Chronological Index:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

The revolutions of 1917 in the Russian Empire led to extremely violent civil wars in 1918. As in any civil war, it is particularly difficult to distinguish between military operations as such and "collateral" violence - to use this anachronistic term in the context of the events of those years: civilian massacres, hostage takings, deportations of populations collectively considered as "enemies." In these multiform conflicts, no single side had a monopoly over violence. It is nevertheless undeniable that the Bolsheviks theorized violence to a far greater extent as "mass terror," a central concept in Lenin’s works. Lenin began developing this concept in 1905 when he explained that the proletariat and the poor farming communities should resort to "mass terror" when facing Czarist regime violence during the revolutionary events of 1905-1906. The call for "mass terror" reappeared shortly after the Bolsheviks took power in October 1917. At this time, the Bolsheviks, who were but a small minority in the country, encouraged all forms of social violence - violence on the part of soldiers deserting the decomposing Czarist army by the millions, violence of the peasant uprisings which broke out in the chaos of the autumn of 1917, violence of a displaced and famished urban proletariat. Most crucial to Lenin was succeeding to channel these different forms of violence under Party control in order to direct all violence at "class enemies," who were already being described as "enemies of the people" (Council of People’s Commissars Decree, November 28, 1917). Far more than simply channeling social violence, "mass terror" spread and developed as a determined, theorized and asserted policy, without any inhibition whatsoever, as an act of regeneration of the entire social body. "Mass terror" then became the instrument of a social hygiene policy aimed to eliminate groups defined as "enemies" from the new society under construction. Indeed, from the very start, the new regime classified and categorized the population by distinguishing between friend and foe. "Friendly" groups were, by order of precedence, first the "real working proletariat," (an arbitrary concept to use in a country where an overwhelming majority of the some three million workers stemmed from rural peasantry), then farm laborers and poor peasants; enemies - the bourgeoisie, the landowners, popes and "kulaks," the latter being defined as "exploiting farmers," in a Marxist "class struggle" approach, which could not account for the complexities of a rural world that was largely ignored and despised for what was perceived as its "Asian backwardness" by the new Bolshevik power. It was all the less inhibiting to eliminate enemies condemned by the very evolution of History that Marxist scientism and the theory of "class struggle" allowed the Bolsheviks to understand. In Leninist discourse, these enemies were reduced to the state of "harmful insects," "lice," "vermin," "germs." Lenin wrote that it was necessary to relentlessly "purify," "clean" and "purge" Russian society of the "flees," "bugs" and "parasites" infecting and polluting it (Lenin, How to organize the emulation?, December 1917). It is undeniable that such language paved the way for murder by dehumanizing the victims who, through rhetorical trickery, remained imminent and mortal threats despite already being condemned by History. "Mass terror" was supposed to bring about a new, regenerated and purified world according to Bolsheviks and, in particular, Chekists, agents of the Cheka (the Extraordinary Commission against counter-revolution, sabotage and speculation), the new regime’s political police created on December 10, 1917. The following article (August 18, 1919) - among many other similar texts - published in the Krasnyi Mech (the Red Sword), the Kiev Cheka newspaper, strongly testifies to this:
"We reject the old morality and ‘humanity’ invented by the bourgeoisie in order to oppress and exploit the lower classes. Our morality does not have a precedent, our humanity is absolute because it rests on a new ideal: to destroy any form of oppression and violence. To us, everything is permitted because we are the very first to raise our swords not to oppress and enslave, but to release humanity from its chains... Blood? Let blood be shed! Only blood can dye the black flag of the pirate bourgeoisie, turning it once and for all into a red banner, flag of the Revolution. Only the old world’s final demise will free us forever from the return of the jackals."

 "Red Terror" (September-October 1918) **

1918; August 31-September 4: ‘In response’ to the double attack that took place on August 30, 1918 against Moisei Uritsky, head of the Petrograd Cheka, and against Vladimir Lenin in Moscow, approximately 1,300 ‘bourgeois hostages’ held in Petrograd and Kronstadt prisons were massacred by Chekists.

1918; September 5: Decree of the Council of People’s Commissars "On Red Terror" urging "the isolation of the Soviet Republic’s class enemies in concentration camps and summary executions of any individual involved in White Guard organizations, insurrections or riots."

1918; September-October: Mass executions of ‘bourgeois hostages’ in Moscow, Petrograd, Tver, Nijni-Novgorod, Viatka, Perm, Ivano-Voznessensk, Tula… etc. Estimated number of victims: 10,000 to 15,000 (Ejenedelnik VCK, September 22-October 27, 1918; Leggett, 1981). In a matter of weeks, the Cheka, the political police of the new regime, carried out two to three times as many executions as the Czarist regime had pronounced death sentences over a 92-year period from 1825 to 1917. Moreover, under the Czarist regime, death sentences were pronounced following legal procedures and later often commuted to forced labor sentences.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7