September 15, 1918 about the Red Terror. Death corrected death. Decree of the Council of People's Commissars on the Red Terror
TERRIBLE DATE
This day - September 5, 1918 - the day of the decree of the Council of People's Commissars of the RSFSR "On the Red Terror" is on a par with January 20, 1942 - the conference in Wannsee, which decided on the "final solution of the Jewish question", with the decision of the Young Turks in February 1915 about the "final solution of the Armenian question" in the Ottoman Empire.
The result of each of these decisions was the death of countless innocent people, just because they belong to a different people, a different faith, a different social stratum than their killers.
The world, including Russia, long ago, in May 1915, called these forms of genocide a “crime against humanity”, that is, a crime against the very essence of human nature, which is love and friendliness for another. Alas, in two of the three societies that carried out these genocides, they are not condemned, murderers are held in high esteem, and the tragedy of the victims is hushed up or denied altogether. Only Germany found the strength to condemn its criminal past, and therefore now it is a stable, prosperous democratic country - a bulwark of humanity and freedom.
Russia and Turkey wished to remain the heirs of the killers, and therefore both Russians and Turks flee to Germany in search of a better life, and in Russia and Turkey there is neither democracy nor civil liberties. Both countries are far from prosperity. Therefore, refugees are accepted in Germany, and the Turks and Russians kill both their own citizens and citizens of neighboring and distant states - Kurds, Syrian Arabs, Ukrainians. Right now, Russian bombs are falling on the heads of civilians in Idlib to force them to flee their native country.
September 5, 1918 is a terrible turning point. We, the people of Russia, must remember her with disgust and shudder. Alas, we have forgotten it.
Here are two documents about the beginning of the Red Terror and, with abbreviations, the corresponding chapter from our History of Russia in the 20th Century.
"PROTOCOL OF THE INTER-DISTRICT CONFERENCE (VChK) ON THE QUESTION OF CARRYING OUT TERROR IN CONNECTION WITH THE ATTEMPT ON Comrade Lenin
August 31, 1918
About shootings. Confirm the previous decision on weapons (execution of counter-revolutionaries for finding weapons in their possession). Shoot all counter-revolutionaries. Give districts the right to shoot independently. Give appropriate instructions to the districts.
About hostages. Take hostages (big manufacturers)
from the bourgeoisie and allies, to announce that no petitions will be accepted for the arrested bourgeois.
The district determines who to take hostage... Establish small concentration camps in the districts....
about those arrested. This very night, the Presidium of the Cheka will consider the cases of counter-revolutionaries and shoot all obvious counter-revolutionaries. The same should be done by the district Cheka. Take steps to ensure that corpses do not fall into unwanted hands. Responsible comrades of the Cheka and district Cheka to be present at major executions.
To instruct all district Chekas to deliver a draft solution to the problem of corpses by the next meeting. Propose to the Commissariat of Justice in a special order to unload prisons from petty criminals...
About other parties. Since the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries stand on the point of view of the Central Committee (their own) and act actively, arrest them. As for the Right Socialist-Revolutionaries, Tsentroviks, Mensheviks, Cadets and other Black Hundreds, the question of them is clear.
(Report of the Cheka for the four years of its activity. M., 1922. - P. 79)
Decree of the Council of People's Commissars of the RSFSR 2 ON THE RED TERROR"
September 5, 1918
The Council of People's Commissars, having heard the report of the chairman of the Cheka on the activities of this commission, finds that in the given situation, the provision of rear by terror is a direct necessity; that in order to strengthen the activities of the Cheka and introduce greater planning into it, it is necessary to send there the largest possible number of responsible party comrades; that it is necessary to secure the Soviet Republic from class enemies by isolating them in concentration camps, that all persons connected with White Guard organizations, conspiracies and rebellions are to be shot; that it is necessary to publish the names of all those who were shot, as well as the grounds for applying this measure to them”
People's Commissar of Justice D.I. Kursky
People's Commissar for Internal Affairs G.I. Petrovsky
Manager of the Council of People's Commissars V.D. Bonch-Bruevich
(Decrees of Soviet power. V.3, M., 1964. S. 291-292.
FROM THE BOOK “HISTORY OF RUSSIA. XX CENTURY"
Section 2.2.12 (partial)
The Red Terror was a natural phenomenon. Having seized power illegally, as a result of a coup, and taking radical measures to appropriate other people's property, the Bolsheviks inevitably faced popular resistance, which they suppressed with the help of a punitive apparatus, physically destroying their potential opponents. This was already demonstrated in January 1918 by the dispersal of the Constituent Assembly, which disagreed with their actions, and the execution of demonstrations in its defense.
On December 7 (NS) 20, 1917, the Council of People's Commissars established the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution, Speculation and Sabotage (VChK, or Cheka), chaired by Dzerzhinsky. It replaced the Bolsheviks with the VRK as the main organ of violence. Mass violence began already in December 1917: in Sevastopol and Odessa, sailors killed about 500 officers. After the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly and the appeal written by Trotsky "The socialist fatherland is in danger", the first wave of red terror arose. In January-March 1918, there were murders of many officers, cadets and civilian intelligent people in Armavir, Evpatoria, Simferopol, Yalta, Mineralnye Vody, again in Sevastopol, in Kyiv, Taganrog, Rostov-on-Don and other cities. The murders were accompanied by torture and were distinguished by incredible cruelty: in Taganrog, cadets were thrown alive into blast furnaces, in other places, sadistically crippled, they were drowned in the sea. The killings were carried out by local revolutionary committees. At the beginning of 1918, in Voronezh, Tula, Tver, and Omsk, the Bolsheviks fired on religious processions: there were dead and wounded.
At the Third Congress of Soviets in January 1918, Lenin declared that "not a single issue of the class struggle has ever been resolved in history except by violence," proposing that speculators be shot on the spot. On January 31, 1918, the Council of People's Commissars ordered to increase the number of prison places and "to secure the Soviet Republic from class enemies by isolating them in concentration camps." In addition, a system of hostage-taking was used to intimidate opponents of Soviet power. On February 21, 1918, the Cheka received the right to extrajudicial reprisals against opponents of the Bolsheviks. The Chekists officially introduced torture into the practice of interrogations, and their superiors themselves demanded that interrogations be supplemented with them, “until the arrested person tells everything.”
On March 24, 1918, the Cheka decided to create local Chekas - provincial (GubChK) and county. Many monasteries were turned into places of detention. The All-Russian Cheka in 1918 occupied the houses of the insurance companies Yakor and Rossiya in Lubyanka in Moscow. Its successor - the FSB - occupies the same, only very overgrown, building today.
With the expansion of the network of organs of the Cheka, many individual murders are added to group murders. Mass executions of hostages after the decrees of 1918 on the Red Terror are no longer going on spontaneously, but according to directives from Moscow. For the service of the tsarist government, its officials, judges, gendarmes, and policemen are killed. In order not to rebel against the Soviet regime, they kill officers and any former military personnel shock troops especially the Kornilovites.
“Calling the station ˝Vlast Naroda˝: give 60-42. They connect, but the phone turns out to be busy - and Vlast Naroda suddenly overhears someone's conversation with the Kremlin: - I have fifteen officers and Kaledin's adjutant. What to do? - Immediately shoot" - I. Bunin. Cursed days. Entry under February 24, 1918
In May and June, large-scale raids were carried out in Moscow in order to eradicate the White underground. On June 18, 1918, emergency judicial bodies, revolutionary tribunals, were created to help the Cheka. Unbiased verdicts were almost excluded here, since both defenders and prosecutors represented the interests of the Bolsheviks. On June 26, 1918, Lenin wrote to Zinoviev: "We must encourage the energy and mass character of terror against the counter-revolutionaries, and especially in St. Petersburg, whose example decides."
Only according to newspaper reports that fell into the field of view of S.P. Melgunov (the author of the first generalizing work on the Red Terror), in July 1918, 1115 executions were carried out. After the attempts on August 30 on Lenin and Uritsky, on September 4 and 5, the Council of People's Commissars announces two decrees on the Red Terror. The killing of hostages "from the bourgeoisie and officers" was declared a legal measure of suppression of the "slightest attempts at resistance" to the Soviet regime. And not only announced. Throughout Russia, hundreds of thousands of people were killed in the most terrible way as hostages, that is, by definition, without trial or investigation, since there was nothing even for the Soviet authorities to judge them personally. So, in October 1918 in Pyatigorsk, the local Cheka, headed by Georgy Atarbekov (Atarbekyan), 73 hostages from the aristocracy and officers were hacked to death in the cemetery, including General N.V. Ruzsky, who received the abdication of the Sovereign on March 2, 1917, and a Bulgarian volunteer in the Russian service, General Radko-Dmitriev.
After the assassination of the chairman of the Petrograd Cheka, the executioner and sadist Moses Uritsky, Krasnaya Gazeta, the official organ of the Petrograd Soviet of Deputies, headed by Zinoviev, wrote “Uritsky was killed. We must respond to the single terror of our enemies with mass terror ... For the death of one of our fighters, thousands of enemies must pay with their lives ”(evening issue 08/30/1918). The next day: “Blood for blood. Without mercy, without compassion, we will beat the enemies by tens, hundreds. Let there be thousands of them. Let them choke in their own blood!... For the blood of Comrade Uritsky, for the wounding of Comrade Lenin, for the assassination attempt on Comrade Zinoviev, for the unavenged blood of comrades Volodarsky, Nakhimson, Latvians, sailors - let the blood of the bourgeoisie and its servants be shed - more blood! (morning issue 08/31/1918). And four days later, the same newspaper, with visible chagrin, reported in the front line: “Instead of the promised several thousand White Guards and their inspirers, barely a few hundred bourgeois were shot” (morning issue 09/04/1918). In fact, only according to the surviving lists in those days, up to 900 hostages were shot in Petrograd and another 512 in Kronstadt.
Karl Marx taught that, since a person is a product of his environment, he should not be judged on "subjective" fault, but on the "objective" basis of belonging to a certain class. November 1, 1918 M.I. Latsis (Jan Sudrabs) gives instructions to his subordinates: “We are not waging war against individuals We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class. Do not look at the investigation for material and evidence that the accused acted in deed or word against the Soviet regime. The first question that you should ask him is what is his origin, upbringing, education or profession. These questions should determine the fate of the accused. This is the meaning and essence of the Red Terror.” In the same November, Lenin echoed Latsis: “It is important for us that the Cheka directly exercise the dictatorship of the proletariat, and in this respect their role is invaluable. There is no other way to the emancipation of the masses than to suppress the exploiters through violence. This is what the emergency commissions are doing, and this is their service to the proletariat.”
Terror acquires the broadest character - its goal is to destroy the former leading layer of Russia in order to put in its place the Bolsheviks, who govern an illiterate, ideologically duped people. The death of many adults was reminded by the crowds of their street children roaming the country.
“My wife was once on the business of the gymnasium Stoyunina in the office of the head educational institutions. While waiting for the reception, she heard the story of this chief that he had returned the day before from the Tver province, where he had gone to lead the Red Week. - The philosopher N.O. Lossky recalled the events of the end of 1918 - The commissar, sent from somewhere from the center, called the head of the district to himself and ordered that such and such a number of people be shot within a week. Who exactly to shoot was determined as follows, according to the story heard by my wife. The head of the county brought the commissar a notebook with a list of the names of priests, former officers, landlords, factory owners, and in general persons who, due to their spiritual constitution, were considered incapable of becoming the builders of communism. The commissar, leafing through the notebook, poked his fingers at random on this or that line; on whose name a finger accidentally fell, he was subject to execution ”- N.O. Lossky. Memories. Life and Philosophy. M., 2008. - P.184.
The systematic, purposeful terror that has engulfed the entire population is also spreading to the Red Army. In July, the Bolsheviks created "special departments" in the Red Army with the functions of the Cheka. On August 14, 1918, after the defeats on the Volga, Trotsky warned: “If any unit retreats without permission, the commissar of the unit will be shot first, the commander second. Cowards, self-seekers and traitors will not escape the bullet.
A.F. Salikovsky, a member of the People's Socialist Party, who lived in Kyiv in 1919, recalled: “In the spring of 1919 (I think in May) Trotsky arrived in Kyiv by royal train to review the troops of the Kyiv district. The troops paraded in front of him on Sophia Square in the presence of a huge crowd of curious people ... Trotsky walked around all the ranks of the Red Army and, quickly peering into the faces of the soldiers, from time to time said to one or another Red Army soldier: “Get out of the line!” By the end of the tour, there were about 300 such soldiers marked by Trotsky. Trotsky was asked what to do with them.
- Shoot!
This is how the "brilliant leader" demonstrated his insight and strengthened his authority and "iron discipline" in the Red Army.
The original memoirs are kept in the collection of S.P. Melgunov in the archives of the Hoover Institution in the USA (box 1, case 3, sheets 35-38).
A.F. Salikovsky. Trotsky in Kyiv.\ Red terror through the eyes of eyewitnesses. – M.: Iris Press, 2009, pp. 66-67.
Trotsky created barrage detachments, which were supposed to shoot at the retreating ones, and percentage executions of personnel were introduced as punishment. The first to do so was the defeated Petrograd Workers' Regiment near Sviyazhsk. His commissar, commander and 27 Red Army soldiers were shot. Reflecting Yudenich's attack on Petrograd, on November 3, 1919, Trotsky issued an order for the 7th Army: “Commanders and commissars are responsible for their units to the Soviet Republic<…>Communists to be in the most dangerous places, setting an example of courage<…>Retreating without an order after a warning to exterminate on the spot. Barrage detachments to hand over deserters immediately to the tribunal,< >sowers of panic to exterminate on the spot. Commander-in-Chief of the Red Army I.I. (Yukums) Vatsetis wrote to Lenin: “Discipline in the Red Army is based on cruel punishments, especially on executions ... With merciless punishments and executions, we inspired terror on everyone ... The death penalty ... is practiced so often on our fronts and on all sorts of reasons and occasions that our discipline in the Red Army can be called bloody discipline. One of the leaders of the Cheka, Latsis, called for the killing of all prisoners of war: “The law of the civil war is to cut out all the wounded in battles against you ... The struggle is not for life, but for death. Therefore, beat, so as not to be beaten ”(Izvestia, August 23, 1918). Trotsky promised that if the officers of the Red Army tried to go over to the Whites, “one wet place will remain of them” (Izvestia, June 30, 1918). By order of S.S. Kamenev, captured white officers were not only killed, but cruelly tortured before that - they drove nails into their shoulders according to the number of stars on shoulder straps, carved St. George crosses on their chests, stripes on their legs, cut off the genitals and shoved them into the mouths of the victims.
The rampant red terror in September-November 1918 confused many communists. A discussion arose in the party about determining the powers of the Cheka, about subordinating it to the People's Commissariat of Justice, about limiting its activities to investigative functions. The Moscow organization of the Bolsheviks was particularly vocal on this subject. However, Lenin stood up for the Chekists, and throughout the Civil War, their activities remained almost uncontrolled. Dzerzhinsky not only retained all his powers, but expanded them by taking control of the revolutionary tribunals, previously independent of the Cheka. By the beginning of 1921 there were 86 regional and republican Chekas, 16 special departments and 508 county Chekas. Each of them killed a huge number of people.
In order to imagine the daily face of the Red Terror, we will cite excerpts from the investigative acts and the forensic medical examination of various departments - both the governments of Kolchak and Denikin, and the Bolsheviks.
“... Corpse number 1 - the entire skull is completely broken, the lower jaw is broken. In it, Nina Konstantinovna Bogdanovich identified her husband, Semyon Pavlovich Bogdanovich. Corpse number 2 has a bayonet wound to the chest and a gunshot wound to the head. Corpse number 3 has a shattered skull. Corpse number 4, military-looking, skull completely shattered. Number 5 - both jaws are broken, most of the skull with the temple is broken. Nina Konstantinovna Bogdanovich stated that this was Kozhuro, who was killed by the Bolsheviks along with her husband. Number 6, military dress, skull broken. Number 7 - both jaws are broken into fragments, the lower part of the face is a solid mass of fragments, the skull is broken.
“Number 9 had a crushed head and left femur, and even during life, soft tissues were destroyed on it. Number 10 has documents in the name of Zenkov from the district military commander on sick leave and the obligation to appear for examination on March 4, 1918 and "a certificate in the name of a soldier of the 1st shock battalion Pavel Zenkov." The lower jaw is crushed, the left humerus in the upper third is broken.
At number 20, the lower jaw with teeth was crushed by a blow from an incomprehensible weapon to the chin. There are gunshot wounds on the body and in the head.”
“There is still no exact information about the fate of Archbishop Andronik; there are only indications that he was buried alive in the ground, apparently, in the Motovilikha plant.
“With regard to Bishop Theophan, there is certain information that, after being tortured, he was drowned in the hole in the Kama River ...”
“One of the survivors of the barge described in detail the terrible death of the unfortunate hostages, who were killed in turn with axes, guns and hammers. The execution went on all night. The corpses of the tortured were thrown into Kama. ... The terrible painful death of twenty-six Czechs captured by the Reds on the Ufa front was described. They were continuously tortured for three days and three nights, and then separate members of the body were cut off with an ax until they died in terrible agony.
“They surrounded the plant and checked the workers. Whoever had a work ticket was released, and the rest were taken out and collected on the church square, where they were all shot from machine guns. In total, about eight hundred people were killed on the day of the capture of the city.
"In one of public holidays two drunken Red Army soldiers passed by the city baths, where children bathed. One of the Red Army men began to boast that he was shooting without a miss, but as proof, he offered to shoot a bathing boy. Then, to the horror of the passing townspeople, the Red Army soldier really took aim at the bathing boy, shot and killed him ... "
“Then they shot 7 people, including an employee from the supply department ... Commissar Okulov spoke and said that he wanted to try his Browning now, he killed the first of those sentenced from it. Then, it seems, the communist Zayakin came out and, waving his saber, chopped off the head of another sentenced man in 2 steps. The third commissar, not knowing how to distinguish himself from his comrades, ordered the next of the convicts to dig his own grave. The grave was too short. Then, seizing an ax, the communist cut off the legs of the unfortunate man along the grave.
“... In recent battles, several cases of mutilation and mockery of the Reds over our wounded who remained on the battlefield have been established. So, for example, when our units occupied the village of Menshchikov on September 13 (which is 62 versts south of the village of Omutinskaya), our shooters who were captured were found mutilated and tortured red: one had matches stuck in his eyes, many bayonet wounds and traces of beatings all over his body . According to the testimony of the inhabitants of the village of Menshchikov, matches were stuck in the eyes of the still alive shooter, and in this form they led him to the forest, where he was finished off with bayonets.
“I order you to burn the villages of Borovaya, Yarkovskoye and Bigsha of the Gilevolipovskaya volost. HP 128/op. Kombrig-115 Polisonov, military commissar Popov.
Yalutorovsky district. On the night of November 15, in the Bobylevskaya volost, our passing cavalrymen, it is not known which part, hacked to death 13 people of local citizens. They are cut down on the streets and in the apartments.”
“From fifty houses there was no trace left, only charred pipes stuck out; from a pit covered with fragments of boards, an old Tatar man and an old woman came out - miraculously saved; before their eyes, torture and executions were carried out ... Finally, they showed a huge pit filled to the top with decomposing corpses, of which there were more than fifty.
“Andreev appointed a commission to ... inspect the sealed boxes, ... they found money ... in papers, gold, silver, ... gold earrings torn off along with earlobes. Protocols were drawn up for the bodies caught from lakes and rivers ... Women had their breasts cut off, men had their cores crushed, all the bodies caught had bare skulls ... ”
“Question: did you find out who was shot and what materials do you have about their guilt, and if so, present them?
Answer: There are no materials. The only thing we have is a list of those who were shot, and even that is incomplete. We received this list from the investigative commission of the headquarters of the 3rd division of Efremov. This list contains only 47 people, which is much less than how many were actually shot, I don’t know why many were shot, many were shot for nothing.
Question: how did you accuse and distribute the arrested?
Answer: Comrade Efremov came to the city prison together with me and with the guards, they began to bring the arrested people to him according to the compiled list. Comrade Efremov asked: "Who is this?" From the crowd they answered: "bourgeois, bourgeois." After that, Comrade Efremov ordered him to be taken away, and a cross was placed over the name of the designated person on the list, which meant execution. S.S. Balmasov Red Terror in the East of Russia 1918–1922. M., Posev, 2006.
“Arrested at the denunciation of the house committee (due to the consonance of surnames) and three weeks later released El. (a person close to us) says among other things: They shoot officers sitting with their wives together, 10-11 people a day. They take him out into the yard, the commandant counts with a cigarette in his mouth, and they take him away. At El. this commandant (the commandants are all from the lowest ranks), passing by the dead wives standing right there, joked: now you are a young widow, Don’t be sorry, your husband was a bastard, he didn’t want to serve in the Red Army.
Professor B. Nikolsky was shot recently. His property and a magnificent library were confiscated. His wife went crazy. She left behind an 18 year old daughter and a 17 year old son. The other day, my son was demanded in "Vsevobuch" (general military training). He came. There, the commissar immediately announced to him with a laugh ... ˝Do you know where your daddy's body is? We fed him to the animals. The animals of the Zoological Garden, which have not yet died, are fed with fresh corpses of the executed, since the Peter and Paul Fortress is close, everyone knows this ... The announcement had such an effect on the boy that he was delirious for the fourth day (I know the name of the commissioner).
Yesterday, Dr. H. consoled I.I. that they are now well settled, despite the lack of meat: the heart and liver of human corpses are passed through a meat grinder - and peptones, nutrient medium, broth are prepared ... for the culture of bacilli, for example "- Z.N .Gippius. Petersburg diary. - P.54-55.
Here is the act of the Rerberg Commission, which carried out its investigations immediately after the occupation of Kyiv by the volunteer army in August 1919: “... The entire cement floor of a large garage (we are talking about the provincial Kyiv Cheka -A.Z.) several inches of blood, mixed into a terrifying mass with brains, skull bones, tufts of hair and other human remains. All the walls were spattered with blood, brain particles and pieces of head skin stuck to them next to thousands of bullet holes. From the middle of the garage to the next room, where there was an underground drain, led a gutter a quarter of a meter wide and deep and about ten meters long. This gutter was filled with blood all the way to the top ... In the garden of the same house, 127 corpses of the last slaughter were hastily buried superficially ... Here it was especially striking to us that all the corpses had their skulls crushed, many even had their heads completely flattened ... Some were completely without heads, but the heads were not cut off, but ... were torn off ... Near the mentioned grave, we came across in the corner of the garden another older grave, in which there were about 80 corpses. Here we found the most diverse injuries and mutilations on the bodies ... Here lay corpses with open bellies, others had no limbs, some were completely cut to pieces. Some had their eyes gouged out and at the same time their heads, faces, necks and torsos were covered with stab wounds. We found a corpse with a wedge driven into its chest. Several did not have languages. In one corner of the grave, we found a number of only hands and feet. Away from the grave near the fence of the garden, we found several corpses on which there were no signs of violent death. When doctors opened them a few days later, it turned out that their mouths, respiratory and swallowing tracts were filled with earth. Consequently, the unfortunate were buried alive and, trying to breathe, swallowed the earth. In this grave lay people of different ages and sexes. There were old people, men, women and children. One woman was tied with a rope to her daughter, a girl of eight years old ... ”- S.P. Melgunov. Red terror in Russia. Moscow: 1990, - pp. 127-128.
“It used to happen that my conscience would speak in me before, but now it’s gone - my comrade taught me to drink a glass of human blood: I drank it - my heart became stone,” Ivanovich, the executioner of the Kharkov emergency, shared his experience. - A.I. Denikin. Essays on Russian Troubles. Volume V. Armed Forces of the South of Russia. Berlin, 1926. - P.129.
“Among the Odessa executioners was a Negro Johnson, specially discharged from Moscow. Johnson was synonymous with evil and savagery. Skinning a living person before execution, cutting off limbs during torture, etc. - one executioner was capable of this - Negro Johnson. Is he alone? — Melgunov S.P. Red terror in Russia. - M.2006. - S. 203.
In January 1920, the death penalty was partially abolished, but already in May it was restored. As the Bolsheviks crushed the resistance of the White armies and popular uprisings, new forms of red terror, unprecedented in their scale, arose. These are mass executions of the White Guards and their supporters. The most famous were the Crimean murders led by Bela Kun and Rozalia Zemlyachka, which began after the departure of Wrangel in November 1920 and continued until June 1921. According to various sources, from 50 to 76 thousand people were exterminated in the Crimea. Similar massacres were carried out in Arkhangelsk, in the Cossack regions and in places of peasant uprisings. In Siberia, during the suppression of peasant uprisings, according to one of the reports of punitive detachments, 15 peasants were killed for one killed punisher. The most famous acts of mass murder are listed below. The figures include killings carried out in a variety of ways.
The most famous acts of mass terror
Time Action Number of victims
1918
January-February Executions in Armavir 1,342
February Kyiv executions 2000
Summer Suppression of the Yaroslavl uprising 1500
Autumn Suppression of the Izhevsk-Votkinsk uprising 7,000
December Execution of striking workers in Motovilikha 100
1919
March-April Suppression of the II Astrakhan uprising 2,000–4,000
March-June Executions in Kharkov 3,000
February-August Kyiv executions 3,000
April-July Executions in Poltava 2,000
April-September Executions in Odessa 2,200
All year Monastic settlement near Saratov 1,500
1920
Beginning of the year Extermination of the Ural Cossacks 130,000?
Winter-spring Krasnoyarsk concentration camp 40,000
March Destruction of Nikolaevsk-on-Amur 20,000
March and beyond Arkhangelsk executions 3,000
August 1920 Execution in prison in Yekaterinodar 1,600
1921
December to July Crimean executions 50,000–76,000
After February Executions in Georgia 24,000
March Kronstadt massacre 2 103
March-April in Arkhangelsk and Pertominsk 424
Spring Suppression of the West Siberian uprising 75,000
Summer Suppression of the Tambov uprising 70,000–90,000
November Execution of hostages in Ukraine 5,000
Partial total ~ 482,500
1919–1922
As a result of decossackization, over 500 thousand Cossacks died. The Ural Cossacks were almost completely exterminated. Terror against the peasants occupies a special place among the crimes of the Bolsheviks. It especially intensified after the defeat of the White Guards, from the end of 1920 the Tambov and Siberian uprisings of 1920–21 were suppressed with particular cruelty. As a result, hundreds of thousands of rural workers died, all the inhabitants of entire villages were destroyed. In 1922, a wave of murders of the clergy followed, connected with the campaign to confiscate church valuables. Total number of victims of the Red Terror 1918–1922 in the historical literature today it is estimated as "not less than 2 million".
It is difficult to imagine the figure of "at least 2 million" can be figuratively represented as follows. Intense terror lasted from July 1918 to February 1922, approximately 1300 days. In the middle of this period, there were 610 Extraordinary Commissions of various levels. If we assume that each of them shot an average of 2 people a day, this is almost 1.6 million. We do not know how many she actually shot, but we know that at the same time there were more than 1000 revolutionary tribunals of various kinds, each of which also constantly passed death sentences. In addition, at least half a million were destroyed in the mass acts of terror, as indicated above.
Of the estimates of contemporaries, an interesting table was published in the Edinburgh newspaper The Scotsman (November 7, 1923). Her source is not specified; perhaps this is the data of British intelligence (the Russian population went to the British missions with complaints about the Bolsheviks). The list clearly lacks Cossacks and their families and does not fully cover other massacres. But the result is close to the assessment of Denikin's Special Commission to Investigate the Atrocities of the Bolsheviks.
Victims of the Red Terror 1918–1922 according to British data
28 bishops
1,219 priests
6,000 professors and lecturers
9,000 doctors
12,950 landowners
54,000 officers
70,000 police (?)
193,290 workers
260,000 soldiers
355,260 various knowledge workers
815,000 peasants
1,776,747 total.
Executive Editor's Notes:
Today, the study of the Red Terror is difficult for three reasons: 1. Access to documents from departmental archives is extremely limited. 2. Official documents are often falsified. As shown by S.P. Melgunov, reports of executions were underestimated by 2-3 times. 3. A huge number of murders during the suppression of uprisings were not recorded at all. Nevertheless, the study of the Red Terror is important both for the "love of the father's coffins" and for understanding the nature of Bolshevik power, which would not exist without this terror.
By 1921, more than 230,000 people were already serving in the apparatus of the Cheka. Of these, 77.3% are Russians, 9.1% are Jews, 3.5% are Latvians, 3.1% are Ukrainians, 1.7% are Poles and 5.3% are others. However, only 1% has higher education. In May 1919, the Internal Guard Troops of the Republic (VOHR) were created, also subordinate to the Cheka. Their composition, about 120 thousand, doubles in a year. One of the tasks of the VOKhR is the protection of concentration camps, which have been created since the summer of 1918. The governing bodies of the Cheka were dominated by non-Russians - Poles, Armenians, Jews, Latvians. “This Russian is soft, too soft,” Lenin used to say, “he is not capable of carrying out severe measures of revolutionary terror.” As in the Oprichnina of Ivan the Terrible, it was easier for a tyrant to terrorize the Russian people with the hands of foreigners.
On May 12, 1919, the Council of People's Commissars issued a decree explaining in detail the system of organizing concentration camps and introducing the principle of their complete self-sufficiency - the work of the prisoners was supposed to support them, the guards and administration of the camp, and also generate income for the state. At the end of 1920, there were 84 concentration camps in Soviet Russia with approximately 50,000 prisoners, by October 1923 the number of camps had increased to 315, and the number of prisoners in them to 70,000. For the escape of one prisoner, a dozen were shot. The prisoners were kept on a terribly starvation diet, killed for the slightest offense, they knew only by numbers. The resemblance to the Nazi camps set up twenty years later was so striking that if reports of life in Soviet concentration camps had not been published in the 1920s, one might have suspected malicious falsification. But the terrible descriptions of the Soviet camps, received from the daredevils who fled from them or from letters, handed over by falsehood to the will and ended up abroad, appear from the beginning of the 1920s. The Soviet practice was immediately noticed by the then little-known Adolf Hitler. On March 13, 1921, he wrote in the Volkischer Beobachter: “If necessary, the corrupting influence of the Jews on our people can be excluded by confining the conductors of this influence in concentration camps.”
According to the Bolsheviks, terror was supposed to paralyze the will to resist the opponents of Soviet power. Educated, thinking people, especially young people capable of active and conscious struggle, were destroyed in the first place if they did not actively cooperate with the Bolshevik regime. Students, cadets, cadets, seminarians were exterminated without exception, if they were not known as convinced socialists. The Bolsheviks were especially careful to identify and exterminate those people who enjoyed authority in society and could unite around themselves dissatisfied with the regime - popular clergymen, zemstvo figures, village elders, worker activists. The Red Terror was not the sum of chaotic cruelties, but a system carefully thought out by the Bolsheviks and meticulously implemented to maintain political power.
The fact that there were hundreds of thousands of voluntary and willing performers of the satanic deeds of the red terrorists, who cheerfully killed and mocked their victims, the suffering of the innocent, is a terrible verdict on the old, pre-revolutionary Russia, its leading stratum. The people were not morally educated, they were not accustomed to goodness, they were corrupted by centuries of contempt for them by the rich and strong, they were not enlightened by the church and were not united nationally. The perpetrators of the Red Terror easily forgot all religious concepts and intrepidly raised their hand against their brother by blood - be it Russian, Armenian, Jew, Latvian or Pole. Exceptions were few. “And today the air smells of death,” wrote the young Boris Pasternak in 1919.
Many Chekists were in a paranoid obsession in their ministry of the "Great World Revolution". Characteristic is the description of the thoughts of the head of the gubchek - Andrei Srubov in one of the first revolutionary stories - "Sliver", written in 1923 by a young Red writer, and before that - a Red Army soldier - V. Zazubrin (real name - Vladimir Yakovlevich Zubtsov), who knew work in the Cheka firsthand. After a gruesome description of yet another massacre in the basement of the Cheka, the author concludes:
“Vanka Mudynia, Semyon Khudonogov, Naum Nepomnyashchikh are deathly pale, wearily unbuttoning their sheepskin coats with sleeves reddened with blood. Alexei God with the whites of his eyes inflamed with bloody excitement, with a face spattered with blood, with yellow teeth in a red grin of his lips, in a black soot mustache. Yefim Solomin, with efficiency, serious and imperturbable, rubbing under a snub-nosed nose, shedding bloody caked clots from his mustache and beard, straightening his captured visor, which had come off halfway from a green cap with a red star.
But is She (the Great Revolution - ed.) interested in this? It only needs to force some to kill, to order others to die. Only. Both the Chekists and Srubov, and the condemned alike, were worthless pawns, small cogs in this spontaneous run of the factory mechanism. In this factory, coal and steam are Her angry power, she is the mistress here - cruel and beautiful. And Srubov, wrapped in a black fur coat, in a red fur cap, in the gray smoke of an unquenchable pipe, felt Her breath. Feeling the proximity of that new tense energy, he tore his muscles, pulled his veins, and drove the blood faster. For Her and in Her interests, Srubov is ready for anything. For Her, even killing is a joy. And if necessary, he will not hesitate to mold bullets into the necks of the condemned. Let at least one Chekist try to be cowardly - he will immediately lay him down on the spot. Srubov is full of joyful determination. For her and for her sake.
In the early 1920s Both Lenin and Gorky highly appreciated Zazubrin, he was very popular, but they did not dare to publish the story "Sliver" at that time. It was published only in 1989. V. Zazubrin himself was arrested by order of Stalin in 1936 and killed on August 31, 1937.
The task of terror was to atomize society, to force its members to survive alone. The brutal murders of innocent people taught the idea that the only way to survive was to serve the regime and at the same time not have your own opinion, “to fluctuate along with the party line” - as one Soviet joke put it. Then there was still a chance to survive, and even then a small one. The second way to exist was to, without actively cooperating with the criminal authorities, lie low and live life unnoticed, without discussing or judging anything - “eat pies with mushrooms, but keep your mouth shut” - said the folk wisdom of those years. Many have taken this second path. They were even afraid to teach the truth to their children, and gradually forgot it themselves.
In a society where, by the summer of 1918, the Bolsheviks were supported by almost no one except their henchmen and fellow travelers tainted with crimes, terror was the only way to retain power. Dzerzhinsky and Lenin proudly declared that terror and its main weapon, the Cheka, had saved the revolution. And it was true, if by revolution we mean that terrible regime that the Bolsheviks imposed on all the peoples of Russia, and then spread to almost a third of the globe. It was during the years of the Civil War that the communists created a punitive system that would protect the omnipotence of the Communist Party for many decades and lead to the death of new millions of our citizens.
“The Red Terror was from the first steps an essential element of the Bolshevik regime. Sometimes it intensified, sometimes it weakened, but it never stopped completely. Like a black thundercloud, he constantly hung over Soviet Russia ... For the Bolsheviks, terror was not a weapon of defense, but a method of control ”- R. Pipes. Russian revolution. T.2. - P.594-95.
The Red Terror, according to the theorists of communism, had as its goal not only intimidation, but also an artificial selective selection of people fit for procreation in the socialist "tomorrow". “Proletarian coercion in all forms, from executions to labor service, is, paradoxically as it may sound, a method of producing communist humanity from the human material of the capitalist era,” Nikolai Bukharin asserted in 1920.
“Death sentences were handed down and carried out not as a punishment for a crime, but as a means of eliminating alien and therefore unsuitable material for socialist construction. Landowners, bourgeois, priests, kulaks, white officers were also simply put out of use, just as in rationally set farms one breed of livestock is put out of use for the sake of introducing another ”- Fedor Stepun, Former and Unfulfilled. M.-Spb., 1995. - P.458.
The Red Terror was practically not condemned by the free world in those years. The Germans denied it in 1918 in order to justify their allies, the Bolsheviks - when Hetman Skoropadsky drew Berlin's attention to the crimes committed in Soviet Russia, he received an answer from the German State Secretary von Hinze that "according to German information, there is no question of terror - it is only about preventing the Soviet government from trying to cause anarchy and disorder by irresponsible elements. Terror tried not to notice European celebrities - writers, artists, politicians. Romain Rolland, Upton Sinclair laughed at the horrific facts or justified them. Bertrand Russell said in 1925 that the same crimes against man are being committed in the USA of his day as in Soviet Russia. Very few saw in the materials published in the West about the Red Terror "the tragedy of human history, in which people kill in order not to be killed." One of these was Albert Einstein, to whom these words belong.
“Who needed, in whose interests to take the lives of these young, strong people who did not live even half of the time they had measured? ˝Their death is necessary for the sake of the happiness of mankind and the bright future of future generations!˝ I would like to look at these happy generations who will build their happiness on the blood and suffering of previous generations. I think if they have at least the rudiments of morality, they will not dare to be happy.” — Pitirim Sorokin. Long road. Autobiography. M.: Terra, 1992. - P.121.
The Red Terror caused irreparable damage to the moral state of society for many decades to come, making millions of brothers and fellow tribesmen cold-blooded killers of each other. Our land is literally saturated with innocently spilled blood, and the air is saturated with the groan of suffering of countless victims. The Bolshevik terror weaned people from honesty, cooperation, mutual assistance, solidarity. He taught me to survive alone, often destroying loved ones for the sake of his own skin. Terror destroyed the best, who refused to bow their heads before the Bolsheviks, refused to become slaves. They did not give offspring, did not continue the race, did not teach their children by their example of civic courage and truth. Hence the moral inferiority of so many Russians, passed down from that terrible era from generation to generation. The destruction of the leading stratum of society led to a deep cultural degradation of the people, and the murder of hundreds of thousands of the best workers - workers and peasants - to the destruction of the entire economic life of Russia.
Andrey Zubov,
Russian historian and public figure, professor
On September 5, 1918, the Council of People's Commissars of the RSFSR issued a resolution "On the Red Terror". The resolution stated that the Council of People's Commissars, “having heard the report of the Chairman of the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution, finds that in this situation, providing rear by terror is a direct necessity; that it is necessary to secure the Soviet Republic from class enemies by isolating them in concentration camps; that all persons connected with the White Guard organizations, conspiracies and rebellions are subject to execution ... ".
This decree, which opened a new chapter in the history of the mutually destructive civil war in Russia, was signed by People's Commissar of Justice D. Kursky, People's Commissar of Internal Affairs G. Petrovsky and the manager of the Council of People's Commissars V. Bonch-Bruevich.
Actually, on September 2, 1918, the chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, Yakov Sverdlov, announced the beginning of the "Red Terror" campaign. Formally, the "Red Terror" was a response to the assassination attempt on the chairman of the Council of People's Commissars Vladimir Ulyanov-Lenin on August 30 and the murder on the same day of the chairman of the Petrograd Cheka, Moses Uritsky.
However, in fact, bloody reprisals against their political opponents came into use by the Bolsheviks from the very first days of the coup, committed by them on October 25 (November 7, according to a new style), 1917. Although just on October 26, by the decision of the II Congress of Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies (the same one at which Lenin announced the accomplished proletarian revolution), the death penalty in Russia was abolished. Lenin himself, as Leon Trotsky said in his memoirs, was very dissatisfied with this decision, and "visionarily" told his comrades in the Central Committee and the Council of People's Commissars that a revolution without the death penalty was impossible. Actually, back in September 1917, in his work “The Threatening Catastrophe and How to Fight It,” he pointed out that “without the death penalty in relation to the exploiters (i.e., landowners and capitalists), any revolutionary government can hardly manage ".
In secret order in those places where there was armed resistance to the establishment of Soviet power, its opponents began to be shot back in November-December 1917. In fairness, we point out that the opponents of the Bolsheviks did not hesitate to resort to similar measures. So, during the October battles of 1917 in Moscow, Colonel Ryabtsev, who commanded the forces of supporters of the Provisional Government, shot in the Kremlin more than 300 unarmed soldiers of the 56th reserve regiment, who he suspected of sympathizing with the Bolsheviks. The Bolsheviks, immediately after their victory in Moscow, shot several hundred cadets and students opposing them. However, Viktor Nogin, who led the Moscow Revolutionary Committee, stopped unauthorized executions and released the remaining opponents on all four sides. Later, he even accused his comrades in the Central Committee and SNK of “political terror unworthy of the party of revolutionaries,” and for such idealism he was sent by Lenin to a lower level of the party hierarchy.
Meanwhile, resistance to the measures of the Soviet government in different regions of the country began to gain momentum, and the Bolsheviks increasingly had to resort to force of arms to suppress it. In January 1918, the Bolsheviks shot on the streets of Petrograd a peaceful demonstration of supporters of the Constituent Assembly that they dispersed. In the same place, where the resistance was of an armed nature, no one was holding back the executions.
After the troops of the German Kaiser Wilhelm launched an offensive along the entire line of the former front in February 1918, Lenin insisted on the adoption of the famous decree “The Socialist Fatherland is in danger!”. Here, the death penalty was already introduced in plain text without judicial trial for the commission of crimes by "enemy agents, speculators, pogromists, hooligans, counter-revolutionary agitators, German spies."
In May 1918, Lenin proclaimed a "crusade for bread", decreed the creation of the Prodarmia (where he planned to send 90% of all the armed forces available to the SNK), which was supposed to take "surplus" food from the peasant population by force. This decree also provided for the execution on the spot of those who would oppose the withdrawal of these "surpluses". It should be noted that the beginning of a full-scale civil war turned out to be more connected with the implementation of this decree than with the Czechoslovak rebellion or the campaign of the Volunteer Army of General Denikin in the Kuban.
In this situation, on June 13, 1918, the Council of People's Commissars adopted a decree on the restoration of the death penalty. From that moment on, execution could be applied according to the verdicts of the revolutionary tribunals. On June 21, 1918, the first revolutionary tribunal sentenced to death was Admiral Shchastny. Having taken the initiative, he took the ships of the Baltic Fleet to Kronstadt, preventing the Germans from capturing them, after which Trotsky, who by that time had become the Commissar of the Navy, announced that Shchastny had saved the fleet in order to gain popularity among the sailors and then send them to overthrow the Soviet regime.
As the activities of the Bolsheviks aroused more and more protests among various sections of the population, the Soviet leadership had to improve its ingenuity in measures to suppress it more and more. So, for example, on August 9, 1918, Lenin sent instructions to the Penza Gubispolkom: “It is necessary to carry out a merciless mass terror against the kulaks, priests and White Guards; doubtful ones to be locked up in a concentration camp outside the city.” Then comes the following "parting word": "Decree and implement the complete disarmament of the population, shoot on the spot mercilessly for any concealed rifle." AT full assembly In the works of V. I. Lenin, there are similar instructions for other cities and provinces.
Among the measures to restore order and prevent resistance, sabotage and counter-revolution, it was also decided to start taking hostages among potential opponents of Soviet power and their families. The chairman of the Cheka, Dzerzhinsky, motivated this measure by the fact that it was “the most effective: taking hostages among the bourgeoisie, based on the lists compiled by you to recover the indemnity imposed on the bourgeoisie ... the arrest and imprisonment of all hostages and suspects in concentration camps.”
Lenin developed this proposal and proposed a list of measures for its practical implementation: “I propose not to take “hostages”, but to appoint them by name according to the volosts. The purpose of the appointment is precisely the rich, because they are responsible for the contribution, they are responsible with their lives for the immediate collection and dumping of surplus grain in each volost.
Such proposals caused shock even among many Bolsheviks, who considered them “barbaric”, but Lenin answered them: “I reason soberly and categorically. What is better - to imprison a few dozen or hundreds of instigators, guilty or innocent, conscious or unconscious, or to lose thousands of Red Army soldiers and workers? The first is better. And let me be accused of any mortal sins and violations of freedom - I plead guilty, and the interests of the workers will benefit.
Of course, there was a fair amount of demagoguery in these words of the proletarian leader. By the summer of 1918, the workers often began to oppose the Soviet regime - in Izhevsk, Votkinsk, Samara, Astrakhan, Ashkhabad, Yaroslavl, Tula, etc. The Bolsheviks suppressed their speeches no less cruelly than any other "counter-revolution".
However, after the implementation of the decision of the Council of People's Commissars on the "Red Terror", emergency commissions, revolutionary tribunals, revolutionary committees and other bodies of Soviet power (up to the red command of individual units) received the right to crack down on everyone who was considered potential opponents of Soviet power, without even finding out the specific guilt of that or any other accused.
On November 1, 1918, one of the leaders of the Cheka, Martin Latsis, in the Red Terror magazine, explained the activities carried out as follows: “We are not waging war against individuals. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class. Do not look at the investigation for materials and evidence that the accused acted in deed or word against the Soviet regime. The first question we must ask him is what class he belongs to, what is his origin, upbringing, education or profession. These questions should determine the fate of the accused. This is the meaning and essence of the Red Terror.”
Similarly to Latsis, the chairman of the Revolutionary Military Tribunal of the RSFSR, Karl Danishevsky, stated: “Military tribunals are not guided and should not be guided by any legal norms. These are punitive organs created in the course of the most intense revolutionary struggle.
However, the People's Commissar of Internal Affairs, Petrovsky, considered it necessary to somehow regulate the activities of his comrades and issued instructions on whom to apply extrajudicial executions to. This list included:
"one. All former gendarmerie officers on a special list approved by the Cheka.
2. All gendarmerie and police officers suspicious of their activities, according to the results of the search.
3. All those who have weapons without permission, unless there are extenuating circumstances (for example, membership in a revolutionary Soviet party or workers' organization).
4. Everyone with found false documents, if they are suspected of counter-revolutionary activities. In doubtful cases, cases should be referred to the final consideration of the Cheka.
5. Exposure of dealings with a criminal purpose with Russian and foreign counter-revolutionaries and their organizations, both on the territory of Soviet Russia and outside it.
6. All active members of the party of socialist revolutionaries of the center and right (note: active members are members of leading organizations - all committees from central to local city and district; members of combat squads and who are in contact with them on the affairs of the party; performing any assignments of combat squads, serving between individual organizations, etc.).
7. All active figures in the counter-revolutionary parties (the Cadets, Octobrists, etc.).
8. The case of executions is necessarily discussed in the presence of a representative of the Russian Party of Communists.
9. Execution is carried out only subject to the unanimous decision of three members of the Commission.
No less wide was the list of categories to be placed in concentration camps.
However, even this long list did not include all possible enemies, and the leadership of the RCP (b) also developed separate “targeted” campaigns to eliminate “socially alien” classes - the Cossacks (“Decossackization”) and the clergy.
So, on January 24, 1919, at a meeting of the Organizing Bureau of the Central Committee, a directive was adopted that marked the beginning of mass terror and repression in relation to "all Cossacks in general who took any direct or indirect part in the fight against Soviet power." The resolution of the Donburo of the RCP (b) of April 8, 1919 posed “an urgent task of the complete, rapid, decisive destruction of the Cossacks as a special economic group, the destruction of its economic foundations, the physical destruction of the Cossack bureaucracy and officers, in general, all the tops of the Cossacks, actively counter-revolutionary, spraying and the neutralization of the ordinary Cossacks and the formal liquidation of the Cossacks.
The Ural Regional Revolutionary Committee also issued an instruction in February 1919, according to which the Cossacks should be "outlawed, and they are subject to extermination." In pursuance of the instructions, the existing concentration camps were used and a number of new places of deprivation of liberty were organized. In a memorandum to the Central Committee of the RCP (b) a member of the Cossack department of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee Ruzheinikov at the end of 1919, it was reported that the 25th division of the Red Army (under the command of the legendary Chapaev. - Note KM.RU), when moving from Lbischensk to the village of Skvorkina, burned all the villages along 80 versts in length and 30–40 in width. By the middle of 1920, the Ural army was actually completely destroyed.
In the spring of 1920, “a member of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Kafront Comrade. Ordzhonikidze ordered: the first - to burn the village of Kalinovskaya; the second - to give the villages of Yermolovskaya, Zakan-Yurtovskaya, Samashkinskaya, Mikhailovskaya always former subjects of Soviet power to the mountainous Chechens. Why should the entire male population of the above villages from 18 to 50 years old be loaded into trains and sent under escort to the North for hard forced labor, the elderly, women and children should be evicted from the villages, allowing them to move to farms and villages to the North. “We definitely decided to evict 18 villages with a population of 60,000 on the other side of the Terek,” Ordzhonikidze himself later reported. He clarified: "The villages of Sunzhenskaya, Tarskaya, Field Marshal's, Romanovskaya, Yermolovskaya and others were liberated from the Cossacks and transferred to the highlanders - Ingush and Chechens."
It must be pointed out that Comrade Sergo was not at all engaged in amateur activities, but acted within the framework of the directive of Comrade Lenin. The latter pointed out in the directive of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the RCP (b): “On the agrarian issue, it is necessary to return to the highlanders of the North Caucasus the lands taken from them by the Great Russians at the expense of the kulak part of the Cossack population and instruct the Council of People’s Commissars to immediately prepare an appropriate decree.”
Lenin also kept the reprisals against the clergy under his personal control. On May 1, 1919, a secret Directive of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee No. 13666/2 was issued to the Chairman of the All-Russian Cheka F.E. Nar. Commissars need to do away with priests and religion as soon as possible. Priests must be arrested as counter-revolutionaries and saboteurs, shot mercilessly and everywhere. And as much as possible. Churches are to be closed. Seal the premises of the temples and turn them into warehouses.”
Taking into account the national composition of the Bolshevik elite, it should be noted that the so-called “fight against anti-Semitism” became an essential component of the “Red Terror”, which from the very beginning was an important goal of the Bolsheviks’ punitive policy (that’s why they were immediately called Judeo-Bolsheviks). Already in April 1918, a circular was issued with an order to stop "the Black Hundred anti-Semitic agitation of the clergy by taking the most decisive measures to combat counter-revolutionary activities and agitation." And in July of the same year, the all-Union decree of the Council of People's Commissars signed by Lenin on the persecution of anti-Semitism: “counter-revolutionaries in many cities, especially in the front line, are conducting pogrom agitation ... The Council of People's Commissars orders all Soviets to take decisive measures to root out the anti-Semitic movement. Pogromists and those leading pogromist agitation are ordered to be outlawed, which meant execution. (And in the Criminal Code adopted in 1922, Article 83 prescribed for "incitement of national hatred" punishment up to execution.)
The "anti-Semitic" July execution decree began to be even more zealously applied in conjunction with the September decree on the "Red Terror". Among the well-known figures, the first victims of these two combined decrees were Archpriest John Vostorgov (accused of serving the holy infant Gabriel of Bialystok, martyred by the Jews), Bishop Ephraim (Kuznetsov) of Selenginsky, priest-“anti-Semite” Lutostansky with his brother, N. A. Maklakov (former Minister of the Interior, proposed to the Tsar in December 1916 to disperse the Duma), A.N. Khvostov (leader of the right-wing faction in the 4th Duma, former Minister of the Interior), I.G. of the Russian people, one of the organizers of the investigation in the "Beilis case", chairman of the State Council) and Senator S. P. Beletsky (former head of the Police Department).
Thus identifying "anti-Semitism" with counter-revolution, the Bolsheviks themselves identified their power with the Jewish one. Thus, in the secret resolution of the Bureau of the Central Committee of the All-Union Leninist Young Communist League "On the issue of combating anti-Semitism" dated November 2, 1926, it was noted "the strengthening of anti-Semitism", which is used by "anti-communist organizations and elements in the struggle against the Soviet authorities." Yu. Larin (Lurie), a member of the Presidium of the Supreme Council of National Economy and the State Planning Commission, one of the authors of the project to transfer the Crimea to the Jews and “one of the initiators of the campaign against anti-Semitism (1926-1931)”, devoted a whole book to this - “Jews and anti-Semitism in the USSR”. He defined “anti-Semitism as a means of camouflaged mobilization against the Soviet regime…Therefore, counteracting anti-Semitic agitation is an indispensable condition for increasing the defense capability of our country” (emphasis added in the original), Larin states and insists on the application of Lenin’s decree of 1918: “Put “active anti-Semites outside the law ”, i.e. shoot”… At the end of the 1920s, only in Moscow, about every ten days, there was a trial for anti-Semitism; they could be judged for the mere spoken word "Jew".
According to some historians, from 1918 to the end of the 1930s. in the course of repressions against the clergy, about 42,000 clergymen were shot or died in places of deprivation of liberty. Similar data on the statistics of executions are given by the St. Tikhon Theological Institute, which analyzes repressions against clergy on the basis of archival materials.
The total number of victims of the "Red Terror" (however, for the sake of justice, we point out, as well as the terror of the "White", nationalist regimes, "Green", Makhnovist and other rebellions) is not possible to establish.
According to the decision of the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation No. 9-P of November 30, 1992, “the ideas of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the “red terror”, the forcible elimination of the exploiting classes, the so-called. enemies of the people and Soviet power led to the mass genocide of the population of the country in the 20-50s, the destruction of the social structure of civil society, the monstrous incitement of social discord, the death of tens of millions of innocent people"
“The All-Russian Central Executive Committee gives a solemn warning to all the serfs of the Russian and allied bourgeoisie, warning them that all counter-revolutionaries will answer for every attempt on the leaders of the Soviet government and bearers of the ideas of the socialist revolution ... Workers and peasants will respond with massive red terror against the bourgeoisie and its agents.” This meant the introduction of hostage, when completely different people should be held accountable for the actions of some people. The resolution of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee opened the way for the adoption of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee's resolution on the Red Terror on September 5.
The decree created the foundations for the repressive policy of the communist regime: the creation of concentration camps to isolate "class enemies", the destruction of all oppositionists "involved in conspiracies and rebellions." The Cheka was empowered to take hostages, pass sentences and carry them out.
It was immediately announced that 29 counter-revolutionaries were shot, who were obviously not involved in the assassination attempts on Lenin and Uritsky, including the former Minister of Internal Affairs of the Russian Empire A. Khvostov, the former Minister of Justice I. Shcheglovitov, and others. In the early days of the September Red Terror in Petrograd more than 500 people died. Thousands of people were executed throughout Soviet Russia, some of whom were guilty only of belonging to "counter-revolutionary" classes and social movements - entrepreneurs, landowners, priests, officers, members of the Kadet Party, peasants taken hostage.
Decree of the Council of People's Commissars of the RSFSR of 09/05/1918 "On the Red Terror"
COUNCIL OF PEOPLE'S COMMISSIONERS OF THE RSFSR
The Council of People's Commissars, having heard the report of the Chairman of the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution, Profiteering and Crime ex officio on the activities of this Commission, finds that in this situation, providing rear services through terror is a direct necessity; that in order to strengthen the activities of the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution, Profiteering and Crime ex officio and to introduce greater planning into it, it is necessary to send there the largest possible number of responsible party comrades; that it is necessary to secure the Soviet Republic from class enemies by isolating them in concentration camps, that all persons connected with White Guard organizations, conspiracies and rebellions are to be shot; that it is necessary to publish the names of all those who were shot, as well as the reasons for applying this measure to them.
People's Commissar of Justice D.KURSKY
People's Commissar for Internal Affairs G. PETROVSKY
Manager of the Affairs of the Council of People's Commissars V. BONC - BRUEVICH
Secretary of the Sov.Nar.Kom. L. FOTIEVA
COUNCIL OF PEOPLE'S COMMISSIONERS OF THE RSFSR
ABOUT THE RED TERROR
The Council of People's Commissars, having heard the report of the Chairman of the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution, Profiteering and Crime ex officio on the activities of this Commission, finds that in this situation, providing rear services through terror is a direct necessity; that in order to strengthen the activities of the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution, Profiteering and Crime ex officio and to introduce greater planning into it, it is necessary to send there the largest possible number of responsible party comrades; that it is necessary to secure the Soviet Republic from class enemies by isolating them in concentration camps, that all persons connected with White Guard organizations, conspiracies and rebellions are to be shot; that it is necessary to publish the names of all those who were shot, as well as the reasons for applying this measure to them.
People's Commissar of Justice
D.KURSKIY
People's Commissar
for Internal Affairs
G.PETROVSKY
Business manager
Council of People's Commissars
V. BONC - BRUEVICH
(Based on the materials of the ATP "ConsultantPlus", according to which the resolution is not considered invalid)
From the editors of the news agency "Legitimist": Until now, in Russian textbooks, in magazine and newspaper articles and television programs, it is suggested that the so-called "Red Terror" began only in September 1918, in response to terrorist acts carried out by "counter-revolutionaries-White Guards".
However, in reality, the "Red Terror" began long before the Bolshevik revolution. What, no matter how acts of the “red”, revolutionary terror was the assassination of the Tsar-Liberator, the attempt on the Tsar-Peacemaker, the murder of Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich, the murders of thousands of officials, policemen, officers, soldiers and even ordinary inhabitants in 1905-1917. What, no matter how terror was the bloody reprisal against the officers, perpetrated by the revolutionaries set on their commanders by the sailors in the days of the February "great and bloodless". What, no matter how the “red terror” was the wave of violence that swept our country At once after the Bolsheviks seized power. The White movement actually became a reaction to this immediate manifestation of the very essence of the totalitarian-terrorist communist dictatorship, to which the following excerpt from the book of the famous Russian historian, researcher of the glorious and mournful path of Russian officers in the twentieth century, Dr. historical sciences, Professor Sergei Vladimirovich Volkov "The tragedy of Russian officers".
In the winter of 1917-1918 and in the spring, when millions of soldiers rushed from the front to the rear, an unprecedented wave of outrages and violence began along all roads, especially along the railway lines. Officers, even those who had long ago taken off their shoulder straps, naturally became the first victims of reprisals, as soon as a random rogue suspected their belonging to the officer corps. Many officers who made their way to their families were never destined to reach them. Danger threatened them everywhere and from all sides - from soldiers who might have seemed suspicious of someone's too "intelligent" appearance, from a drunken crowd at the stations, from local Bolshevik commandants, executive committees, emergency commissions, etc., finally, from anyone , who wished to prove his loyalty to the new government by denouncing the "hydra of the counter-revolution". The officers themselves and their families could, with virtually impunity, be attacked by criminal elements, who always had the opportunity to refer to the fact that they were cracking down on enemies of the revolution (in the provinces, the line between criminal elements and functionaries of the new government was, as a rule, very shaky, and often it did not exist at all , since the latter consisted largely of the former).
As a result of this "unofficial" terror at the end of 1917 - the first half of 1918. many officers died, the exact number of which is difficult to name due to the lack of any account. It is impossible to count exactly how many officers fell at the hands of a brutal mob and were killed at the initiative of ordinary adherents of the Bolshevik government: such massacres then took place daily at hundreds of stations and in dozens of cities.
The impressions of eyewitnesses on all railways in November-December 1917 are approximately the same. "What a journey! Executions everywhere, everywhere the corpses of officers and ordinary inhabitants, even women, children. Revolutionary committees raged at the stations, their members were drunk and shot at the cars at the fear of the bourgeoisie. A little stop, a drunken brutal crowd rushed to the train, looking for officers ( Penza-Orenburg) ... The corpses of officers lay all over the way (on the way to Voronezh) ... I was rather frightened, especially when I saw through the window, right in front of the house in the snow, the corpses of officers - I examined them with horror, obviously hacked to death with swords (Millerovo) ... The train started off. On this terrible return journey - what a chilling horror! - in front of our eyes, on the platforms, eight officers were shot. The searches took place continuously ... We then saw how fifteen officers were led , together with the general and his wife, somewhere along the railway track. Less than a quarter of an hour later, gunshots were heard. Everyone crossed themselves (Chertkovo) ... At the moment the train was leaving, two young men in military uniform quickly headed towards him. Moment - and two friends lay on the platform, stabbed with bayonets. "They killed the officers!", swept through the cars (Voronezh). The same on st. Volnovakha and others. Dozens of those arrested... He was taken out of the car into the station building, took off his shoes and, leaving only in his underpants, was taken to a room where there were already about 20 people in the same form. Nearly all the officers turned up. They learned their fate ... execution, as it happened the previous day with fifty arrested (Kantemirovka) "(107). led by the commander and taken to Uspenskaya station, where they were shot on the night of January 18 (108). . We were informed in advance and therefore approached the station under the cover of machine-gun fire, from which the Red gangs began to scatter. Then some railway worker told us that they had been taking the discovered officers to be shot all night, pointing out where the corpses were; and now they led 50-60 people whom we managed to save. There were 132 people killed there. There was a massacre here. We forced the dead to be buried, and the rescued, all former officers, joined us "(109). It was no less dangerous to make our way on foot. Here are the scenes. The 12 officers and several old soldiers of the Ingermanland Hussars remaining after the collapse decided to make their way to Ukraine. At one of the overnight stays in the village of Rogi, Kyiv Province. they were attacked by a gang of deserters: one of the officers was killed, five were seriously wounded and only miraculously escaped (110). In the Alexandrovo region, a gang of Red Guards captured several officers of the Shirvan Grenadier Regiment, beat them, mocked them, killed two, gouged out their eyes (111).
The events in the seaside cities of the Caucasus and the Crimea, and above all in Sevastopol, overflowing with Bolshevik-minded sailors, took on a particularly acute character. In early December, a detachment returned from near Belgorod, directed against shock battalions marching from Headquarters to the Don. The dead were buried, after which crowds of sailors and all sorts of rabble rushed into the city in search of officers, who were seized and taken to prison. When her chief refused to accept those arrested due to lack of space, the crowd took out those who were already in prison, took them to Malakhov Kurgan and shot them. So 32 officers and a priest died. This happened from 16 to 17 December. By the way, this episode was reflected in Akhmatova's poem:
Is that why I wore you
I used to be in my arms
Is it for this that strength shone
In your blue eyes!
He grew up slender and tall,
He sang songs, drank Madeira,
To distant Anatolia
The destroyer drove his own.
On the Malakhov Hill
The officer was shot
Twenty years without a week
He looked at God's light.
That night, officers were hunted all over the city, especially on Chesmenskaya and Sobornaya streets (where there were many officers' apartments) and at the station. A typical episode: “Suddenly, amid the incessant shots and swearing, a wild cry was heard, and a man in black with a huge jump found himself in the corridor and fell near us. the bestial growl of the sailors... It became scary...". Then, during the first Sevastopol massacre, however, mainly naval officers were exterminated - out of 128 land officers who died in the city, there were only 8 (112).
In order to defend themselves, the officers were forced to unite and join the detached from the army units of the Crimean Tatar government formed in Simferopol. The chief of staff of the "Crimean troops" was Lieutenant Colonel Makukha, who included Colonel Dostovalov and Captain Stratonov. Up to 2,000 officers gathered there. But the really huge headquarters had only four officer companies of about 100 hours each. On the basis of the Crimean Cavalry Regiment (about 50 officers) that returned from the front, a brigade (Colonel Bako) was formed from the 1st and 2nd Tatar Horse Regiments (Colonel Petropolsky and Lieutenant Colonel Biarslanov), whose squadrons maintained order in the cities of the peninsula; in Evpatoria there were 150 people in the officer squad (113). Meanwhile, the Bolsheviks concentrated more than 7 thousand people and, under the command of officers Tolstov and Lyashchenko, moved them to Simferopol, which fell from January 13 to January 14, 1918 (114) During the fighting, up to 170 officers were killed (almost all the ranks of the Crimean headquarters at the head of with Lieutenant Colonel Makukha). After that, the Bolsheviks became the masters of the entire peninsula and executions began. In total, according to the minimum data, more than 1000 hours were shot, mainly officers (officers of the Crimean Cavalry Regiment then died 13 people (115)), primarily in Simferopol, where the number of shot officers is said to be from 100 to 700 (116).
More than 200 (117) civilians were killed on the southern coast alone, more than 60 officers died in Feodosia in February, and several retired officers were killed in Alushta. In Sevastopol, on the night of February 23-24, the second massacre of officers took place, but "this time it was perfectly organized, they killed according to plan, and not only naval officers, but all officers in general, about 800 people in total. Corpses were collected by specially designated trucks "The dead lay in piles. They were taken to the Grafskaya pier, where they were loaded onto barges and taken out to sea." In April, when the Germans occupied the Crimea, some of the surviving officers, who could not bear to hand over the ships to the Germans, believed the sailors, went with them on ships from Sevastopol to Novorossiysk, but were thrown into the sea along the way (118).
Over 800 people were arrested in Yevpatoria on January 15-18. Executions were carried out on the Truvor transport and the Romanian hydro cruiser. On the "Romania" they were executed as follows: "Persons sentenced to death were taken to the upper deck and there, after bullying, they were shot, and then thrown overboard into the water. They were thrown in masses and alive, but in this case the victim's hands were pulled back and they were tied with ropes at the elbows and hands. In addition, they tied the legs in several places, and sometimes they pulled the head behind the neck with ropes back and tied it to the already bandaged arms and legs. The grate was tied to the legs. " On the Truvor, "the one called out of the hold was taken to the so-called" frontal place ". Here they took off the victim's outer dress, tied his hands and feet, and then cut off his ears, nose, lips, penis, and sometimes his hands, and in this form were thrown into the water. The executions went on all night, and each execution took 15-20 minutes." On January 15-17, about 300 people died on both ships (119). Here is an eyewitness description of the massacre of one of the parties: “All the arrested officers (46 in total) with their hands tied were lined up on board the transport, one of the sailors kicked them into the sea. This brutal massacre was visible from the shore, where relatives, children, wives ... All this wept, screamed, begged, but the sailors only laughed. Staff captain Novatsky died worst of all. He, already badly wounded, was brought to his senses, bandaged and then thrown into the furnace of transport "(120). In addition, 9 officers were shot on January 24 and 8 more (with 30 other persons) on March 1 near the city (121).
In Yalta, after it was occupied by the Bolsheviks on January 13, the arrested officers were taken to the destroyers standing in the port, from which they were sent either directly to execution on the pier, or they were placed for 1-2 days in the building of the agency of the Russian Shipping Company Society, from where almost all those arrested at the end -the ends were still brought out to the same pier and there they were killed by sailors and Red Guards. Only a few managed to escape miraculously (among which was the bar. Wrangel, who later described these events in his memoirs). In the first two or three days in Yalta, up to 100 officers were killed, and in total these days more than 100 people were shot on the pier alone, whose corpses, with loads tied to their feet, immediately threw themselves into the water at the pier. Some of the officers were killed directly on the streets of the city (122). In the memoirs of one of the officers, in particular, the following episode is cited: “The accursed murders of officers began in Yalta. The sailor mob broke into the infirmary where my brother was lying. seriously wounded, barricaded themselves and returned fire from revolvers. The mob riddled the ward with shelling. All the defenders were killed "(123).
There were about 11,000 officers in Odessa at the beginning of December. The attempt of the Bolsheviks to seize power then ended unsuccessfully; in early January, led by Gen. Leontovich began to form volunteer units to protect the city, dormitories and canteens were arranged for officers from other cities, but only a few were able to gather (124). In January 1918 they took part in the battles with the Bolsheviks. Junkers of the Odessa Military School, led by its chief, Colonel Kislov, and 42 volunteer officers defended themselves in the school building for three days; leaving it at night, they made their way to the Don in groups of the Volunteer Army (125). The massacre of officers that followed in the city took place under the leadership of Muravyov. On the cruiser "Almaz" there was a naval military tribunal. The officers were thrown into ovens or put naked on the deck in the frost and poured with water until they turned into blocks of ice ... Then they were thrown into the sea (126). Then over 400 officers were killed in the city (127).
In Novorossiysk, on February 18, all the officers of the 491st regiment (63 people), issued by their soldiers to the brutal crowd, were taken to the barge, where they were stripped, bound, mutilated and, partly hacked, partly shot, thrown into the bay (128). In Berdyansk at the end of February 1918, a sailor detachment that occupied the city arrested 400-500 officers who only accidentally escaped being taken to Sevastopol and shot (129).
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(108) Moiseev M.A. Past, p. 72.
(109) Wrangel P.N. Memoirs, v.1, p. 64; 10th Hussar Ingermanland Regiment. 1704-1954, p. 20; Slezkin Yu.A. Chronicle of the years gone by. Buenos Aires, 1975, p. 80-84.
(110) Drozdovsky M.G. Diary. New York, 1963, p. 75-79.
(111) Krishevsky N. In the Crimea (1916-1918) // APP, KhSh, p. 105-107.
(112) Crimean equestrian regiment of Her Majesty the Empress Alexandra Feodorovna. 1784-1922. San Francisco, 1978, p. 117. Krishevsky N. In the Crimea, p. 107.
(113) Almendinger V.V. "At least Dostovalov will not know the time of the attack" (Memoirs) // VP, No. 63/64, p. 23-29.
(114) Crimean Cavalry Regiment, p. 125
(115) Wrangel P.N. Memories, v.1, p. 58; Krishevsky N. In the Crimea, p. 109; this number obviously includes civilians - for example, more than 60 of them were killed in the courtyard of the city prison alone.
(116) Red Terror during the Civil War, p. 202.
(117) Krishevsky N. In the Crimea, p. 108, 117.
(118) Red Terror during the Civil War, p. 187-189.
(119) Krishevsky N. In the Crimea, p. 108.
(120) Red Terror during the Civil War, p. 191.
(121) Ibid., p. 195-196.
(122) Turkul A.V. The Drozdovites are on fire. New York, 1990, p. 49.
(123) Odessa Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich Cadet Corps. 1899-1924. New York, 1974, p. 281-282.
(124) Ch, No. 45, p. 20; Markov A. Cadets and cadets. San Francisco, 1961, p. 236.
(125) Nesterovich-Berg M.A. In the fight against the Bolsheviks, p. 129-130.
(126) Melgunov S.P. Red Terror in Russia. M., 1990, p. 46.
(127) Denikin A.I. Essays on Russian turmoil // White business, book 1, M., 1992, p. 82; Volkov A. In memory of the tragically dead officers of one regiment // VB, No. 129; Krishevsky N. In the Crimea, p. 111. The number of dead officers is also determined at 32 people. (Voronovich N. Between two fires // APP, UP, p. 59.).
(128) Abaliants. The uprising of the Berdyansk Union of Crippled Warriors in early April 1918 // VP, No. 51, p. thirteen.
(129) See, for example: Grekov A.P. In Ukraine in 1917 // VP, No. 44.
A hundred years ago, the Civil War in Russia entered its hottest stage. In response to the assassination of the chairman of the Petrograd Cheka, Moses Uritsky, and the assassination attempt on the head of the Council of People's Commissars, Vladimir Lenin, on August 30, 1918, the Bolsheviks announced the application of a complex of the most severe measures against their enemies. A new round of struggle between the new government and its opponents was secured by a government decree "On the Red Terror" of September 5. After listening to the report of the chairman of the Cheka, the Council of People's Commissars considered it necessary to "provide the rear through terror."
The document gave the Chekists the exclusive authority to shoot people "touched by the White Guard organizations, conspiracies and rebellions."
The grounds for applying capital punishment to the executed, as well as their names, according to the plan of the people's commissars, were to be published in the public domain.
“In order to strengthen the activities of the Cheka in the fight against counter-revolution, speculation and crime ex officio and to introduce into it greater planning, it is necessary to send there the largest possible number of responsible party comrades; it is necessary to ensure the Soviet Republic from class enemies by isolating them in concentration camps, ”the decision of the Council of People’s Commissars also said.
The document was signed by the people's commissars of justice and internal affairs Dmitry Kursky and Grigory Petrovsky, the head of the Council of People's Commissars Vladimir Bonch-Bruyevich and the secretary of the Council of People's Commissars Lidia Fotieva.
Wikimedia Commons
In other words, objectionable persons were officially allowed to be eliminated without trial or investigation - only on suspicion of involvement in an organization that the Soviet leadership defined as an enemy. Spies, saboteurs and "other counter-revolutionaries" were officially outlawed. Terror became the main state policy.
Strictly speaking, such methods of struggle were practiced by the Reds before, starting in the autumn of 1917. Resonant outbreaks of terror accompanied the revolutionary events even before the Bolsheviks began to play an important role in the Russian political system. Actually, already the February Revolution was marked by the brutal reprisal of sailors against officers of the Baltic Fleet. Now, something like that would no longer be considered a crime - both legally and morally.
In fact, the decree "On the Red Terror" restored the death penalty in the country, which the Bolsheviks themselves abolished on October 28, 1917.
It was a direct continuation of the decision of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of September 2 on the transformation of the Soviet Republic into a "military camp". Based on this document, the Revolutionary Military Council was created with the chairman and commander-in-chief Joachim Vatsetis. After the formation of a clear structure for commanding the army, the troops began demonstrative executions of "cowards and traitors." This helped to establish discipline: already on September 10, the Reds won the first significant victory in the Civil War, taking Kazan with tense battles.
In the Soviet press of that time, the legend about the death of Uritsky and the severe wounds of Lenin at the hands of a strong, dangerous and organized enemy was stubbornly propagated. Although these two episodes, most likely, nothing united. The fact that the attackers - Leonid Kannegiser and - were involved in some serious combat groups remains a big question. That is, the attacks in Petrograd and Moscow were certainly not the result, for example, of the counterintelligence operation of the Volunteer Army of General Anton.
However, it was beneficial for the Bolsheviks to blame the incident on the Whites and others. And even better - to present them in the eyes of the common people as a single enemy camp.
Shots at Uritsky and Lenin made it possible to legitimize terror, to make it inevitable and widespread.
The number of victims of the Red Terror, according to various researchers, varies from 140 to 500 thousand. In general, the number of deaths in the Bolshevik repressions of 1917-1922 can reach 2 million. It is known that soon after the attempt on Lenin, 512 people from among the "bourgeois hostages" were executed. Among them are ex-ministers of internal affairs and justice Ivan Shcheglovitov, Bishop Ephraim (Kuznetsov), archpriest, rector of St. Basil's Cathedral Ivan Vostorgov. The main targets of the Cheka were officers, former members of the gendarmerie and police, clergy, landowners, representatives of the intelligentsia and the bourgeoisie, and leaders of counter-revolutionary political parties.
Corpses of the killed repressed in a cart in Kharkov
Wikimedia Commons“The laws of September 2 and 5 finally endowed us with legal rights to what some party comrades have objected to so far, to end immediately, without asking anyone’s permission, with the counter-revolutionary bastard,” Dzerzhinsky rejoiced at the opportunities that had opened up.
Newspapers sang along to the Chekists, indignant at the too small, according to journalists, the number of those shot - "not thousands, but only hundreds."
Arbitrary arrests and imprisonment of princes, counts, ministers of the tsarist and Provisional governments, generals and other "class alien elements" became commonplace. By cracking down on these people, the Bolsheviks "avenged" the death of their comrades.
Among the shot, hacked, stabbed or mauled victims of the Red Terror are such famous figures of pre-revolutionary Russia as the poet (executed in 1921), historian, Slavic philologist Timofey Florinsky and many others. At the same time, a method of mass execution was invented - to drown people in barges. In order not to waste cartridges, prisoners were burned alive in the furnaces of locomotives. Quite often the Chekists disguised a banal robbery by “fighting the bourgeoisie”, then getting rid of unnecessary witnesses. The case quickly took on such a scale that already on November 8, murders without proof of guilt were banned.
General Fyodor Rerberg, who headed Denikin's Special Investigation Commission to investigate the atrocities of the Bolsheviks, described what he saw in Kyiv liberated in August 1919:
“The entire cement floor of the large garage was covered with several inches of blood, mixed into a terrifying mass with brains, skull bones, tufts of hair and other human remains. All the walls were spattered with blood, brain particles and pieces of head skin stuck to them next to thousands of bullet holes.
Men were screwed to the floor with screws, women were skinned on their arms and legs, imitating gloves and stockings. In total, the commission found 4,800 corpses of the executed in the city.
Grand Dukes Pavel Alexandrovich (the sixth son of Emperor Alexander II), Georgy Mikhailovich, Nikolai Mikhailovich, Dmitry Konstantinovich were executed in Petropavlovka in response to the murder of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg in Germany.
“We are exterminating unnecessary classes of people,” wrote a prominent member of the board of the Cheka, by whose order the mentioned members of the imperial family were killed. - Do not look at the investigation for materials and evidence that the accused acted in word or deed against the Soviets.
The first question is what class he belongs to, what is his origin, upbringing, education or profession. These questions should determine the fate of the accused. This is the meaning and essence of the Red Terror.”
In fairness, Lenin critically assessed this statement, calling it "the greatest stupidity" the refusal to use representatives of the bourgeois apparatus "for administration and construction."
In contrast to the red terror, there was a white one. Historians, depending on their own political beliefs, have not yet come to an unambiguous position which of them appeared first. Some call the initiative of the Bolsheviks only a defensive measure in response to the bloodthirstiness of Denikin's troops and the Siberian armies. Others, on the contrary, see white terror as a response to red terror.