Cheka and Red Terror – Notes
The Cheka came into being in virtual secrecy on December 7, 1917
The name was an acronym for “Extraordinary Commission to Fight the
Counterrevolution and Sabotage”
 It would be a crime to publish any information about this organization
without its consent
 The Cheka had on its payroll many non-Russians as Lenin believed his
people were “too soft” for the harsh demands of the job
Feliks Dzerzhinskii
This young Pole was a professional revolutionary who had passionately hated the
Russians for what they had done to Poland.
 He spent many years languishing in labour camps and prisons
 As the Bolshevik regime grew more insecure, the Cheka’s power increased
exponentially, especially after an attempt it made on Lenin’s life
Royals
Grand Duke Michael, abducted and dragged into a forest, along with his British
secretary… both shot to death
Romanovs…
Having been moved out to Ekaterinaburg, for their “protection”, they are moved
in the middle of the night into a basement room.
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Alexandra asks for a chair for she and Alexei who is quite ill
They are told to pose for a photo, that will be shown to prove to Western
powers they are safe
Yurovskii and the guards are told who to aim at, then they tell the family
they are about to be shot
Shooting lasted for 2-3 minutes as the jewels hidden in the daughters’ and
mother’s corsets may have protected them initially.
Alexei lay bleeding and breathing on the floor, so he was shot twice in the
head.
Bodies were soaked in sulfuric acid, kerosene and then burned
Remains were buried in a shallow grave that wasn’t discovered until 1989
Lenin
No tsar, even at the height of radical terrorism, was as fearful of his life and as
well protected as Lenin.
 He almost never traveled outside Moscow, except to go to his
requisitioned country estate nearby
 Always surrounded by Latvian guards
Assassination attempts
Friday, August 30th, 1918
 Lenin appears and speaks at a Moscow factory
 After, he makes his way through a dense crowd to his car
 A woman buttonholes him and complains about Soviet food policy
 3 shots rang out, fired by another woman, standing nearby, unnoticed
 Lenin driven at top speed to the Kremlin
 2 wounds – one in the arm, one potentially fatal in the jaw and neck
 Fannie Kaplan, the shooter, was interrogated and shot in the back in the
courtyard of the Kremlin
Thus began a campaign of Red Terror
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Class enemies were to be committed to concentration camps
All persons linked to “White Guard organizations, conspiracies, and
seditious actions” were to be summarily executed
A kind of murderous psychosis seized the Bolsheviks
Zinoviev: “We must carry with us 90 million out of the 100 million of Soviet
Russia’s inhabitants. As for the rest, we have nothing to say to them. They
must be annihilated.”
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These word spelled a death sentence for 10 million human beings
N.V. Krylenko: “We must execute not only the guilty. Execution of the innocent
will impress the masses even more.”
Soviet concentration camps
They were fundamentally different than those that had originated during colonial
wars in Cuba, the Philippines and South Africa
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They were directed not against foreign enemies, but domestic opponents
They were permanent
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They performed important economic functions, supplying the regime with
slave labour
Every provincial city was ordered to construct a facility capable of housing 300 or
more inmates
At the end of 1920, Soviet Russia had 84 concentration camps that held
approximately 50 000 prisoners…
3 years later, that number had increased to 315 camps and 70 000 prisoners
Why????
In Soviet Russia, it was the regime and its supporters that constituted a
MINORITY.
 To stay in power, they had first to atomize society and then destroy in it
the very will to act independently
 Innocence would be no guarantee of survival
 Once each person was atomized and fearful of attracting attention,
concerned exclusively with physical survival, the gov’t had the entire
sphere of public activity under its control