers of the Terror. It could not find other agents. Though in individual instances it strove to control such abusers, as a matter of fact in the great majority

![](https://samisdat.in/user/pages/03.books/1927%20-%20The%20Record%20of%20The%20Red%20Terror/read/_page_3_Picture_2.jpeg?g-16018011)

M. MENZHINSKY

Head of the G. P. U., the Political Department

of the Soviet Government

with the cloak of its own authority, to protect and justify the activity of the Chekisti (members of the Cheka). "We must all be agents of the Cheka," declared Bukharin. "The Cheka is the beauty and pride of the Communist Party," said Zinoviev. "The Extraordinary Commission is the best that the Soviet organ can give us," wrote Latsis, the Cheka historian, and one of its most zealous leaders as the Chairman of the Central Commission in the Ukraine. While some of the Bolshevist members raised their voice in indignant protest against what was being done under the banner of the "revolutionary conscience," against the transformation of provincial branches into bandit and marauding organizations, according to the expression of the first Bolshevist Commissar of Justice, other authoritative voices spoke in defense of the Cheka. In the same Cheka Weekly, already cited, there was published an attack on the charges brought by "soft-bodied," "weak-nerved" intelligentsia, by certain strong-nerved authorities, such as one of the most prominent Chekisti, Peters, who said: "There is nothing to faint over."

\* \* New people are not used to judicial

wisdom. \* \* \* It is absurd to limit by a judicial framework the activity of the Cheka." In No. 5 of the Weekly in reply to the accusations, there even appeared an article which embodied an original argument in defense of the penetration into the Cheka of criminal elements: "It means that we are strong, for rogues are a practical people who do not go together with the weak."

#### CHEKA CYNICISM—TERRORISM

All the background of the Red Terror was bound to exercise a degenerative influence on the active workers of the Cheka. The destruction of the enemy leads to a view of the utter worthlessness of human life in the eyes of those who conduct such a policy. Death seems too common; it is too easy to pronounce death sentences. Before me lie original protocols of the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission. In reading them one is always surprised by the extreme simplicity of the forms of the "Legal Proceedings." The "revolutionary conscience" allows, for instance, at one session, consideration of fifty-nine cases, and in twenty-five cases the decree of execution

by shooting. In the protocols are contained death sentences over the signature of Latsis himself, without even the date being given when they were issued. It is unnecessary in order to learn the actual activity of the Extraordinary Commission to penetrate into far-off provincial regions, where various forms of abuse of power could be met with especially often, where the Cheka could absorb more easily elements which we call criminal, for even in the centre of events, when the names of those executed were published in the General Assembly, one is surprised by the ignoring of questions which the human conscience and morale ask those who put into practice the right of the revolution to commit murder. The last names only were published with unusual carelessness; people were shot, with a brief comment: "Counter-revolutionary by conviction," "a counter-revolutionary hard to catch," and so on, or simply, under the circumstances of the Red Terror such and such a number were shot. "We do not need evidence or cross-examinations or suspicion to justify shooting. We find it useful, and we shoot," declared with great cynicism one of the active Chekisti (in Kungur).

The aim of the Cheka was not only to destroy the enemy but also to intimidate him; in the words of Latsis, to kill in him every desire to "sabotage" the Government. Aiming to affect the soul, a whole system of terrorization was built up, going as far as wholesale arrests of hundreds and thousands, night trials, terrible conditions of prison life, a room with cork (soundproof) walls, feigned shootings and shootings "for every case." It was most likely with the aim of intimidation that in that official organ of the Extraordinary Commission, already more than once referred to, there was printed that significant appeal to obtain evidence by torture. This really historical document, under the title "Why Do You Take Mild Measures!" written by the representative of one of the provincial commissions, was published in connection with the well-known case of the British Consul Lockhardt. "Tell us," said the article, "why you did not subject this man Lockhardt to the most refined tortures in order to obtain information. Tell us why, instead of subjecting him to such tortures as would send a cold chill over the counter-revolutionaries at the mere recital of it, you allowed him to leave the Cheka. Enough of sentimentalism! Catch a dangerous scoundrel. Get all

the information you can from him and send him to the heavenly kingdom." Is it necessary to point out how such appeals from the Centre must have spurred on the Cheka agents to action?

Formally, and more demagogically, the Red Terror, created by the Communist power in the name of the proletariat, was aimed at the so-called bourgeois classes. Actually its chief characteristic was terrorization and the physical extermination of all opposers of the Soviet power, regardless of the property class to which they belonged. The principle, "Poison for the bourgeoisie, comradely exhortation for workmen and peasant," was only the expression of a demagogic principle. Only with a demagogic object did the "proletarian origin" sometimes admit extenuating circumstances. Kautsky called the Terror "fraternal murder, committed exclusively, because of the will to power," and he was more than right. Owing to the manner in which the executions were published by the Bolsheviki, it is almost impossible to determine the social position of those executed. But it is characteristic that occasional data show a minimum percentage of bourgeoisie.

#### INTELLIGENTSIA AND PEASANTS VICTIMS

My card-record of 1918-1919 showed the largest percentage to be of the intelligent-sia—that is, "the servants of the bourgeoisie," to use the terminology of the Bolshevist classification—and of the peasants, representing the petit bourgeois interests. If we take the later data of the year 1923, we find more than 40 per cent. of the workman-peasant group. Wholesale shootings carried out by the Cheka by all possible punitive expeditions, as a matter of fact, affected the masses, viz., the workmen and peasants. We might note the decrees of wholesale murder of "well-to-do" peasants. When, during the repression of the peasant disorders in the villages (especially in the Tambov guberniya, in the year 1921), the Bolsheviki shot "every eleventh" and even "every fourth," as the official document in question states, it is hardly necessary to take into account the qualification of "well-to-do." The "pitiless punishment" at the order of Trotsky of the Astrakhan workmen in March, 1919, marked a hecatomb of the proletariat in the real sense of the word.

Such was the Red Terror in its first period, within which we include the years 1918-1921. This was a time when an active civil war was going on, but after the Soviet power in one way or another issued victori-

![](https://samisdat.in/user/pages/03.books/1927%20-%20The%20Record%20of%20The%20Red%20Terror/read/_page_5_Picture_2.jpeg?g-16018011)

M. KRYLENKO
Head of the Soviet Law Department (Attorney
General)

ous—in the South after the fall of the rule of General Denikin, in the Crimea after the evacuation of General Wrangel, in Siberia after the régime of Admiral Kolchak, in the North everywhere—the same picture may be observed; the act of vengeance on the defeated enemy is carried out, the annihilation of the future enemy, the enemy in spe. Not caught with guns in their hands, but remaining on the territory which had fallen under the Soviet's control, those who participated in the civil war (especially the officers) were subjected to wholesale destruction. Tens of thousands were arrested after the issue of orders declaring the indispensability of registration and tens of thousands were shot. A bloody butchery, in the literal sense of the word. It is enough to refer to at least the official publications, keeping in view that they always understated. For example, in the "News of the Provisional Revkom (Revolutionary Commission) of Sebastopol," on Nov. 28, 1920, the estimate of 1,634 executions was published, and two days later another of 1,202. In the little town of Kertch the local Izvestiya gives an estimate of 800. The Odessa Cheka itself fixes the figure of shootings in 1920-21 at 1,418 men.

In the Crimea, where Bela Kun held sway, the number of those shot in that liquidation of 1920-21 was estimated at more than 100,000. Wholesale shootings became so serious that they even called forth an investigation by Moscow, undertaken mostly, it is true, to influence public opinion.

## CONTINUED AFTER DEATH PENALTY ABOLISHED

The Red Terror in this period of liquidation was carried on despite the official admission that open civil war had virtually ceased and that the "revolutionary proletariat" was able to "lay aside the weapon of terror," to which "the Government of Workmen and Peasants had been obliged to resort." Thus read the declaration of the All-Russian Cheka over the signature of Dzerzhinsky, published on Jan. 20, 1920, in the Izvestiya, and ordering all organs of the Cheka to discontinue the application of the most extreme forms of punishment. It was impossible, however, to attribute any great significance to this decree of the Cheka, confirmed somewhat later by a decree of the Soviet of People's Commissaries and the V. Ts. I. K. (the Central Executive Committee), for a whole year before that it had also been solemnly proclaimed that "the proletariat \* \* \* turns away from the weapon of Terrorism, making law and justice its weapons." An indisputable fact: the night before the issue of the decree abolishing the death penalty in the Cheka sentences became a "night of blood," in the words of one of the horrifying inscriptions traced on the walls of the cell of the condemned men in the Cheka prison in Moscow.

And in Moscow and Petrograd and everywhere in the province there occurred intensive shootings in those days of the formal abolition of the death penalty. Within a month there was introduced by a secret circular a formal reservation destroying the intention of the Cheka's previous prohibition of independent shootings. "In view of the discontinuance of the death penalty," the Cheka circular sent to the local Cheka organizations read, "it is ordered to send all persons now subject to the extreme penalty to the zone of military operations as a place to which the decree of discontinuance of the death penalty does not extend."

The shootings continued. In May, in connection with the Polish-Russian war, the death penalty was officially revived all over Russia. To what extent it was openly applied in the so-called revolutionary military tribunals, organically linked with the

Cheka, even official figures published in the Soviet newspapers show. For instance, in July-August there was published in the Izvestiya the figure of 1,183 deaths; in August-September, 1,206. The shootings were carried out on every pretext, as is seen in the published reports; for counter-revolution, for rebellion, for having arms, even for disorderly conduct in a state of drunkenness.

### "QUIET TERROR" UNDER G. P. U.

The picture did not change essentially in the period following. For tactical reasons in 1922 the name of the Cheka was changed to the Government Political Office. But the substance and form of the Cheka organization, and even its personnel activities remained unchanged. And the G. P. U. as it was now called, bore the same reputation as the Cheka.

court." But the court should not in any way be different "from such an organ a the Cheka," declares Krylenko in his book Court and Law in S. S. S. R. (Soviet Rus sia), published in 1927. Krylenko again refers to the testament of Lenin, recalls the words uttered by him in the first period of the New Economic Policy: "The revolutionary courts must decree execution by shooting when it is proved that the accused is a Menshevik." Fully forty three articles of the Criminal Code give the revolutionary courts the possibility to sentence the accused to death in the Soviet Republic. Is not this the Red Terror? That is the revolutionary court. But the Red Terror, also, in the sense in which it is depicted by the Communist idealists, may always rise in its turn, for none except the "hysterical woman-intellectuals doubt its necessity," said Vladimir Ilyitch (Lenin) on March 6, 1922. "If it becomes necessary we will bring it forth again." It became necessary in the Summer months of 1927, when under the circumstances of the Red Terror there began on all sides in Russia arrests of hostages and shootings on a wholesale scale.

#### THE "TERROR" PASSING

It is incontestable that the breaking on every now and then of flashes of the "hysterical Terror" (an expression of one of the notorious leaders of the Cheka—Peters does not have at the present time and can not have the character of that really me dieval nightmare, which it was in the first years following the seizure of the Government by the Bolsheviki. The Governmenta Terror has been so habitual a phenomenor that people have become accustomed to it and it has ceased to frighten. The psychical depression of the terrorized population is gradually passing; the people are awakening to revolutionary activity and protest against the despotic group of political leaders standing at the head of the Government. The Governmental Terror is giving birth to the Terror of the discontented aimed at the agents of the Government and the representatives of the G. P. U. A new generation is appearing on the scene of history. It is alien to the moods and reasoning in the atmosphere of which the Red Terror was born and existed. The unity of the Communist Party itself is broken—a unity absolutely essential for the deliberate realization of that Jacobin policy which the Communist power has sought to follow for the last ten years.

Naturally, the question is asked: How

many victims of the Red Terror may be estimated during the last ten years? Unfortunately there is no answer to this question, and even history will scarcely be able to answer it. There was too much disorder in the application of the Red Terror in the period of the civil war in Russia. No one can ever calculate the number of shootings of "hostages" in the Autumn months of 1918 or during the period above referred to as that of the liquidation of the civil war. Space prevents me from dwelling on this question of statistics. Latsis, in his statistics for the second half of 1918, estimated 4,500 executions by shooting. My cardindex for that period has 5,000 cards. Moreover, I deliberately left out of account evidence concerning the shootings that occurred during the punitive expeditions. Of course, I was able only to enter far fewer cases than those known to the central organs of the Cheka. It is possible categorically to assert that the secret shootings were recorded in infinitely lesser number than the actual occurrences. But the really horrible aspects of the days of the Red Terror have never yet appeared in print. The

commission investigating in the period of the Government of General Denikin the activity of the Bolsheviki in South Russia estimated the number of victims of the Red Terror in 1918-1919 at 1,700,000 persons—an estimate based only on the territory won back from the Bolsheviki by Denikin's forces. It could not extend its inquiry to the centre of Russia, to the north, to the vast zone of the Volga, to the western part of Russia, or finally to Siberia. Statistical data always depend on the method applied to the statistics. The death sentences of the Cheka, of course, could not have reached the figure given (1,700,000), but if we take the wholesale executions, the shootings "on the spot," the shootings on the punitive expeditions, I think that the estimates of the Denikin Commission cannot be very far from the truth. At all events, not by thousands, but by tens of thousands of shootings, must we speak of the death sentences of the Cheka or the G. P. U. And by hundreds of thousands, if not more, must we speak when the Red Terror is discussed in its full significance.

PARIS. FRANCE.

![](https://samisdat.in/user/pages/03.books/1927%20-%20The%20Record%20of%20The%20Red%20Terror/read/_page_7_Picture_5.jpeg?g-16018011)

A crowd, mostly of workers, listening to a speech in the Red Square, Moscow, in the Spring of 1927. The young man wearing the *lapti* (sandals) and the wrappings, something like puttees, around his legs, is a peasant type

---

## Navigation

- Parent: [The Record of The Red Terror (1927) by S Melgunoff](https://samisdat.in/books/the-record-of-the-red-terror-1927.md)