1918-1921 - The Red Terror

• Prisoners in many cities were shot.
• Official records put the figure of deaths at the hand of the Cheka from 1918-20 at nearly 13,000.
• Increasing opposition to the regime from workers who wanted Soviet elections, a free press, restoring the Constituent Assembly and overthrowing the Sovnarkom led to more clashes with the Cheka.
• Graffiti appeared in Petrograd saying "Down with Lenin and horsemeat, give us the Tsar and pork!"
• A campaign was launched by some left-wing SRs who were protesting about the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.

  • They captured Dzerzhinsky, Head of the Cheka in May 1918.
• In July 1918, the left SRs shot the German Ambassador and in August, there was an assassination attempt on Lenin who was shot in the neck and badly wounded.
• There was an increase in support for the other socialist parties.
• The SRs and Mensheviks both enjoyed a growth in support which was accompanied by calls for a return to multi-party democracy.
• The Cheka fanned the flames of class warfare threatening to wipe out the middle class.

  • However, the main aim of the Terror was to frighten all social groups into cooperation with the regime.
• Victims of the terror included large numbers of workers and peasants as well as princes, priests, prostitutes, judges, merchants/
• Children made up 5% of Moscow's prison population in 1920.

  • They alongside other groups were found guilty of "bourgeois provocation" or "counter-revolutionary activities".
• Apologists for Lenin argue that he was faced with enormous political and economic challenges during the Civil War and that the use of terror was a necessary response to the crisis.

  • "Lenin cannot be accused of personal cruelty. The main argument for the terror was to protect the working class." - D Volkogonov.
• Once the crisis passed, the Cheka was disbanded by Lenin in February 1922.
• Critics of Lenin do not accept that the Red Terror was temporary policy born out of desperate circumstances.

  • "The Red Terror constituted form the outset as an essential element of the regime. It never disappeared, hanging like a permanent cloud over Soviet Russia." - Richard Pipes
• Lenin's critics also point out that despite the Cheka being disbanded in 1922, it was immediately replaced by the GPU who continued the work of the secret police.
• Lenin's critics see the foundations of Stalin's purges in the 1930s coming from the Red Terror whereas apologists regard Stalin's later escalation of terror as something different.