Role of terror / Red Terror

• What launches the red terror?

  An assassination attempt on Lenin
• Intensified what was already occurign
• Hang no less than 100 well-known Kulaks, rich men, bloodsuckers
• Lubianka became heaquarters and by June 1918 every province had a branch
• By 1921 - 31,000 frontline agents and 143,000 employees

  • worked outside of the law and reported to Lenin and the Politburo
  • it does not judge it strikes
• socialist revolutionaries were arrested in masses and other leftist groups

  • tsar shot
• 1918 - 1920 - over 13,000 killed officially but estimates garner 500,000
• chekha fanned the flames of class warfare and some argued wiping out middle class to equalise society - targeted everyone and incited terror everywhere

  • children made up 5% of Moscow prison population - princes, priests, prostitutes and judges
  • no one knew who was actually a counter revolutionary
• arrested for bourgeoise provocation
• arrested for simply associations with bourgeoise or near scenes of arrests
• checkha bosses acted like mafia with turf and tyrants
• how did they tackle peasants holding onto grain?

  • quotas were filled even if they starved
  • brigades became bandits
  • peasants resisted by murdering Bolshevik officials and splitting stomach and stuffing with grain
• how did the tackle housing dissident workers and peasants?

  • Concentration and labour camps were setup
  • machinery of terror under Lenin
  • hundreds of thousandsperish