tribunals’, which, though not necessarily gentle with their accused, were at least elected by the soviets and to some extent under their control. They more nearly, in fact, embodied popular involvement in justice.
After the rising of July 1918, however, the Left Socialist Revolutionaries were expelled from the Cheka, and the republic entered a more dangerous period, when emergency justice became more acceptable. A start was made with the insurgents of Yaroslavl. The future prime minister, N. A. Bulganin, there headed a Cheka detachment which summarily shot 57 rebels, mostly officers, while a commission of investigation selected a further 350 captives for execution. This was still an isolated incident, but with the proclamation on 5 September of the Red Terror, such operations became routine. The decree stated that ‘it is essential to protect the Soviet Republic against its class enemies by isolating these in concentration camps; all persons involved in White Guard organizations, plots and insurrections are to be shot.’ It became unnecessary for an actual crime to be proven against any person of non-worker and non-peasant origin. His very existence could be held to imply that he was at war with the Soviet system, and therefore with the people as a whole. The sinister term ‘enemy of the people’ began to creep into official instructions and propaganda. Latsis, chairman of the eastern front Cheka, told his officers in November 1918:
We are not waging war against individual persons. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class. During the investigation, do not look for evidence that the accused acted in deed or word against soviet power. The first questions that you ought to put are: To what class does he belong? What is his origin? What is his education or profession? And it is these questions that ought to determine the fate of the accused. In this lies the significance and essence of the Red Terror.
The imagery of public hygiene became part of the standard language of Soviet propaganda. Already in December 1917 Lenin had called for ‘a purge of the Russian land from all vermin’, by which he meant the ‘idle rich’, ‘priests’, ‘bureaucrats’ and ‘slovenly and hysterical intellectuals’. And on 31 August 1918 Pravda exhorted: ‘The towns must be cleansed of this bourgeois putrefaction. … All who are dangerous to the cause of the revolution must be exterminated.’
Concentration camps served the same sanitary purposes, by isolating the class enemy from the ordinary people. Lenin first proposed their establishment in a letter to the Penza provincial soviet on 9 August 1918 (the town was in an exposed position on the vulnerable eastern front): ‘It is essential to organize a reinforced guard of reliable persons to carry out mass terror against kulaks [rich peasants], priests and White Guardists; unreliable elements should be locked up in a concentration camp outside the town.’ Such camps were mentioned again in the decree on Red Terror, and were evidently already in existence, although the enactment authorizing them was not passed by VTsIK till 11 April 1919. By 1922 it appears from official figures that there were some 190 camps containing 85,000 inmates. According to Solzhenitsyn and others, conditions in most of them (there were notorious exceptions) were still tolerable compared with later days: prisoners still worked an eight-hour day and received a small regular wage. Perhaps something of the genuine notion of ‘corrective labour’ still survived. On the other hand, the inmates were hostages, liable to be summarily shot or taken out in a barge and drowned in a river in retribution for some action of the Whites in the civil war.
It is impossible to know how many people died at the hands of the Cheka during this period. Latsis stated that 12,733 persons were shot by them up to December 1920. Chamberlin in his standard history of the revolution makes an estimate of more like 50,000, while more recently Robert Conquest has given a figure of 200,000 for the period 1917–23, reckoning that a further 300,000 died as a result of other repressive measures, such as the suppression of peasant risings, strikes and mutinies.
These figures yield something by comparison with Stalin’s later efforts, and of course it must be remembered that they occurred in a period of genuine civil war, when the other side was also committing atrocities. One has the impression that White brutality was sporadic and sometimes committed without the knowledge of White leaders, while the Reds frankly and proudly acknowledged terror to be part of their system. Lenin’s attitude we have seen above, and Trotsky (in Terrorism and Communism, 1920) called terror ‘no more than a continuation … of armed insurrection’. Perhaps these distinctions are tenuous. What one can say with certainty is that Lenin introduced and made habitual the ruthless use of violence against all real and imagined ‘enemies’, while also creating, outside soviet or party control, the extra-legal institutions to enable this to be done.
Whatever may have been the Bolsheviks’ intentions when they came to power, there can be no doubt that during the civil war they withdrew or nullified most of the benefits they had given to the people in October, while submitting the democratic institutions they had helped create to rigid and often brutal control from above. ‘During the civil war’ does not, however, necessarily mean ‘because of the civil war’: in fact, there is considerable controversy among historians on this point. Soviet historians, and some Western ones, would attribute the extreme authoritarianism of Bolshevik rule at this time to the emergencies which the regime faced. Many Western historians, on the other hand, have always insisted that such authoritarianism was to be found in Lenin’s attitudes from the outset and in the way he organized his own faction and broke with all those who were unable to agree with him wholeheartedly.
There is in fact no need no posit any total incompatibility between these two views. By their very method of seizing power the Bolsheviks plunged Russia into a situation akin to civil war–which later developed into actual civil war. Futhermore, some of their most authoritarian measures were taken either before or after the most critical phases of the civil war. The war, in fact, merely offered the Bolsheviks the first occasion to grapple with reality, to move out of the realm of fantasy into that of practical politics. They were guided by the vague but powerful preconceptions they had brought to the situation. Wartime, moreover, in some ways provided them with the best opportunity to combine democracy (in the sense of contact with the masses) and authoritarianism in the manner of Lenin’s exhortations of November and December 1917. In State and Revolution he had urged that ‘to organize the whole national economy on the lines of the postal service … all under the control and leadership of the armed proletariat–this is our immediate aim.’ If one substitutes for ‘armed proletariat’ ‘the party and the Red Army’ that is a pretty close approximation to what War Communism actually was. But of course that substitution is the whole point. Lenin easily made the transition from the concept of ‘proletariat’ to that of ‘party’, without seeing the enormity of the questions begged. He displayed the same ambivalence in his article ‘The immediate tasks of Soviet power’, of April 1918, in which he was able to assert at one and the same time that ‘without full-scale state accounting and supervision of production and the distribution of products, the workers’ rule cannot hold, and a return to the yoke of capitalism is inevitable’, yet also that ‘each factory, each village is a producers’ and consumers’ commune, with the right … of deciding in its own way the problem of acounting for production and distributing the products’. Perhaps such ambivalence was natural in what was still largely a utopian programme being tempered by reality.
At any rate, there can be no doubt that the actual measures adopted even before, but especially during and after the civil war increased the power of the state enormously, and withdrew or nullified the benefits the Bolsheviks had granted to the people in October. The essence of War Communism consisted in (i) the nationalization of virtually all industry, combined with central allocation of resources; (ii) a state trade monopoly (which, because it could not satisfy people’s needs, was accompanied by a vigorous black market); (iii) runaway inflation, leading to a partial suspension of money transactions (welcomed by those Bolsheviks who considered that money had no place in socialist society) and the widespread resumption of barter and of wage payments in kind; (iv) requisitioning of peasant surplus (or even non-surplus) produce. Alec Nove has summed it up trenchantly: ‘A siege economy with a communist ideology. A partly organized chaos. Sleepless, leather-jacketed commissars working round the clock in a vain effort to replace the free market.’
Already gravely overstrained by more than three years of a huge war, and then by the fears and conflicts of revolution, the economy finally collapsed.