Red Terror

Red Terror, campaign of terror from 1918 to 1921 in the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (RSFSR)—ordered by the Bolshevik (Communist) leadership and carried out by the political police—against party opponents, suspected opponents, and others declared “class enemies” during the Russian Civil War. All classes were affected, but the middle class and former nobility were especially targeted.

The Red Terror began in the summer of 1918 as the political police, or Cheka, led by Feliks Dzerzhinsky, engaged in the widespread executions of opponents or possible opponents to the new Bolshevik regime. During this phase, in July, Russian emperor Nicholas II and his family were executed to remove any possibility they would be liberated by the White (anti-Bolshevik) armies. The attempted assassination of Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin on August 30 sparked an intensification of terror, formalized by the September 5 “Decree on Red Terror.” Party newspapers called for “rivers of blood” and “wholesale executions.” Thousands of civilians were executed in the next month. Terror and mass executions of hostages, prisoners, and “class enemies” became even more widespread as the Russian Civil War grew in intensity and territory changed hands. Executions in the hundreds often took place just before a city fell to White armies, and again when recaptured by the Bolshevik-controlled Red Army. Terror was applied to virtually all elements of the population to enforce unpopular decrees and to stifle discontent, but especially to the peasants for their resistance to the government’s policy of requisitioning grain to supply the war effort. Between 1918 and 1919 more than 200,000 people were executed by the Cheka. Many others died in prisons and newly constructed concentration camps, while untold thousands were sent into the growing network of forced labor camps.

Both sides resorted to terror and executions during the civil war, but the Red Terror was more systematic and widespread. Indeed, one of its outstanding features was the Bolshevik leadership’s effort to provide a theoretical justification for the use of terror. After the Bolsheviks seized power in the Russian Revolution of 1917, Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders frequently spoke of the need for terror to further the socialist revolutionary cause. As early as January 1918 Lenin declared, “We cannot expect to get anywhere unless we resort to terrorism,” and he repeated the call for terror and executions often thereafter. Martyn Latsis, deputy head of the Cheka, declared that it was necessary to exterminate the bourgeoisie (capitalists) as a class, and that class or occupation, not actions, determined guilt. Leon Trotsky, who was then commissar for war, took time in 1920 to publish a lengthy defense of government-sponsored terror in his Terror and Communism.