Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 16:56, 27 September 2007

The most common use of Red Terror in English refers to the campaign of mass arrests, deportations, and executions conducted by the Bolshevik government in Soviet Russia from 1918 to 1922. The mass repressions were conducted without judicial process by the secret police organization Cheka, a predecessor of NKVD and KGB.

Some authors use the term "Red Terror" to describe the last six weeks of the "Reign of Terror" of the French Revolution, ending on July 28, 1794 (execution of Robespierre), to distinguish it from the subsequent period of the White Terror (historically this period has been known as the Great Terror (French: la Grande Terreur)).

Purpose of the Soviet Red Terror

The stated purpose of this campaign was struggle with counter-revolutionaries labeled as "enemies of the people", although many Russian communists openly proclaimed that Red Terror was needed for extermination of entire social groups or "ruling classes" to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat. Communist leader Grigory Zinoviev declared in September 1918:

"To dispose of our enemies, we will have to create our own socialist terror. For this we will have to train 90 million of the 100 million of Russians and have them all on our side. We have nothing to say to the other 10 million; we will have to get rid of them."

Many people were executed simply for who they were, not for their deeds. Martin Latsis, chief of the Ukrainian Cheka, explained in newspaper "Red Terror":

"Do not look in the file of incriminating evidence to see whether or not the accused rose up against the Soviets with arms or words. Ask him instead to which class he belongs, what is his background, his education, his profession. These are the questions that will determine the fate of the accused. That is the meaning and essence of the Red Terror"

History

The campaign of mass repressions was officially initiated as retribution for the assassination of Petrograd Cheka leader Moisei Uritsky, and attempted assassination of Vladimir Lenin by Fanya Kaplan on August 30, 1918. While recovering from his wounds, Lenin instructed: "It is necessary - secretly and urgently to prepare the terror" However even before the assassinations, Lenin was sending telegrams to "to introduce mass terror" in Nizhny Novgorod in response to a suspected civilian uprising there, and "crush" peasants in Penza who protested, sometimes violently, to requisition of their grain by military detachments  :

Comrades!... You must make example of these people. (1) Hang (I mean hang publicly, so that people see it) at least 100 kulaks, rich bastards, and known bloodsuckers. (2) Publish their names. (3) Seize all their grain. (4) Single out the hostages per my instructions in yesterday's telegram.

The first official announcement, published in Izvestiya, "Appeal to the Working Class" on September 3 1918 called for the workers to "crush the hydra of counterrevolution with massive terror! ... anyone who dares to spread the slightest rumor against the Soviet regime will be arrested immediately and sent to concentration camp" . This was followed by the decree "On Red Terror", issued September 5 1918 by the Cheka. On 15 October, checkist Gleb Boky proudly reported that 800 alleged enemies had been shot and another 6,229 imprisoned . Casualties in the fall of 1918 was between 10,000 and 15,000 based on lists of summarily executed people published in newspaper "Cheka Weekly" and other official press.

On 16 March 1919 all military detachments of Cheka were combined in a single body, the Troops for the Internal Defense of the Republic which numbered 200,000 in 1921. These troops policed labor camps, ran the Gulag system, conducted requisitions of food, put down peasant rebellions, riots by workers, and mutinies in the Red Army, which was plagued by desertions The Internal Troops and Red Army practiced true terrorism tactics such as taking and execution numerous hostages, often in connection with desertions of forcefully mobilized peasants. It is believed that more than 3 million deserters escaped from Red Army in 1919 and 1920. Around 500,000 deserters were arrested in 1919 and close to 800,000 in 1920 by Cheka troops and special divisions created to combat desertions . Thousands of deserters were killed, and their families were often taken hostages. According to Lenin instructions,

"After the expiration of the seven-day deadline for deserters to turn themselves in, punishment must be increased for these incorrigible traitors to the cause of the people. Families and anyone found to be assisting them in any way whatsoever are to be considered as hostages and treated accordingly"

In September 1918, only in twelve provinces of Russia, 48,735 deserters and 7,325 "bandits" were arrested, 1,826 were killed and 2,230 were executed. A typical report from a Cheka department stated:

"Yaroslavl Province, 23 June 1919. The uprising of deserters in the Petropavlovskaya volost has been put down. The families of the deserters have been taken as hostages. When we started to shoot one person from each family, the Greens began to come out of the woods and surrender. Thirty-four deserters were shot as an example".

This campaign marked the beginning of the Gulag, and some scholars have estimated that 70,000 were imprisoned by September, 1921.

Interpretations by historians

Most historians agree that Bolsheviks simply had no other means except mass terror to stay in power, because they had no popular support , . Bolsheviks only got a quarter of the vote at the height of their popularity in the elections . Massive strikes by Russian workers were "mercilessly" suppressed during Red terror Bolsheviks saw bourgeoisie, landowners, and peasantry and intelligentsia in Russia as class enemies of the industrial workers, whom they claimed to represent. However, industrial workers comprised only 1 to 2% of Russia's population, and only 5.3% of them were members of Bolshevik party .

Robert Conquest concluded that "unprecedented terror must seem necessary to ideologically motivated attempts to transform society massively and speedily, against its natural possibilities."

The notable anticommunist Richard Pipes said that despotism and violence were the intrinsic properties of every Communist regime in the world He also argued that Communist terror follows from Marxism teaching that considers human lives as expendable material for construction of the brigher future society. He cited Marx who once wrote that "The present generation resembles the Jews whom Moses led through the wilderness. It must not only conquer a new world, it must also perish in order to make a room for the people who are fit for a new world"

Other repression campaigns by communists

By extension, the term Red Terror came to refer to any acts of violence carried out by communist or communist-affiliated groups. Often, such acts were carried out in response to (and/or followed by) similar measures taken by the anti-communist side in the conflict. See White Terror.

Examples of these other "Red Terrors" include the executions of 590 people accused of involvement in the counterrevolutionary coup against the Hungarian Soviet Republic on June 24, 1919, as well as many acts of violence by the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War and during the Cultural Revolution in China. The bloody campaign that claimed tens of thousands of lives in Eritrea and Ethiopia during the rule of the Derg is also known as the Red Terror in those countries.

Hungarian Red Terror

Red Terror in Hungary (vörösterror) was an ideology, a movement and a set of atrocities during the reign of Hungarian Soviet Republic. When communists lead by Béla Kun grabbed power with the aid of socialdemocrats and putsched Mihály Károlyi, the leader after the civilian revolution; most radical communists thought that no more amenable chances will be to take absolute power and to realise the utopia of "proletar dictature". So the time has come to showdown with every enemies of communism. Ideologists who strongly propagated these beliefs - the necessity of "revolutional terror" as themself called - were Georg Lukács and Tibor Szamuely (but socialdemocrats in the governmenmt mainly, and strongly opposed these ideas). With the ideological aid of these persons, the bolshevist József Cserny laid up some detachment of 200 people called "Lenin Boys" (Lenin-fiúk), who tried to take control over the countryside, and in Budapest other detachments has been formatted. They orderly organized "requisition patrols" and pocketed goods from civic houses, and they captured and arrested their putative or real enemies. Numerous atrocities, exterminations and crimes have been recorded . These exterminations happened with intense and bizarre cruelty, for example detachments forced the relatives to help the executions, or tormented their victims before or during their agony. Finally, the government itself became fed up with these activities and condemned them as homicide, and detachments must been dismissed . The book of Dr. Albert Váry crown lawyer (1922) documents 590 dead victims of terror, other sources speak about a number between 370 and 587 .

See also

• Decossackization
• Lenin's Hanging Order

Notes

1. French Revolution
2. ^ Nicolas Werth, Karel Bartošek, Jean-Louis Panné, Jean-Louis Margolin, Andrzej Paczkowski, Stéphane Courtois, The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, Harvard University Press, 1999, hardcover, 858 pages, ISBN 0-674-07608-7
3. Yevgenia Albats and Catherine A. Fitzpatrick. The State Within a State: The KGB and Its Hold on Russia - Past, Present, and Future. 1994. ISBN 0-374-52738-5.
4. ^ Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin (2000). The Mitrokhin Archive: The KGB in Europe and the West. Gardners Books. ISBN 0-14-028487-7, page 34.
5. ^ Richard Pipes Communism: A History (2001) ISBN 0-812-96864-6, pages 39. Cite error: The named reference "Pipes" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
6. ^ Robert Conquest Reflections on a Ravaged Century (2000) ISBN 0-393-04818-7, page 101
7. Lukács: Social Hinterland of White Terror; Lukács: Article in Népszava, 15. apr. 1919.: "The lordship of police power means that we have the occasion for liquidating the ruling classes. The second is here, but we must use it up!"
8. Szamuely Tibor in 20th of April 1919. said on a speech in Győr: "Now the power is in our hands. Who want the old reign to come back, that should to be hanged on harshly. The one of this kind must be neck-bitten. The victory of Hungarian proletariat till this times required no serious numbers of victims. But now there is the need of bloodshed. We mustn't afraid of blood, the blood is like steel: strengthens the hearth and strengthens the proletar bunch. Blood will make us gigantean. We will exterminate the whole burgeoisie, if we'll have to.
9. Honismeret 2003
10. A modernizacia kora 2003
11. Atrocities of Lenin Boys - the terror commando of Soviet Republic (Hungarian).
12. Sorensen: "Did Hungary Become Fascist?"; see Leslie Eliason - Lene Bogh Sorensen: Fascism, Liberalism, and Social Democracy in Central Europe: Past and Present, Aarhus Universitetsforlag, 2002, ISBN 8772887192

References and further reading

• Nicolas Werth, Karel Bartosek, Jean-Louis Panne, Jean-Louis Margolin, Andrzej Paczkowski, Stephane Courtois, Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, Harvard University Press, 1999, hardcover, 858 pages, ISBN 0-674-07608-7. Chapter 4: The Red Terror
• Melgounov, Sergey Petrovich (1925) The Red Terror in Russia. London & Toronto: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd.

External links

• Red Terror Spartacus Schoolnet collection of primary source extracts relating to the Red Terror
• Terrorism or Communism book by Leon Trotsky on the use of Red Terror.
• Down with the Death Penalty! by Yuliy Osipovich Martov, June/July 1918

• Russian Civil War
• Political repression in the Soviet Union