The Red Terror

The Red Terror started in August 1918 after Socialist Revolutionary Fanny Kaplan tried to kill Lenin.  Recovering from his wounds, Lenin decided: "It is necessary – secretly and urgently to prepare the terror”.  In September, a decree "On Red Terror" ordered the Cheka "to secure the Soviet Republic from the class enemies by isolating them in concentration camps" and prescribed "mass shooting … without hesitation".  The Bolsheviks believed that fear would keep people from supporting their enemies. 

The Cheka arrested, tortured, and killed anyone they thought might be against the Bolsheviks.  They didn't need to have proof that someone was guilty; even a suspicion was enough.  In the first two months more than 10,000 people were summarily executed.  Thousands more were sent to prison camps called gulags – terrible places where people had to do hard labour in awful conditions.  Many people died from the harsh treatment and lack of food.  Nobody was safe – peasants, workers, clergy; people lived in constant fear because they never knew if they would be next. 

The Civil War intensified the Terror: 3,000+ executions in Kharkov, 4000+ in Rostov, 3,000 in Kiev … and so on in every city captured.  In the Crimea the Bolsheviks executed 50,000 White prisoners of war after the defeat of General Wrangel at the end of 1920.  Estimates of the total range from 70,000 to 1.7 million. 

The Red Terror showed how far the Bolsheviks were willing to go to hold onto power. 

It has to be said that the Whites – including, on a few occasions, the British – were no better.  It has been suggestde that what made the Red Terror more terrifying than that of the Whites was that it was systematic and ruthless.

Interpretations:

• Richard Pipes (2001) argued that the Terror proved how little mass-support the Bolsheviks had, and that it stemmed from Lenin’s belief that lives were of no value compared to the cause of communism. 

• Other historians have suggested that it was an outworking of the Bolsheviks ideological belief in violent revolution. 

• Orlando Figes (1998) thought that the impetus came from below, more than from above, and that it was an outworking of the general brutality of the time.