The Red Terror was officially proclaimed by the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of Soviets (VTsIK) on September 2, 1918 and ended on the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, on November 6 of the same year. However, the Red Terror is usually referred to as a set of repressive measures used by the Bolsheviks against their enemies from the time they came to power until the end of the Civil War (until 1922).
White terror refers to similar repressions of opponents of the Bolsheviks in the same period. For the first time in history, the definition of “white terror” was used in relation to the actions of royalists during the Bourbon Restoration in France (1814-1830) in relation to individual figures of the revolution and the Napoleonic empire. He was called white after the color of the Bourbon banner. The Russian counter-revolution took the name “White Guard” for its armed forces from the same story.
The boundaries of the concepts of “red terror” and “white terror” are very vague. Do they include only executions carried out by special authorities, or also any acts of retaliation and intimidation committed by troops in places of hostilities? Should the acts of violence of such opponents of the Bolsheviks as the Directory of the Ukrainian People's Republic, the Baltic states, Poland, the Czechoslovak Corps, Cossack troops, peasants be considered white terror? rebel armies in Russia (the army of Alexander Antonov in the Tambov region, the West Siberian army, etc.)?
Due to the collapse of state and social institutions during that period, it is impossible to even approximately compile statistics of such repressions. More or less accurately, the number of victims of terror on both sides can only be determined in small Finland, where a civil war also raged from January to May 1918. It is generally accepted that the White Terror in Finland was bloodier than the Red Terror. The first claimed the lives of approximately 7-10 thousand people, the second - 1.5-2 thousand. However, the power of the radical left in Finland was too short-lived to draw any final conclusions on this basis, much less extend them to the whole of Russia.
Terror became one of the main tools for creating a new society from the very first steps of Soviet power. At first, the actions of intimidation were spontaneous, such as the shooting of captured cadets after the suppression of their rebellion in Petrograd on October 29 and the capture of the Moscow Kremlin on November 2, 1917. But soon the conduct of terror was systematized and put on stream. On December 7 (20), 1917, for this purpose, the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission (VChK) “to combat counter-revolution and sabotage” was formed. Within its framework, their own armed forces. However, other bodies of Soviet power, especially locally, and military units carried out their own repressions.
The control of terror among the anti-Bolshevik forces was less centralized. Usually, various types of “counterintelligence” were involved in intimidation. Their actions were poorly coordinated, were unsystematic, chaotic, and therefore they were ineffective as a mechanism of political repression. It is often noted that the White Guards and Petliurists in Ukraine organized pogroms against Jews, but units of the Red Army were also guilty of this.
The Red Terror was directed against entire social groups as “class aliens.” The decree of the Council of People's Commissars on the Red Terror of September 5, 1918 introduced the institution of hostage-taking. For a terrorist act against a figure of the Soviet government, hostages taken from the so-called “bourgeoisie” - former civil servants, intelligentsia, clergy, etc. - were subject to execution. In the first week of the decree alone, according to incomplete data, more than 5,000 people were shot, since they bore “class responsibility” for F. Kaplan’s attempt on Lenin’s life.
The orders of Soviet leaders testify to the purposeful nature of the Red Terror. “To carry out merciless mass terror against priests, kulaks and White Guards,” Lenin telegraphed on August 9, 1918 to the Penza provincial executive committee after Penza was recaptured from the White Czechs. “The suspects should be locked up in a concentration camp outside the city.” “We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class,” taught one of Dzerzhinsky’s deputies, M. Latsis. “During the investigation, do not look for materials and evidence that the accused acted in deed or word against the Soviet regime.”
There was nothing similar in the statements of the anti-Bolshevik leadership. True, according to the memoirs of G.K. Gins, a member of the White Guard government in Siberia, A.V. Kolchak admitted to him that he had given the order to shoot all captured communists. However, no written traces of such an order remain. Some atamans of the Cossack troops subordinate to Kolchak (Annenkov, Kalmykov) committed atrocities against the Red partisans, completely burning down the villages in which they were hiding. But the Reds acted even more cruelly, and in accordance with the instructions of the Soviet authorities, suppressing the peasant uprising in the Tambov province. The Plenipotentiary Commission of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee for the suppression of the rebellion of A. Antonov issued such an order on June 11, 1921, signed by V.A. Antonov-Ovseenko and M.N. Tukhachevsky:
"1. Citizens who refuse to give their name are shot on the spot, without trial.
2. To the villagers who are hiding weapons, announce a verdict on taking hostages and shoot them if they do not surrender their weapons.
3. The family in whose house the bandit took refuge is subject to arrest and deportation from the province, its property is confiscated, the senior worker in this family is shot without trial.
4. Families harboring family members or property of bandits shall be treated as bandits and the senior employee of this family shall be shot on the spot without trial.
5. In the event of the escape of the bandit’s family, its property should be distributed among peasants loyal to the Soviet regime, and the houses left behind should be burned.
6. This order must be implemented severely and mercilessly.”
Although it is impossible to accurately establish the number of victims of bilateral terror in Russia, it can be reasonably assumed that there were several times more deaths as a result of the Red Terror than during white terror. Considering the lack of ideological justification among whites, centralization and systematic punitive measures, one can generally question the legitimacy of such a definition as “white terror” in relation to the events of the Civil War in Russia.
L. LITVIN
RED AND WHITE TERROR IN RUSSIA 1917-1922/// DISCUSSIONS AND DISCUSSIONS 1993
A. L. LITVIN RED AND WHITE TERROR IN RUSSIA 1917-1922
Violence and terror have always been indispensable companions of the centuries-old history of mankind. But in terms of the number of victims and the legalization of violence, the 20th century has no analogues. This century “owes”, first of all, to the totalitarian regimes in Russia and Germany, the communist and national socialist governments.
Russia has traditionally been one of the countries where the cost of human life was scanty and humanitarian rights were not respected. Extremely radical socialists - the Bolsheviks, having seized power, proclaiming the immediate task of accomplishing a world revolution in the shortest possible time and creating a kingdom of labor, destroyed the semblance of a rule of law state, establishing revolutionary lawlessness. Never before in history have utopian ideas been introduced into the consciousness of people so cruelly, cynically and bloodily. The non-resistance proposed to the century by Gandhi and Leo Tolstoy was not accepted either in Russia or in Germany. In a short ideological struggle, merciless, fanatical evil won. which brought so much unprecedented suffering to people. The policy of violence and terror 1 pursued in Russia by the Bolsheviks changed the consciousness of the population. Pushkin in “Boris Godunov” noted the silence of the people during executions; Bolshevik periodicals are full of vociferous approval of mass murder. The eternal questions: who is to blame? What are the causes of the tragedy? How to explain, try to understand what happened?
The main trends in their solution were outlined for Soviet historiography by V.I. Lenin’s statements that the Red Terror during the Civil War in Russia was forced and became a response to the actions of the White Guards and interventionists. At the same time, the thesis was formulated: “The repressive measures that workers and peasants are forced to use to suppress the resistance of the exploiters cannot be compared with the horrors of the white terror of the counter-revolution” 3.
At the same time, through the efforts of, first of all, the Russian emigration, books and stories were created about the dungeons of the Cheka, and the difference between the White and Red Terror was characterized. According to S.P. Melgunov, the Red Terror had an official theoretical justification, was systemic, governmental in nature, and the White Terror was seen “as excesses based on unbridled power and revenge.” Therefore, the red terror in its scale and cruelty was worse than the white one 4. At the same time, a third point of view arose, according to which any terror was inhuman and should be abandoned as a method of struggle for power 5.
For a long time, politicized Soviet historiography was engaged in justifying the Red Terror. 6 Publicists were the first to criticize this position. They saw in the Red Terror not an “extraordinary measure of self-defense,” but an attempt to create a universal means of solving any problems, an ideological justification for the criminal actions of the authorities, and in the Cheka, an instrument of mass murder 7.
Currently, Melgunov’s thesis has become widespread that the whites, more than the reds, tried to adhere to legal norms when carrying out punitive actions . It's hard to agree with this statement. The fact is that the legal declarations and resolutions of the confronting parties did not protect the population of the country in those years from tyranny and terror. They could not be prevented either by the decision of the VI All-Russian Extraordinary Congress of Soviets (November 1918) on amnesty and “On revolutionary legality”, or by the resolution of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee on the abolition of the death penalty (January 1920), or by the instructions of the governments of the opposite side. Both of them shot, took hostages, practiced decimation and torture. The comparison itself: one terror is worse (better) than another is incorrect. Killing innocent people is a crime. No terror can be a model. The Whites also had institutions similar to the Cheka and revolutionary tribunals - various counterintelligence and military courts, propaganda organizations with information tasks, such as Denikin’s Osvag (propaganda department of the Special Conference under the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of the South of Russia).
General L. G. Kornilov’s call to officers (January 1918) not to take prisoners in battles with the Reds is very similar to the admission of the security officer M. I. Latsis that similar orders were resorted to in relation to the Whites in the Red Army8. Those who viewed terror as a destructive force, a factor of demoralization for all its participants, were right.
The desire to understand the origins of the tragedy has given rise to several research explanations: the Red Terror and mass repressions of the 30s are the result of Bolshevik rule in the country; Stalinism is a special type of totalitarian society; the leaders are to blame for all troubles - Lenin, Sverdlov, Stalin, Trotsky 10. Despite the apparent differences, the common thing is the assertion of the guilt of the Bolsheviks. At the same time, the extent of the influence of the terrorist actions of opponents of Bolshevism on the Soviet repressive policy remains unclear.
IN national historiography One can distinguish periods of propaganda of the slogan “Stalin is Lenin today”, criticism of the “cult of personality” and the ongoing canonization of Lenin and Bolshevism (from the late 50s), approval of the formula: Stalinism arose on the basis of Leninism (from the late 80s. )1. Last point view coincides with the opinion widely spread in the West 13
There is another opinion: Lenin was better than Stalin. Lenin carried out the Red Terror during the civil war, Stalin shot the unarmed population in peaceful conditions. R. Conquest wrote that in 1918-1920. The terror was carried out by fanatics, idealists - “people in whom, for all their mercilessness, one can find some traits of a kind of perverted nobility.” And he continued: in Robespierre we find a narrow but honest view of violence, also characteristic of Lenin. Stalin's terror was different. It was carried out using criminal methods and was not started during a crisis, revolution or war. 14 This statement is objectionable.
Terror during the years of the Civil War was carried out not by fanatics, not by idealists, but by people deprived of any nobility and the mental complexes of the heroes of Dostoevsky’s works. Only insufficient knowledge of the sources can explain Conquest's conclusion about Lenin's “honest” view of violence. Let's just name the instructions for committing a murder written by the leader (they have become known recently). Let's quote two of them. In a note to E. M. Sklyansky (August 1920), deputy chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic, Lenin, apparently assessing the plan born in the bowels of this department, instructed: “An excellent plan! Finish it together with Dzerzhinsky. Under the guise of “greens” (we will blame them later) we will go 10-20 miles and hang the kulaks, priests, and landowners. Prize: 100,000 rubles for the hanged man” 15.
In a secret letter to members of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the RCP (b), written on March 19, 1922, after the introduction of NEP, Lenin proposed taking advantage of the famine in the Volga region and confiscating church valuables. This action, in his opinion, “must be carried out with merciless determination, certainly stopping at nothing and in the most the shortest possible time. The more representatives of the reactionary clergy and the reactionary bourgeoisie we manage to shoot on this occasion, the better. It is now necessary to teach this public a lesson so that for several decades they will not dare to think about any resistance” 16. This was a criminal, not an “honest” view of violence, which differed from the execution lists signed by Stalin in that Stalin knew many of those whom he decided to execute, but Lenin did not know any of those whom he condemned to death..
Those who knew Lenin and those who met him noted his commitment to extreme measures of violence. 7. It was from Lenin that Stalin perceived the condemnation of the individual and the encouragement of mass terror, hostage-taking, power based on force and not on the law, and the recognition of state arbitrariness as a highly moral matter. Lenin, Trotsky, Bukharin and other associates of the leader tried to theoretically substantiate such anti-human practices.
Already the first acts of violence carried out by one, and then by the two-party Soviet government (Bolsheviks and Left Socialist-Revolutionaries): the closure of newspapers that defended the ideas of February, and not October 1917, the outlawing of the Cadet Party, the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, the introduction of the right of extrajudicial reprisals, the recognition of terror not as an emergency, but as a traditional means of struggle for power - caused the rejection of many. Among them were M. Gorky, R. Luxemburg, I. Bunin, thousands of residents of the country who left memories of this time, or expressed protest even then 18. They protested against the murder of ideological opponents, the ban on dissent in the country, the rampant arbitrariness of the authorities, those methods and the means by which the Bolshevik leadership decided to achieve its goals.
Lenin and his associates defended the need to tighten punitive policies in the country. This was particularly reflected in their books directed against the works of K. Kautsky, who accused the Bolsheviks of being the first to use violence against other socialist parties 19 and creating a situation in which “the opposition was left with only one form of open political action - civil war "2.
Lenin proceeded from the fact that “the benefit of the revolution, the benefit of the working class is the highest law”21, that only he is the highest authority that determines “this benefit”, and therefore can resolve all issues, including the main one - the right to life and activity. The principle of expediency of means used to protect power was guided by Trotsky, Bukharin and many others. Moreover, they all considered the right to dispose of people’s lives as natural. Trotsky, after the end of the civil war, answered the question: “Do the consequences of the revolution, the sacrifices it causes, generally justify?” - answered: “The question is theological and therefore fruitless. With the same right, one can, in the face of the difficulties and sorrows of personal existence, ask: is it worth being born at all?”23
Kautsky adhered to a different point of view, taking the abolition of the death penalty as a matter of course for a socialist. He spoke about the victory of Bolshevism in Russia and the defeat of socialism there, argued that viewing the Red Terror as a response to the White Terror is the same as justifying one’s own theft by the fact that others steal. He saw Trotsky’s book as a hymn to inhumanity and myopia and prophetically predicted that “Bolshevism will remain a dark page in the history of socialism” 24.
It is difficult to name the first acts of red and white terror. They are usually associated with the beginning of the civil war in the country, which actually began with an act of armed seizure of power by the Bolsheviks. Their victory immediately put into action the levers of political and economic terror (one-party ideological, state monopoly, expropriation of property, etc.). At the same time, cases of physical destruction of opponents became known. The process of transition from individual to mass terror took little time. It is easy to see the connection between various types of terror and the socio-political actions of governments and opposing organizations.
The assassination attempt on Lenin occurred on the evening of January 1, 1918, shortly before the opening of the Constituent Assembly, and the murder of members of the Central Committee of the Cadet Party, deputies of this assembly, lawyer F.F. Kokoshkin and doctor A.I. Shingarev occurred on the night of January 6–75. That is, at the time when the All-Russian Central Executive Committee approved Lenin’s resolution on its dissolution. The introduction of mass terror did not stop individual terror, but, as a rule, it was linked with harsh political actions against the main part of the country's population - the peasantry (introduction of committees of poor people, food requisitions, levying an emergency tax, etc.). The connection between the military victories (defeats) of the parties and the tightening of punitive policies is less clear. The Crimean tragedy (autumn 1920) - the execution by security officers of thousands of officers and military officials of Wrangel's army - occurred after the victory of the Reds.
In Soviet historiography, for a long time there was an opinion that the white terror in the country began in the summer, and the red one - after the resolution of the Council of People's Commissars of September 5, 1918, as a response to the white terror. There are other points of view that link the beginning of the Red Terror with the murder royal family, with Lenin’s call for terror in Petrograd in response to the murder of Volodarsky28, with the resolution of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee on July 29, 1918 on carrying out mass terror against the bourgeoisie, with the fact that terror was the essence of the Soviet system and was carried out in fact until August 1918, and “ from September 5, 1918 - officially. This last conclusion is closer to the truth, since Soviet decrees either fixed what was already happening or initiated the acceleration of what, according to the authorities, was slowing down. Among the reasons that determined the victory of Bolshevism in the country were: an ideology intolerant of dissent that met the immediate aspirations of the impoverished masses demanding social justice; the right of management to dispose of personnel, privileges, and the organization of authorities: brutal terror. The Bolsheviks managed to create an illusory idea of fair equalization and convince the majority of the population that they would receive land, bread, and peace. War, famine, requisitions and terror became realities.
The class characteristics of the Red and White Terror appeared in 1918 to justify and justify the actions of the parties. Soviet explanations noted that the methods of both terrors were similar, but “decidedly diverged in their goals”: the red terror was directed against the exploiters, the white terror against the oppressed workers. Later, this formula acquired a broad interpretation and called the armed overthrow of Soviet power in a number of regions and the accompanying massacre of people as acts of white terror. This meant the presence of various forms of terror even 49 before the summer of 1918, and the term “white terror” meant the punitive actions of all anti-Bolshevik forces of that time, and not just the white movement itself. The lack of clearly developed concepts and criteria leads to different interpretations.
Although manifestations of mass terror are the shooting of about 500 soldiers in the Moscow Kremlin (October 28, 1917), the murders in Orenburg during the capture of the city by Dutov’s Cossacks (November 1917), the beating of wounded Red Guards in January 1918 near Saratov, etc.
Dating various types terror should not begin with reprisals against famous public figures, not from the decrees that legitimized the ongoing lawlessness, but from the innocent victims of the confronting sides. They are forgotten, especially the defenseless sufferers of the Red Terror34. The terror was carried out by officers - participants in the ice campaign of General Kornilov; security officers who received the right of extrajudicial execution; revolutionary courts and tribunals; guided not by the law, but by political expediency3.
On June 16, 1918, the People's Commissar of Justice P. Stuchka canceled all previously issued circulars on revolutionary tribunals and stated that these institutions “are not bound by any restrictions in the choice of measures to combat counter-revolution, sabotage, etc..” On June 21, 1918, the Revolutionary Tribunal under the All-Russian Central Executive Committee passed a death sentence on the chief without convincing evidence. naval forces Baltic Fleet to Captain A.M. Shchastny37. Based on the rights granted to the Cheka and the tribunals, one can judge the development of Soviet punitive policy, since these institutions considered primarily political crimes, and they included “everything that is against Soviet power.” 38. It is characteristic that the right of the Cheka to extrajudicial executions, composed by Trotsky, was signed by Lenin ; the tribunals were given unlimited rights by the People's Commissar of Justice; the resolution on the Red Terror was endorsed by the People's Commissars of Justice, Internal Affairs and the head of the Council of People's Commissars (D. Kursky, G. Petrovsky, V. Bonch-Bruevich); The tasks of the military tribunals were determined by the chairman of the Revolutionary Military Tribunal of the Republic, K. Danishevsky. He stated: “Military tribunals are not and should not be guided by any legal rules. These are punitive bodies, created in the process of intense revolutionary struggle, which pronounce their sentences, guided by the principle of political expediency and the legal consciousness of communists.” Granting the right to sign the most important acts of punitive policy not only to higher authorities, but also to lower ones indicated that these acts were not given paramount importance, and that terror was quickly becoming commonplace. The leadership of the Soviet Republic officially recognized the creation of a non-legal state, where arbitrariness became the norm and terror the most important tool retention of power40. Lawlessness was beneficial to the warring parties, as it allowed any actions with references to something similar from the enemy. Its origins are explained by traditional cruelty Russian history, the severity of the confrontation between revolutionaries and autocracy, and, finally, the fact that Lenin and Plekhanov saw no sin in killing their ideological opponents, that “along with the poison of socialism, the Russian intelligentsia fully accepted the poison of populism” .
In a radical revolution in Russia, on initial stage The Left Social Revolutionaries also took part in the creation of the dictatorial regime. Not only did they become members of the Council of People's Commissars in early December 1917, but they were also, along with the Bolsheviks, the creators of the Cheka and its local commissions, which were involved in the “sin of the revolution.” Moreover, their representatives remained in the Cheka until July 6, 1918, although the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries left the Council of People's Commissars after Lenin signed the Brest-Litovsk Peace Treaty with Germany (March 1918). Terror was carried out not only by security officers. Units of the Red Army, internal troops (VOKhR - 71,763 people, in April 1920), units special purpose(CHON - from communists and Komsomol members), food detachments (23,201 people, in October 1918), food army (62,043 people, in December 1920)43. But the main conductor of terror was the Cheka, and the leader of the policy for its implementation was the Bolshevik leadership. The Central Committee of the RCP(b) in a message to the security officers reported: “The need for a special body for merciless reprisals was recognized by our entire party from top to bottom. Our party entrusted this task to the Cheka, providing it with emergency powers and placing it in direct contact with the party center” 44.
The Cheka was created as an elite organization: the majority were communists; almost unlimited power over people; increased salaries (in 1918, the salary of a member of the Cheka board - 500 rubles - was equal to the salary of people's commissars, ordinary security officers received 400 rubles)45, food and industrial rations. Privileges were worked out. Many security officers became executioners, executors of the party's will. The partyocracy initiated and developed a punitive policy, convincing itself and others of the importance of observing the class principle.
The constantly declared class principle during the Red Terror was not always respected. In the book by S.P. Melgunov, 1286 representatives are listed among the victims of terror in 1918! intelligentsia, 962 peasants, 1026 hostages (officials, officers)46, etc. In the Soviet press of that time, the Bolshevik terror was often compared with the Jacobin terror. Thus, it was presented as a traditional revolutionary method, without revealing the results of Robespierre’s actions... The Bolshevik leaders presented the “necessity” of terror as an expression of the will of the masses47, as a policy of the state of workers and peasants, carried out for the benefit of the working people. So that the latter can be sure of this, N. Osinsky from the pages of the Pravda newspaper. On September 11, 1918 he stated: “From the dictatorship of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie, we have moved to extreme terror - a system of destroying the bourgeoisie as a class.” Latsis detailed this position, giving instructions to the local Cheka: “Do not look for incriminating evidence in the case as to whether he rebelled against the Council with weapons or words. The first thing you must ask him is to what class he belongs, what his origin is, what his education is and what his profession is. All these questions must decide the fate of the accused. This is the meaning of the Red Terror."48.
This call by Latsis for the merciless class destruction of enemies was not accidental, as was the demand of the security officers of the Nolinsky district of the Vyatka province to use torture during interrogations until the arrested person “tells everything” 4. This was a consequence of the party’s policy of arbitrariness and permissiveness 50.
The “need” of terror to maintain the power of Bolshevism was obvious; it was important to convince the population of this. The propaganda apparatus played on the feelings of the lumpen, assuring them that terror would not affect them, but was directed only against “rich counter-revolutionaries.” But the class principle, especially when suppressing peasant uprisings, was not maintained. 51. It was easier to justify the intensification of terrorist actions in response to the murders (or attempted murders) of the Bolshevik leaders. The idea of the omnipotence and mercilessness of those in power was created by the execution of members of the royal family: if they were killed, then there is nothing to say about the rest... they will be killed. The skillful use of these acts to incite hatred towards opponents of the regime was aimed at intimidating and suppressing possible resistance to it by every citizen52.
Acquaintance with the investigative cases about the murder of the Commissioner for Press, Propaganda and Agitation of the Petrograd Soviet V. Volodarsky, the Chairman of the Petrograd Cheka M. Uritsky and the attempt on Lenin gives rise to many questions that are difficult to find answers53. Volodarsky was killed on June 20, 1918 in Petrograd by the painter Sergeev, a Socialist Revolutionary. It is not clear why it was Volodarsky who became the victim, why the car in which he was driving from the rally “broke down” on the road at the place where the terrorist was waiting for it. The investigation lasted a long time (until the end of February 1919), but did not produce results. The Bolsheviks used the act of Volodarsky’s murder to call for mass Red Terror and launch a large-scale propaganda campaign against the democratic parties: the Mensheviks and the Right Socialist Revolutionaries54.
But this was not enough to convince the population of the need for total terror. The murder of the little-known Volodarsky in the country (a Jew, a Bolshevik with little party experience) could not cause mass indignation among the masses. The situation in the country has become extremely aggravated. The Bolsheviks moved towards creating a one-party system and inciting class struggle, believing that only in this case they could stay in power. On June 14, 1918, the All-Russian Central Executive Committee expelled from its composition and proposed to do so the local 1st Soviets of the Socialist Revolutionaries (right and center), Mensheviks, “seeking to discredit and overthrow the power of the Soviets”55. At the same time, the Soviets created committees of the poor, intensified requisition activities, increased the number of the Cheka and... were defeated by detachments of the Czechoslovak Corps and the People's Army of the Committee of Members of the Constituent Assembly (Komuch), created by the Social Revolutionaries in Samara to restore the power of the Constituent Assembly.
The Soviets put an end to the Left SRs and quickly began to turn the country into a “single military camp” filled with concentration camps. A catalyst was needed to move to decisive action. And, as Latsis wrote, when “S.-R. made an attempt on the life of comrade. Lenin, Volodarsky, Uritsky and others, then the Cheka had no choice but to begin the destruction of the enemy’s manpower, mass executions, i.e., the Red Terror” 56. The murder of Uritsky and the attempt on Lenin occurred on the same day - 30 August 1918. Uritsky was not the worst of the security officers; on the contrary, many found honesty and humanity in him57. Shot at Uritsky was Leonid Akimovich Kannegisser, poet and socialist 58. During the investigation, accusations were made different versions motives for the murder of Uritsky59. The most probable was the one that Kannegiesser imposed on the investigation: he shot in protest against the execution as a hostage of a school friend. The security officers, who were aimed at solving political crimes, could not prove otherwise.
However, the response was unusually cruel: up to 900 innocent hostages were shot in Petrograd 60. A significantly larger number of victims is associated with the attempt on Lenin. Kaplan was shot before the investigation was completed, without a trial, without a decision of the All-Russian Cheka Collegium, on the verbal instructions of the Chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee Sverdlov, without proof that it was she who fired61.
The number of those executed in the first days of September 1918, before the Council of People's Commissars' resolution on the Red Terror, is difficult to calculate. It is important to note that this resolution recorded what was already happening and gave it a legislative basis; the authorities sanctified terror as state policy. During these days, the Central Committee of the RCP(b) and the Cheka developed practical instructions. It suggested: “Shoot all counter-revolutionaries. Give the districts the right to shoot on their own... Take hostages... set up small concentration camps in the districts... Tonight the Presidium of the Cheka will consider the affairs of the counter-revolution and shoot all obvious counter-revolutionaries. The district Cheka should do the same. Take measures to ensure that corpses do not fall into unwanted hands...” 62 The mayhem exceeded the darkest expectations: 6,185 people were shot, 14,829 were sent to prison, 6,407 were sent to concentration camps, 4,068 became hostages 63. These are approximate figures, since it is impossible to calculate How many lives were then ruined by the local Chekas is almost impossible. The Cheka explained: during the civil war, legal laws are not written, therefore “the only guarantee of legality was the correctly selected composition of the employees of the Extraordinary Commission”64.
Thus, attempts on the lives of Bolshevik leaders contributed to the rampant mass terror in the country, which became an integral part of the military-communist state for many years. This method will be used in the early 30s, when the inspired murder of Kirov will lead to great terror and it will be carried out by the security officers of the civil war: Yagoda, Beria, Agranov Zakovsky and many others...
In September 1918, People's Commissar of Internal Affairs G.I. Petrovsky was indignant at the “insignificant number of serious repressions and mass executions” and suggested that the provincial executive committees, that is, the executive bodies of the Soviet government, should show “special initiative” in the spread of mass terror. Stalin used this experience when he criticized Yagoda’s actions and complained that the NKVD was two years late with the deployment of great terror...
The Red Terror with its indispensable companions - arbitrariness, concentration camps, hostages, torture - functioned throughout the civil war. Its tides and some limitations depended on many circumstances, as did the development of its attendant institutions. Such was the decree of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of February 15, 1919, allowing to take “hostages from the peasants with the understanding that if the snow is not cleared, they will be shot,” or Dzerzhinsky’s proposal on September 26, 1919 that “the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party, declaring the official mass red terror, he instructed the Cheka to actually carry it out” 6.
The investigation into the assassination attempt on Lenin was typical for that time and indicated that the authorities were not interested in identifying the circumstances of the crime and the identity of the terrorist. The very fact of what happened was important to them in order to move on to the total extermination of those whom they considered “counter-revolutionaries.” Having stated that Kaplan represented the right-wing Socialist Revolutionary Party (this has not been proven), the authorities attacked not only members of this party who were fighting with the Reds at that time "military actions, but also against all potentially conceivable enemies V. They were shot in public to intimidate them. Patriarch Tikhon’s call for reconciliation and an end to the extermination of fellow citizens was not heard 67.
At the same time and interconnected with the red terror, white terror was rampant in the country. And if the red terror, unlike the white one, we consider the realization public policy, then, probably, one should take into account the fact that whites at that time also occupied vast territories and declared themselves as sovereign governments and state entities. None of the leaders of the warring parties avoided the use of terror against their opponents and civilians. The forms and methods of terror were different. But they were also used by adherents of the Constituent Assembly (Komuch in Samara, the Provisional Regional Government in the Urals, the Provisional Siberian Government, the Supreme Administration of the Northern Region), and the white movement itself. The coming to power of the founders in the cities of the Volga region in the summer of 1918 was characterized by reprisals against many party and Soviet workers68, and the prohibition of Bolsheviks and left Socialist Revolutionaries from working in government structures69. One of the first departments of Komuch was the creation of state security (counterintelligence, 60-100 employees in cities), military courts, which, as a rule, passed death sentences, trains and “death barges”. On September 3, 1918, they brutally suppressed the workers' uprising in Kazan, and on October 1 - in Ivashchenkovo. “The regime of terror,” admitted Komuchevets S. Nikolaev, “took particularly cruel forms in the Middle Volga region, through which the movement of Czechoslovak legionnaires took place” 70.
In the Urals, Siberia and Arkhangelsk, the Socialist Revolutionaries and People's Socialists immediately announced their commitment to the Constituent Assembly and the arrests of Soviet workers and communists. In just one year of being in power in the northern territory with a population of 400 thousand people, 38 thousand arrested people passed through the Arkhangelsk prison. Of these, 8 thousand were shot and more than a thousand died from beatings and illnesses 71.
The political regimes established in 1918 in Russia are quite comparable, primarily in their predominantly violent methods of resolving issues of organizing power. In November 1918, Kolchak, who came to power in Siberia, began with the expulsion and murder of the Socialist Revolutionaries. “I forbid arresting workers, but order them to be shot or hanged”; “I order all arrested workers to be hanged on the main street and not removed for three days” - this is from the orders of the Krasnov captain of the Makeyevsky district on November 10, 1918.72 Terror served as a means of maintaining power for the confronting parties; it was immoral and criminal, no matter who for whatever purposes it was used. Already in 1918, “environmental terror” began to reign in Russia, when the symmetry of the parties’ actions became inevitably similar. This continued in 1919-1920, when both the Reds and the Whites simultaneously built dictatorial militarized states, where the implementation given goal prevailed over the value of human life.
Kolchak and Denikin were professional military men, patriots who had their own views on the future of the country. In Soviet historiography, for many years Kolchak was characterized as a reactionary and a hidden monarchist; the image of a liberal who enjoyed the support of the population was created abroad. These are extreme points of view. During interrogations at the Irkutsk Cheka in January 1920, Kolchak stated that he did not know about many facts of the ruthless attitude towards workers and peasants on the part of his punishers. Perhaps he was telling the truth. But it is difficult to talk about support for his policies in Siberia and the Urals, if out of approximately 400 thousand red partisans of that time, 150 thousand acted against him, and among them 4-5% were wealthy peasants, or, as they were called then, kulaks .
The Kolchak government created the punitive apparatus on the basis of the traditions of pre-revolutionary Russia, but changing the names: instead of the gendarmerie - state security, police - militia, etc. The managers of punitive authorities in the provinces in the spring of 1919 demanded not to comply with legal norms created for peacetime, but to proceed out of expediency75. This was true, especially during punitive actions. “A year ago,” the coniferous minister of the Kolchak government, A. Budberg, wrote in his diary on August 4, 1919, “the population saw us as deliverers from the heavy captivity of the commissars, but now they hate us just as much as they hated the commissars, if not more; and what’s even worse than hatred is that it no longer believes us, it doesn’t expect anything good from us.”6
A dictatorship is unthinkable without a strong repressive apparatus and terror. The word “execution” was one of the most popular in the vocabulary of the Civil War. The Denikin government was no exception in this regard. The police in the territory captured by the general were called state guards. Its numbers reached almost 78 thousand people by September 1919 77 (note that Denikin’s active army then had about 110 thousand bayonets and sabers). Denikin, like Kolchak, denied his participation in any repressive measures. He blamed this on counterintelligence, which became “a hotbed of provocation and organized robbery,” on governors and military leaders. 78 Osvag’s reports informed Denikin about robberies, looting, and military cruelty towards civilians, 79; it was under his command that 226 Jewish pogroms took place, resulting in deaths thousands of innocent people 80.
Numerous evidence speaks of the cruelty of the punitive policy of Wrangel8183 Yudenich82 and other generals. They were complemented by the actions of many atamans who acted on behalf of the regular white armies . The White Terror turned out to be as senseless in achieving its goal as any other 84.
An essential part of the civil war were numerous peasant uprisings against the local policies of the Soviet authorities. For the most part, they flared up spontaneously, as a protest against requisitions, taxes, various duties, mobilizations into the army, as a reaction of people who were robbed, offering a “bright future” in return for the taken food products, i.e., nothing.
Mass peasant uprisings began in the fall of 1918 and reached their climax in 1920, contributing to the preservation of martial law in 36 provinces of the country until the end of 1922. Hundreds of thousands of multinational peasant population participated in the resistance movement against the regime, and elite armed units took part in its suppression : cadets, units of the Cheka corps, internal troops, CHON, Latvian riflemen, internationalists (companies of Poles, Hungarians, Germans, Chinese, etc., who then served in the Red Army), the best commanders - M. N. Tukhachevsky, I. P. Uborevich, V. I. Shorin and others.
The fury and mercilessness of the Russian rebellion then manifested itself in all its strength. In 1918, during the suppression of these protests, 5 thousand security officers and approximately 4.5 thousand food detachments died86. The number of victims on the part of the peasants was immeasurably greater. In 1920, a real war was waged between the proletarian state and the majority of its own population. That’s why Lenin called her more dangerous for the Soviet regime than Denikin, Yudenich and Kolchak combined. The ferocity and mercilessness with which villages were burned, peasants were shot and entire peasant families were taken hostage is only just becoming the subject of study.
There are no exact estimates of the number of victims of the White and Red Terror. The figures given in the literature are contradictory; their sources and calculation methods are not reported. The commission created by Denikin to investigate the actions of the Bolsheviks in 1918-1919, named 1,700 thousand victims of the Red Terror.
Latsis reported that during these two years the number of those arrested by the Cheka was 128,010, of which 8,641 people were shot. Modern Soviet historians have calculated that in 1917-1922. 15-16 million Russians died, of which 1.3 million were killed in* 1918-1920. victims of terror, banditry, pogroms, participation in peasant uprisings and their suppression.
It is not possible to establish the exact numbers of those killed during the Red or White Terror 89.
An analysis of individual minutes of meetings of the Presidium of the Cheka/GPU shows that the number of people sentenced to death from among the cases considered is quite large. On May 8, 1919, 33 cases were examined - 13 people were sentenced to death; August 6, 1921, respectively - 43 and 8; August 20, 1921 - 45 and 17; September 3, 1921 - 32 and 26; November 8, 1922 - 45 and 18. According to the minutes of the meetings of the presidium of the Kazan Gubernia Cheka, during two days of meetings in December 1918, 75 cases of those arrested were considered, of which 14 were sentenced to death; in 1919, out of approximately 3 thousand cases considered, 169 were sentenced to death, in 1920 - 65, in 1921 - 16 9<0.
Reports of various terrorist attacks are inaccurate. It is known that in Crimea, after the evacuation of Wrangel’s troops, tens of thousands of former officers and military officials remained who, for various reasons, decided to abandon emigration. Many of them were registered and then were shot. The estimated number of those executed ranges from 50 to 120 thousand people. Documentary evidence is not enough. The archive of the Crimean Cheka is not yet available to researchers. The discovered award list of E. G. Evdokimov (1891-1940), a security officer, and head of the Special Department of the Southern Front in the fall of 1920 speaks of his nomination for awarding the Order of the Red Banner of Battle. The justification emphasized: “During the defeat of the army, Gen. Wrangel in Crimea comrade. Evdokimov and his expedition cleared the Crimean peninsula of white officers and counterintelligence officers remaining there for the underground, seizing up to 30 governors, 50 generals, more than 300 colonels, the same number of counterintelligence officers and in total up to 12,000 white elements, thereby preventing the possibility of white gangs appearing in Crimea” 91. The number in this document is impressive - 12 thousand people were shot only by employees of the Special Department of the Front. But it should be noted that the security officers also carried out reprisals in all cities and towns of Crimea. Because the number of victims was significantly higher. Of course, it is impossible to imagine that former governors or generals who found themselves in Crimea would start creating gangs... But the stereotype of those years was this: arguments were not needed, political charges were equal to criminal ones.
Probably, the number of people who died from the Red Terror will become known over time and will once again shake the consciousness of people, and not only their compatriots. The civil, fratricidal war with its millions of human victims became a national tragedy; it devalued life. It is the beginning of that great terror that the party-state dictatorship again unleashed with particular fury against its own people a decade and a half later. And no matter how the participants, eyewitnesses, historians describe the events of those years, the essence is the same - the Red and White Terror were the most barbaric method of struggle for power. Its results for the progress of the country and society are truly disastrous. Contemporaries realized this. But many still do not fully understand the fact that any terror is a crime against humanity, no matter what its motivation.
Notes
1 The famous researcher of totalitarianism X. Arendt is right in seeing the connection and difference between violence and terror. “Terror is not the same as violence; it is rather a form of government that occurs when violence, having destroyed all power, does not exhaust itself, but gains new control.” (A g e n d t Hannah. On Violence. N. Y., 1969. P. 55.)
2 Lenin V.I. PSS T. 39. P. 113-114, 405.
3 Bystryansky V. Counter-revolution and its methods. White terror before and now. Pb., 1920. P. 1.
4 Melgunov S.P. Red terror in Russia. 1918-1923. Berlin, 1924. pp. 5-6.
5 See: Gorky M. Untimely Thoughts. Notes on revolution and culture. Pg., 1918. S. 68, 101; V. G. Korolenko during the years of revolution and civil war. 1917-1921: Biographical chronicle. . Vermont, 1985. pp. 184-185; Martov and his relatives. New York, 1959. P. 151.
6 Golinkov D. L. The collapse of the anti-Soviet underground in the USSR. Book 1. M., 1986. S. 137, 188; In e-l and d about in A.S. Preface to the “Red Book of the Cheka”. M., 1989. T. 1. P. 7. O. F. Solovyov even came to the conclusion that “the red terror brought immeasurably fewer victims than the white terror” (O. F. Solovyov. Modern bourgeois historiography on the suppression of counter-revolution in Soviet Russia during the civil war // Historical experience of the Great October Revolution, M., 1975. P. 420.
7 Feldman D. Crime and... justification // New World. 1990. No. 8. P. 253; Feofanov Yu. Ideology in power // Izvestia 1990. October 4; Vasilevsky A. Ruin // New World, 1991. No. 2. P. 253.
8 See: Ioffe G. 3. “White Business”. General Kornilov. M., 1989. P. 233; Latsis M.I. Take no prisoners // Red Army soldier. 1927. No. 21. P. 18.
9 See: L e w i n M. The Civil War: dynamics and legacy // Party, State and Society in the Russian Civil War. Indiana University Press. 1989. P. 406; him. Civil war in Russia: driving forces and legacy // History and historians. M., 1990. P. 375. Not only the Red and White Terror, but also banditry and pogroms were destructive. Only in Ukraine in 1918-1920. More than 200 thousand Jews were killed and about a million more were beaten and robbed. Pogroms covered about 1,300 towns and cities in Ukraine and about 200 in Belarus (Larin Yu. Jews and anti-Semitism in the USSR. M.; Leningrad, 1929. P. 39). V.P. Danilov gives different data: Petliura’s terror (it can be called black or yellow) claimed 300 thousand Jewish lives. Neither whites nor reds can take such victims personally (Rodina. 1990. No. 10. P. 15).
10 Cohen S. Rethinking the Soviet experience (politics and history since 1917). Vermont, 1986. pp. 47-78; Avtorkhanov A. Lenin in the destinies of Russia // New World, 1991. No. 1; V about l about about in D. A. Stalinism: essence, genesis, evolution // Questions of history. 1990. No. 3; Ts i p k o A. S. The violence of lies, or how a ghost got lost. M., 1990, etc. Accusations of modern Black Hundred organizations, the magazine “Young Guard” (1989. No. 6, 11) against Jews as the perpetrators of revolution and terror are anti-Semitic in nature and were quite fully exposed on the pages of the newspaper “Izvestia” (1990 . 11, 29 August). Anti-Semitic fabrications include speeches pointing to Sverdlov as the organizer of the civil war and to him and Trotsky as the initiators of “decossackization.” N azarov G. Ya. M. Sverdlov: organizer of the civil war and mass repressions // Young Guard, 1989. No. 10; him. Further... further... further... to the truth // Moscow, 1989. No. 12; Literary newspaper. 1989. March 29.
11 Reds and Whites explained the cruelty of treatment by reference to similar actions of the opposite side - the newest type of “blood feud”. See, for example, Stalin’s telegram of January 10, 1939 (Izvestia of the Central Committee of the CPSU. 1989. No. 3. P. 145).
12 See, for example: Volkogonov D. “With merciless determination...”//Izvestia, 1992. April 22.
13 See: Brzezinski 3. Big failure. N.Y., 1989. P. 29; K e e r J. Lenin's Time Budget: the Smolny period // Revolutionin Russia: Reassessment of 1917. Cambridge, 1992. P. 354.
14Conquest R. The Great Terror. L., 1974. pp. 16-17.
15 RCKHIDNI, f. 2, 2, d. 380, l. 1. The document was partially published by D. A. Volkogonov (Izvestia. 1922. April 22).
17 Lenin told N. Valentinov in 1904 that the future revolution must be Jacobin and there is no need to be afraid to resort to the guillotine (Valentinov N. Meetings with Lenin. N. Y., 1979. P. 185). The Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets abolished the death penalty in the country on October 25, 1917. Upon learning of this, Lenin was indignant: “Nonsense... How can you make a revolution without executions.” Lenin proposed canceling the decree. (Trotsky L. About Lenin: Materials for a biographer. M., 1925. P. 72-73). P. Kropotkin told I. Bunin about his meeting with Lenin in 1918: “I realized that it was completely in vain to convince this man of anything! I reproached him for allowing two and a half thousand innocent people to be killed for the attempt on his life. But it turned out that this did not make any impression on him...” (Bunin I.A. Memoirs. Paris, 1950. P. 58). There is a lot of similar evidence. Lenin more than once came out with a cynical demand for the execution of innocents, justifying them in the highest interests of the class struggle. (See: Lenin V.I. PSS, T. 38. P. 295; T. 45, P. 189; etc.) He, as a rule, defended the actions of the Cheka. In December 1918, M. Yu. Kozlovsky, a member of the board of the People's Commissariat of Justice of the RSFSR, wrote to Lenin that he was sending 8 grandfathers from the Cheka, from which one can see “how things are conducted in the Cheka, with what light baggage they are sent there to a better world.” Kozlovsky gave examples of similar cases: the shooting of the wife of a White Guard - an active monarchist - for stealing rye, etc. Sergeeva was shot for participating in the work of Savinkov’s organization. She stated that she confessed to this under threat of execution. When Kozlovsky asked where this investigator was, he was told that he had been shot as a provocateur. There is no information in the case about Sergeeva’s cooperation with Savinkov and his organization. At a meeting of the Board of the Cheka on December 17, 1918. Kozlovsky's letter of protest was discussed. They decided that Kozlovsky did not have the right to interfere in the affairs of the Cheka, and demanded from him evidence about 50% of the innocent people executed by the Cheka in order to file a protest about this to the Central Committee of the party, “considering his actions completely unacceptable and introducing complete disorganization into the work of the Cheka.” At the suggestion of Dzerzhinsky, the Board of the Cheka demanded full confidence of the Central Committee of the RCP (b) in its actions and declared the inadmissibility of control of its activities by the People's Commissariat of Justice. In response to this, Kozlovsky, stating that his protest was supported by the Collegium of the People's Commissariat of Justice, again wrote to Lenin on December 19, 1918, that he protested 16 of the 17 executions carried out by the Cheka as illegal. Lenin agreed with Dzerzhinsky. (RTSKHIDNI, f. 2. op. 2, d. 133, l. 1-2, 9, 11, 13; d. 134, l. 1.) Lenin did not object to the mass terror that Stalin committed in Tsaritsyn in the summer of 1918 . (Medvedev R. About Stalin and Stalinism. M., 1990. P. 40-42).
18 See: Gorky M. Untimely Thoughts: Notes on Revolution and Culture. Pg., 1918; B u n i n I. A. Damned days. L., 1984; Luxemburg R. Manuscript about the Russian Revolution // Questions of History, 1990. No. 2.
1 Lenin V.I. PSS. T. 38. Proletarian revolution and the renegade Kautsky; Trotsky L. D. Terrorism and communism // Soch., M.; L., 1925. T. XII; Kautsky K. Dictatorship of the proletariat. Wien, 1918; him. Terrorism and communism. Berlin, 1919; his e. From democracy to state slavery (answer to Trotsky). Berlin, 1922.
20 Kautsky K. Moscow court and Bolshevism // Twelve Death Rowers. The trial of socialist revolutionaries in Moscow. Berlin, 1922. P. 9.
21 Lenin V.I. PSS. T. 35. P. 185.
22 L. D. Trotsky justified: “The question of the form of repression, or its degree, of course, is not “fundamental.” This is a question of expediency. In a revolutionary era, a party thrown out of power, which does not put up with the stability of the ruling party and proves this by its frantic struggle against her, cannot be deterred by the threat of imprisonment, since she does not believe in his activities. It is this simple but decisive fact that explains the widespread use of executions in the civil war.” Trotsky T. XII. 59. N.I. Bukharin agreed with him: “From a broader point of view, that is, from the point of view of a large historical scale, proletarian coercion in all its forms, from executions to labor conscription, is , as paradoxical as it may sound, by the method of developing communist humanity from the human material of the capitalist era.” (Bukharin N.I. Problems of theory and practice of socialism. M., 1989. P. 168.)
23 Trotsky L. D. History of the Russian Revolution. T. II. Part II. Berlin, 1933. P. 376.
24 Kautsky K. Terrorism and communism. pp. 7, 196, 204; his e. From democracy to state slavery. pp. 162, 166.
25 The investigation into the case of the assassination attempt on Lenin and the murder of Kokoshkin and Shingarev was led by the manager of the Council of People's Commissars, V.D. Bonch-Bruevich, although the Cheka had been created by that time. He pointed out that the three officers who attempted to assassinate Lenin were arrested and then sent to the front against the German troops who had begun the offensive. (Bonch-Bruevich V. Three attempts on V.I. Lenin. M., 1930. P. 10, 43-44.) An overview report on this attempt on Lenin was compiled by NKVD officers in August 1936. It contains the testimony of the car driver Lenin Taras Gorokhovik dated January 2, 1918 and former second lieutenant G. G. Ushakov, arrested in 1935. The driver reported that “the shooting began as the car was descending from the bridge onto Simeonovskaya Street.” Gorokhovik said that he heard up to 10 shots and that F. Platten was wounded while saving Lenin's head. Ushakov “admitted” that, together with Semyon Kazakov, he was the perpetrator of the assassination attempt. But he threw the grenade not at the car, but at Moika, other officers began to shoot at the car, but it quickly drove away. Ushakov was shot in 1936.
The investigation into the murder of Kokoshkin and Shingarev revealed the actual organizers of the crime: the head of the Petrograd police commissariat P. Mikhailov, his henchmen P. Kulikov and Basov, who provoked a group of sailors, soldiers and Red Guards to commit the crime. (Io f e G. 3. “White matter...” P. 246-247.)
26 Spirin L. M. Classes and parties in the civil war in Russia (1917-1920). M., 1968. S. 210, 213.
27 R. Pyles: “When the government arrogates to itself the right to kill people because their death is “necessary,” we enter a qualitatively new moral era. And this is the symbolic meaning of the events in Yekaterinburg that happened on the night of July 16-17, 1918.” (Izvestia. 1990. November 27.) “The execution of the royal family,” wrote Trotsky, “was needed not just to intimidate, terrify, and deprive enemies of hope, but also to shake up one’s own ranks, to show that retreat no, that there is complete victory or complete destruction ahead." (Trotsky L. D. Diaries and letters. Tenafly, 1986. P. 100-101.)
29 Karr E. Bolshevik revolution. 1917-1923. M., 1990. T. 1. P. 144. The resolution of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of July 29, 1918, apparently relied on calls from the localities. On July 28, 1918, a member of the RVS of the Eastern Front, F. F. Raskolnikov, telegraphed Trotsky that it was “completely unthinkable” to do without executions. He suggested: “All active White Guards who were caught preparing an armed uprising against the Soviet regime, or caught with weapons in their hands... Black Hundred agitators..., as well as all persons who dared to take power temporarily in one place or another, who had fallen from hands of the Soviets, are declared illegal and punishable by death without investigation or trial.” (Rodina, 1992. No. 4. P. 100.)
30 Miliukov P. Russia at a turning point. Bolshevik period of the Russian revolution. T. 1. Paris, 1927. P. 192. Former People's Commissar of Justice of the RSFSR I. Steinberg wrote: “Terror is not an isolated act, not an isolated, random, although repeated manifestation of the government majority... Terror is a legalized plan of mass intimidation , coercion, extermination by the authorities... Terror is not only the death penalty... The forms of terror are countless and varied... " (Shteinberg I. The moral face of the revolution. Berlin, 1923. P. 18-24.)
31 See: Volkogonov D. Trotsky. Political portrait. M., 1992. P. 191. According to Yu. P. Gaven, the Red Terror was used long before its official introduction. So, in January 1918 he, as chairman of the Sevastopol Military Revolutionary Committee, ordered the execution of more than 500 “counter-revolutionary officers.” (Motherland. 1992. No. 4. P. 100-101.)
32 Steklov Yu. White terror // Izvestia, 1918. September 5; Shishkin V.I. Discussion problems of October and the Civil War // Current problems of the history of Soviet Siberia. Novosibirsk, 1990. P. 25.
33 Grunt A. Ya. Moscow 1917. Revolution and counter-revolution. M., 1976. P. 318; Bolsheviks of the Urals in the struggle for the victory of the October Socialist Revolution. Sat. doc. and materials. Sverdlovsk, 1957. P. 251-252; Diary of the Russian Civil War. Alexis Babin in Saratov. 1917-1922 // Volga. 1990. No. 5. P. 127.
34 General Ts. Grigorenko, recalling how during the civil war the whites were rampant in the Ukrainian village where he lived and how security officers shot hostages for not surrendering their weapons, he remarked: “But here’s a phenomenon. We heard it all, we knew it. Two years have passed and they have already forgotten. We remember the executions of the first Soviets by the Whites, the stories about the atrocities of the Whites are in our memory, but the recent Red Terror has been completely forgotten. Several of our fellow villagers were captured by the whites and tasted ramrods, but they brought their heads home intact. And they also remembered the atrocities of the whites and were more willing to talk about white ramrods than about the recent KGB executions.” (Grigorenko P. Memoirs.//Zvezda. 1990. No. 2. P. 195.) I talked about this back in the 20s. General A.A. von Lampe: “When the Reds left, the population counted with satisfaction what they had left... When the Whites left, the population angrily calculated what they had taken... The Reds threatened... to take everything and they took part - the population was deceived and... satisfied. The whites promised legality, took little - and the population was embittered" (Denikin A.I., Lampe A.A. von Tragedy of the White Army. M., 1991. P. 29.)
35 Gul R. Ice campaign. M., 1990. S. 53-54. Chekist M. Latsis claimed that in the first half of 1918 the Cheka shot 22 people. S. Melgunov counted 884 people according to newspaper sources. (Latsis M. Extraordinary commissions to combat counter-revolution. M., 1921. P. 9; Mel Gunov S. Red terror in Russia. P. 37.)
36 Collection of laws and orders of the Workers' and Peasants' Government (hereinafter - SUR). 1918. No. 44. P. 536. P. Stuchka in 1918 told the people’s judges: “We now need not so much lawyers as communists.” (Stuchka P. 13 years of struggle for the revolutionary Marxist theory of law. M., 1931. P. 67.)
38 In 1918, cases of counter-revolutionary actions in the tribunals accounted for 35%, in 1920 - 12%. The rest are cases of crimes in office, speculation, forgeries, pogroms, etc. (T and about in Yu. P. Development of the system of Soviet revolutionary tribunals. M., 1987, P. 14; R o d i n D. Revolutionary tribunals in 1920-1922 // Bulletin of Statistics. 1989. No. 8. P. 49. B erman Ya. About revolutionary tribunals // Proletarian Revolution and Law 1919. No. 1. P. 61;
B.P., Slavin M.M-. The formation of justice in Soviet Russia (1917-1922). M., 1990.
pp. 51-52, 122.
40 Bonch-Bruevich in his memoirs quoted Dzerzhinsky, who had assumed the duties of chairman of the Cheka: “Do not think that I am looking for forms of revolutionary justice; We don't need justice now. Such a struggle - chest to chest, a struggle for life and death - who will win! I propose, I demand the organization of revolutionary reprisals against counter-revolutionary figures.” (Bonch-Bruevich V. At combat posts of the February and October revolutions. M., 1931. P. 191-192.)
41 See: Solomon G. A. Among the red leaders. Personally experienced and seen in Soviet service. Part 1. Paris, 1930; P. 242.
42 Axelrod P.B. Experienced and changed minds. Berlin, 1923. Book. 1. pp. 195-199; Novgorodtsev P.I. On the paths and tasks of the Russian intelligentsia // From the depths. Paris, 1967. P. 258; P a i p s R. Russia under the old regime. Cambridge, 1981. P. 426; Clark R. Lenin: The man behind the mask. L., 1988. P. 90-91, 255; Antonov V.F. Populism in Russia: utopia or rejected possibilities // Questions of history. 1991. No. 1. P. 14, etc.
43 Internal troops of the Soviet republic. 1917-1922: Documents and materials. M., 1972. P. 165; Strizhkov Yu. K. Food detachments during the civil war and foreign intervention. M., 1968. Dis. ...cand. ist. Sci. pp. 183, 392.
45 Review of the activities of the Cheka for 4 years. P. 13. A Red Army soldier received 150 rubles in 1918. per month, family - 250 rubles. (Portnov V., Slavin M. Legal principles of the construction of the Red Army. M., 1985. P. 162.)
46Melgunov S.P. Decree. Op. P. 105. According to P. Sorokin, in 1919 the terror of the authorities fell to a greater extent on workers and peasants. He explained this by saying that “since 1919, power has actually ceased to be the power of the working masses and has become simply a tyranny, consisting of unprincipled intellectuals, declassed workers, criminals and assorted adventurers.” (Sorokin P. Current state of Russia // New World. 1992. No. 4. P. 198.)
47From Dzerzhinsky’s point of view, “the red terror was nothing more than an expression of the unyielding will of the poor peasantry and the proletariat to destroy any attempts to rebel against us” (Dzerzhinsky F.E. Selected Works. T. I. M., 1957. P. 274).
48 Red Terror (Kazan). 1918. No. 1. P. 1-2. It is believed that Lenin criticized Latsis’s statement; they refer to his words on this matter (Lenin V.I. PSS. T. 37. P. 410; Golinkov D.L. The collapse of the anti-Soviet underground in the USSR. Book 1. M., 1986 . P. 225). Latsis recalled this episode as follows: “Vladimir Ilyich reminded me that our task is not the physical destruction of the bourgeoisie, but the elimination of those causes that give rise to the bourgeoisie. When I explained to him that my actions exactly corresponded to his directives and that I simply made a careless expression in the article, he delayed his article, scheduled for publication in Pravda. counter-revolution on the internal front [Typescript]. P. 41.) Lenin’s article “A small picture for clarifying big issues” was first published in Pravda on November 7, 1926, when the urgency of the issue under discussion had disappeared and Latsis’s criticism on the issue of terror had no effect. previous value.
49 Weekly of the Cheka. 1918. No. 3. October 6. The security officers demanded that Lockhart be tortured. As a result of public criticism of the actions and calls of the Nolin security officers, sanctions followed; The publication of the “Weekly of the Cheka” was stopped at the end of 1918, and the presidium of the Cheka decided on December 27, 1918: “Deny the district Nolinsk Cheka the right to execute. In emergency cases, it was proposed to act with the consent of the Executive Committee and the RCP(b) committee.” (Archive of the Ministry of Bank of the Russian Federation, f. 1, op. 2, d. 2, l. 11.)
50 Back in July 1918, Petrograd newspapers demanded “ exterminate the enemies of the people“, and the Petrograd Soviet made a decision on August 28: “If even a hair falls from the heads of our leaders, we will destroy those White Guards who are in our hands, we will exterminate the leaders of the counter-revolution without exception.” (The past. Historical almanac. Paris, 1986. P. 94-95.)
1 Frenkin M. The tragedy of peasant uprisings in Russia. 1918-1921 Jerusalem, 1987. pp. 93-95.
52 On February 24, 1918, shortly after the Cheka was endowed with extrajudicial reprisals, the Cheka Collegium introduced the institution of secret agents. 10% of the confiscated money was paid to those who pointed out the speculator. (Review of the activities of the Cheka for 4 years. P. 11.) On September 19, 1918, Dzerzhinsky stated: “the main task of the Cheka ... is a merciless fight against counter-revolution, manifested in the activities of both individuals and entire organizations.” (Collection of the most important orders and instructions of the Cheka. T. 1. M., 1918. P. 12.)
53 Many details of the murder of Volodarsky, Uritsky and the attempt on Lenin became known from the brochure of the former Socialist Revolutionary, since 1921 communist G. Semenov, “Military and combat work of the Socialist Revolutionary Party for 1917-1918.” (M., 1922), published simultaneously in Berlin and in the GPU printing house on Lubyanka. Lenin knew its contents and hurried its publication in connection with the impending trial of the leaders of the Right Socialist Revolutionary Party in 1922. In January 1922, he instructed the Deputy Chairman of the GPU I. Unshlikht to take measures “so that the manuscript known to him would be published abroad no later than than in 2 weeks.” (RCKHIDNI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 256, l. 2.) G. I. Semenov-Vasiliev (1891 -1937) from 1915 - Socialist Revolutionary, in 1918 - leader of the party’s combat group. -r. He was arrested by the Cheka in October 1918, after which he collaborated with the security officers. In 1922 he was convicted and amnestied. Then he worked in the intelligence department of the Red Army. On February 11, 1937, he was arrested on charges of connections with Bukharin and the creation of “terrorist groups under his leadership.” This was not proven, but Semenov was shot on October 8, 1937 by the verdict of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR. In August 1961, he was posthumously rehabilitated. (Archive of the Ministry of Bank of the Russian Federation, no. 11401, 1.)
54 Lenin, in a letter to the party leaders of Petrograd on June 26, 1918, strongly advocated mass terror in the city, calling: “to encourage the energy and mass character of terror against counter-revolutionaries, and especially in St. Petersburg, whose example decides.” (Lenin V.I. PSS. T. 50. P. 106.)
56 SUR. 1918. No. 44. P. 538.
57 Review of the activities of the Cheka for 4 years. P. 74.
57 The director of the Gatchina Museum, V.P. Zubov, recalled his meeting with Uritsky: “Before me was a deeply honest man, fanatically devoted to his ideas and possessing somewhere in the depths of his soul a share of kindness. But fanaticism forged his will so much that he knew how to be cruel. In any case, he was far from the type of sadists who ran the check after him.” (Zubov V.P. The difficult years of Russia. Memories of the revolution of 1917-1952. Munich, 1968. P. 51.) At the 1st conference of the Cheka (June 1918) the issue of recalling Uritsky from the post of chairman of the Petrograd Cheka and replacing him was discussed “a more persistent and decisive comrade, capable of firmly and unswervingly pursuing tactics of mercilessly suppressing and combating hostile elements that are destroying Soviet power and the revolution.” This was caused by Uritsky's protests against the brutal interrogation methods of the Cheka, especially children. Then Uritsky was left at his post. (Moscow News. 1991. November 10.)
58 L. A. Kannegiesser (1896-1918) - comes from the family of an employee of the Ministry of Railways. In 1913-1917 - a student at the Faculty of Economics of the St. Petersburg Polytechnic Institute, after February 1917 - a cadet at the Mikhailovsky Artillery School, chairman of the Union of Socialist Junkers of the Petrograd Military District.
59 Petrograd Cheka investigators Otto and Ricks, who initially led the case, stated that the murder of Uritsky was the work of Zionists and Bundists who took revenge on the chairman of the Cheka for internationalism. This statement was rejected by the chairman of the Petrograd Cheka N. Antipov, who fired these investigators for anti-Semitic sentiments (in 1919 they were re-hired to serve in the Cheka), and wrote on January 4, 1919 in Petrogradskaya Pravda: “During interrogation, Leonid Kannegiesser stated “that he killed Uritsky not by order of the party or any organization, but on his own impulse, wanting to take revenge for the arrests of the officers and for the shooting of his friend Pereltsweig, whom he had known for about 10 years.” Antipov admitted that the Cheka was unable to “establish accurately through direct evidence that the murder of Comrade. Uritsky was organized by a counter-revolutionary organization.” This version was supported by Kannegiesser’s friend, writer M.A. Aldanov, adding a note that Uritsky was chosen as a victim out of the Jew’s desire to show the Russian people that among the Jews there are not only Uritskys and Zinovievs. Aldanov M. Leonid Kannegiesser. Paris, 1928. P. 22). December 24, 1918 Antipov dropped the case of Uritsky's murder. Kannegiesser was shot at the same time. All months of interrogation, he repeated the same thing: he killed because Uritsky signed a list of hostages sentenced to death, and among them was his friend from the gymnasium, that he was with Uritsky and warned him about this. (Archives of the KGB of the USSR, no. 196. In 11 volumes.)
6 Ilyin-Zhenevsky A.F. Bolsheviks in power. L., 1929. P. 133; Fedyukin S.A. The Great October Revolution and the intelligentsia. M., 1971. P. 96. Contemporaries recalled the terrible terror that began in Petrograd after the murder of Uritsky. (M e l g u n o v S. P. Memoirs and diaries. Issue 2. Part 3. Paris, 1964. P. 27; Smilg-Benario M. In Soviet service // Archive of the Russian Revolution. Vol. 3. Berlin, 1921. pp. 149-150, etc.) According to the instructions of the Cheka, a hostage is “a captive member of the society or organization that is fighting us. Moreover, such a member that has value, which this enemy values ... For some village teacher, forester, miller or small shopkeeper, and even a Jew, the enemy will not stand up and will not give anything. What do they value... High-ranking dignitaries, large landowners, farbikants, outstanding workers, scientists, noble relatives of those in power, and the like.” (Review of the activities of the Cheka for 4 years. P. 190;),
F. E. Kaplan (F., H. Roitman. 1887-1918), came from the family of a rural Jewish teacher. In 1906, she was wounded during the preparation of a terrorist attack against the Kyiv governor-general; in 1907-1917 served hard labor. She returned sick and half-blind. Doubts that she shot Lenin on August 30, 1918 have been expressed more than once. (Lyandres S. The 1918 Attempt on the Life of Lenin: a new look at the evidence // Slavik Review. 1989. V. 48. No. 3. P. 432-448, etc.) Investigative case No. 2162 in the Archives of the KGB of the USSR does not contain substantiated evidence of Kaplan’s guilt. 17 witness statements are contradictory and do not state that she was the shooter. For more details, see: L i t v i n A. L. Who shot Lenin? // Megapolis-Continent. 1991. July 30; his e. Case 2162 and other cases // Interlocutor. 1991. October. No. 42. About the execution of Kaplan, see: Malkov P. D. Notes of the commandant of the Moscow Kremlin. M., 1959. S. 159-161. “Izvestia of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee” on September 4, 1918 reported about the execution of Kaplan by order of the Cheka: this was confirmed by the publication of the execution list in the “Weekly Journal of the Cheka” (1918. No. 6, p. 27), where Kaplan was listed at No. 33. In the same list of executed - Archpriest Vostorgov, former ministers of Justice Shcheglovitov, Internal Affairs Khvostov, Director of the Police Department Beletsky and others. But in the minutes of the meetings of the Presidium of the Cheka there is no information about the execution of Kaplan.
62 Review of the activities of the Cheka for 4 years. P. 190.
63 Latsis M. Two years of struggle on the internal front. M., 1920. P. 75; e g about e. The truth about the red terror // News of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, 1920. February 6; L e g g e t t G. The CheKa: Lenin's Political Police. Oxford, 1981. P. 181.
64 Review of the activities of the Cheka for 4 years. pp. 183-189. In the fall of 1918, members of the Cheka board who carried out the policy of red terror were: Dzerzhinsky, Petere, Latsis, Fomin, Puzyrev,
Ksenofontov, Polukarov, Yanushevsky, Yakovleva, Kamenshchikov, Pulyanovsky, Skrypnik, Kedrov. It was they who developed order No. 158, according to which “in the republics that are part of the RSFSR, the orders of the Cheka can be canceled only with the consent of the Cheka” (Ibid. p. 194). At the end of 1920 among the employees of the provincial Cheka there were 49.9% communists and their sympathizers. 1.03% had higher education, 57.3% had primary education; illiterate people accounted for 2.3%. By national composition, provincial security officers were distributed as follows: Russians - 77.3%, Jews - 9.1%, Poles - 1.7%, Latvians - 3.5%, Ukrainians - 3.1%, Belarusians - 0.5% , Germans - 0.6%, British - 0.004% (2 people), etc. Funding for the Cheka increased throughout the years of the civil war and amounted to 1918-1920. RUB 6,786,121 (Ibid. P. 2(57, 271, 272, 287-289.)
67 Message from Patriarch Tikhon to the Council of People's Commissars October 26, 1918 // Our contemporary. 1990. No. 4. P. 161-162.
68 In Samara, 66 people were arrested on suspicion of Bolshevism; many fell victim to lynchings.(Popov F.G., 1918 in the Samara province: Chronicle of events. Kuibyshev, 1972. P. 133, 134). About the atrocities in Kazan, see: Kuznetsov A. Kazan under the rule of the Czech founders // Proletarian Revolution. 1922. No. 8. P. 58; Maisky I.M. Democratic counter-revolution. M.; Pg., 1923, pp. 26-27; etc.
69 Order of Komuch July 12, 1918 In August 1918, Kolchak wrote: “A civil war, of necessity, must be merciless. I order the commanders to shoot all captured communists. Now we are relying on bayonets.” (Dotsenko P. The Struggle for democracy in Siberia: Eyewiness account of contemporary. Stanford, 1983. P. 109.)
70 Nikolaev S. The emergence and organization of Komuch // Will of Russia. Prague, 1928. T. 8-9. P. 234.
71 Piontkovsky S. Civil war in Russia. Reader. M., 1925. S. 581-582; Marushevsky V.V. A year in the North (August 1918 - August 1919) // White Business. 1926. T. 2. P. 53, 54; P o t y litsy n A. I. White terror in the North. 1918-1920. Arkhangelsk, 1931.
72 Coup d’état of Admiral Kolchak in Omsk on November 18, 1918. Paris, 1919. P. 152-153; Kolosov E. How was it? (Mass murders under Kolchak in December 1918 in Omsk and the death of N.V. Fomin) // Bygone. 1923. No. 21. P. 250; Rodina, 1990. No. 10. P. 79. Io f e G. 3. Kolchak’s adventure and its collapse. M., 1983. P. 179.
73Melgunov S.P. The tragedy of Admiral Kolchak. Part 2. Belgrade, 1930. P. 238; Fleming P. The Fate of Admiral Kolchak. N.Y., 1963. P. 111; etc.
74 Interrogation of Kolchak. L., 1925. S. 210-213 ; Gins testified that Kolchak told him more than once: the civil war must be merciless. (Gins G.K. Siberia, allies and Kolchak. T. 1. Harbin, 1921. P. 4; Zhur about in Yu. V. Civil war in a Siberian village. Krasnoyarsk, 1986. P. 96, 109.
75 GA RF, f. 147, op. 2, d. 2 "D", l. 17 - Report of the governor of the Yenisei province, Trotsky. General Sakharov, by order to the army on October 12, 1919, demanded that every tenth hostage or resident be shot, and also in the event of armed protests against the military, “such settlements should be immediately surrounded, all residents shot, and the village itself destroyed to the ground.” (The Party during the period of foreign military intervention and civil war /1918-1920/: Documents and materials. M., 1962. P. 357.)
76 Budberg A. Diary of a White Guard. L., 1929. P. 191. 78 K and N D. Denikinshchina. L., 1926. P. 80.
78 Denikin - Yudenich - Wrangel. M.; L., 1927. S. 64-65. For numerous facts of terrorist acts against the population under the Denikin government, see: Ustinov S. M. Notes of the head of counterintelligence (1915-1920). Berlin, 1923. pp. 125-126; William G. Whites. M., 1923. S. 67-68; Arbatov 3. Yu. Ekaterinoslav. 1917-1922 GSU/Archive of the Russian Revolution. T. 12. Berlin, 1923. P. 94. etc.
80 GA RF, f. 440, op. 1, d. 34, l. 2, 12, 73; d. 12, l. 1-33.
80 Sh t i f N. I. Volunteers: and Jewish pogroms // Denikin - Yudenich - Wrangel. pp. 141, 154; Lekash B. When Israel dies... L., 1928. P. 14, 22, 106; Fedyuk V.P. Denikin’s dictatorship and its collapse. Yaroslavl, 1990. P. 57, etc.
81 See: Valentinov A. A. Crimean epic // Denikin - Yudenich - Wrangel. pp. 359, 373; Kalinin I. Under the banner of Wrangel. L., 1925. S. 92, 93, 168; R akovsky G. The end of the whites. Prague, 1921. P. 11; S l a s h o v Ya. Crimea in 1920. M., L., 1923. P. 4-6, 44, 72. The former Archive of the Crimean Regional Committee of the CPSU contains many documents about the terror of the Whites. Here are some of them: on the night of March 17, 1919, 25 political prisoners were shot in Simferopol; On April 2, 1919, counterintelligence shot 15 people in Sevastopol; in April 1920, there were about 500 political prisoners in the Simferopol prison. (Archive of the Crimean OK CPSU, f. 150, op. 1, d. 49, l. 197-232; d. 53, l. 148).
82 In October 1919 The Minister of Justice of the Yudenich government, Lieutenant Colonel E. Kedrin, compiled a report on the establishment of the “State Commission to Combat Bolshevism.” He proposed to investigate not individual “crimes,” but “to cover the destructive activities of the Bolsheviks as a whole.” The report set the task of studying Bolshevism as a “social disease”, and then developing practical measures “for the real fight against Bolshevism not only within Russia, but throughout the entire world.” (GA RF, f. 6389, op. 1, f. 3, d. 3, l. 17-19.) Eyewitnesses testified to the reprisals, and not only against the Bolsheviks, of Yudenich’s punitive forces. (Gorn V. Civil War in North-West Russia // Yudenich near Petrograd. L., 1927, l. 12, 128, 138.) Miller signed an order on June 26, 1919, according to which Bolshevik hostages were shot for any attempt on officer's life.
83 In May 1926, former major general of Kolchak’s army, ataman B.V. Annenkov (1889-1927), was tried in Semipalatinsk. The 4 volumes of the investigative file (Archive of the Ministry of Security of the Russian Federation, no. 37751) collected hundreds of testimonies of peasants, workers of the city of Slavgorod, relatives of those who became victims of the punitive forces of the Semirechensk army, operating under the motto “We have no prohibitions! God and Ataman Annenkov are with us. Cut left and right." According to the court's verdict, Annenkov was shot. In 1946, the former lieutenant general of the Kolchak army, ataman G.I. Semenov (1890-1946), was tried in Irkutsk. The investigative file took up 25 volumes. They contain testimonies of former Red partisans testifying to reprisals against the civilian population of Cossacks and Semenov’s soldiers. By court verdict, Semenov was executed.
84 As the commander of US forces in Siberia, General Graves, recalled, “in Eastern Siberia, for every person killed by the Bolsheviks, there were a hundred people killed by anti-Bolshevik elements” and “the number of Bolsheviks in Siberia by the time of Kolchak increased many times in comparison with the number of them at the time our parish." (Graves V. American adventure in Siberia /1918-1920/. M., 1932. P. 80, 175.)
86 Frunze M.V. Op. T. 1. M., 1929. P. 375.
88 Lenin V.I. PSS. T. 13. P. 24.
88 See: Frenkin M. The tragedy of peasant uprisings in Russia. 1918-1921. Jerusalem. 1987.
89 See: Melgunov S.P. Red Terror in Russia. P. 88; Lats and M. The truth about the red terror // News of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee. 1920. February 6; Danilov V. Why 16 million Russians died // Motherland. 1990. No. 10. P. 19. Miliukov named 1,766,118 people as victims of the Red Terror. (Milyukov P.N. Russia at a turning point. T. 1. Paris, 1927. P. 194). According to Solzhenitsyn, from June 1918 to October 1919, the Reds shot 16 thousand people, i.e. more than a thousand a month. In 1937-1938 28 thousand arrestees were shot per month. (Solzhenitsyn A. Gulag Archipelago // New World. 1989. No. 9. P. 141, 143.) Note that the number of victims of terror (1.3 million people) exceeded the losses of the Red Army in 1918-1922. (939,755 people). (The classification has been removed: Losses of the armed forces of the USSR in wars, hostilities and military conflicts. M., 1993. P. 407.)
90 Archive of the Ministry of Bank of the Russian Federation, f. 1, d. 1, l. 13; d. 3, l. 140, 145, 149; d. 7, l. 1; Archive of the KGB of the Republic of Tatarstan. Minutes of meetings of the Kazan Gubernia Cheka from December 28, 1918 to 1921. For comparison: from December 1918 to December 1921, the Kazan Gubernia Cheka shot 264 people, and in August-December 1937 alone, the NKVD of Tatarstan shot 2,521 people. (this is the number officially registered in the protocols).
91 Melgunov S.P. Red terror in Russia. P. 66; Gul R. Dzerzhinsky (beginning of terror). New York, 1974. P. 94. On the award list of E. G. Evdokimov, discovered in the RGVA by A. A. Zdanevich, there is a resolution from the commander of the Southern Front M. V. Frunze: “I consider the activities of Comrade Evdokimov worthy of encouragement. Due to the special nature of this activity, holding the awards ceremony in the usual manner is not entirely convenient.” Evdokimov was awarded the order without publicly announcing it. 62
“Red terror” - this topic is constantly being discussed by both pro-Western and pro-Kremlin groups, especially on the eve of a birthday or November 7th. As a rule, numerous articles boil down to one thesis: “red terror”, expressed in the mass extermination of dissenters (or even everyone)
, is the calling card of the internal policy of the Bolsheviks during the years of the revolution and the Civil War, which, of course, was unleashed by the communists themselves, led by Lenin.
But the first known terrorist attack in the Civil War was committed not by the Bolsheviks, but by whites in 1918. Having captured the Kremlin and captured more than 500 Red Army soldiers, they put them against the wall and shot them right at the Kremlin wall.
The first concentration camps were also built not by the Bolsheviks, but by the Americans in the Arkhangelsk region. Not only prisoners, but also civilians were driven here. Tens of thousands of arrestees passed through the prisons on Mudyug Island, many of whom were shot, tortured or died of starvation.
So are the Bolsheviks to blame for starting the Civil War? In bringing forward this grave accusation, anti-communists, as a rule, rely on Lenin’s well-known slogan about “transforming the imperialist war into a civil war.” But, firstly, this slogan had a purely theoretical meaning, since the Bolsheviks, due to their small numbers, had practically no political influence in the country before February. And secondly, this slogan was intended to be used by the proletariat of all warring countries.
After February, this slogan was removed and replaced by a new one - “about a just world.” And after October, during the German offensive, a new slogan, “The Socialist Fatherland is in Danger,” was again put forward. What does this mean? First of all, Lenin was never a dogmatist of Marxism. On the contrary, he always kept his finger on the pulse of the times and clearly responded to the slightest changes in current events. The situation in the country changed, and the slogans also changed.
Facts show that the Bolsheviks did not at all want civil war in their country and made every effort to prevent it. It was the Bolsheviks, led by Lenin, who, until July 3-4, 1917, proceeded from the possibility and desirability of the peaceful development of the revolution after February. Who prevented this? Provisional Government, Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries.
After the failure of the Kornilov rebellion, Lenin, in his article “On Compromises,” proposed creating a government of Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries, controlled by the Soviets.
“Such a government,” he wrote, “could be created and strengthened quite peacefully” (Vol. 34, pp. 134-135). And who thwarted this opportunity for a peaceful transfer of power into the hands of the working people in the person of the Soviets? Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks together with Kerensky.
In his pre-October works, V.I. Lenin repeatedly returned to the issue of intimidation of a civil war in Russia by the bourgeois press if power passed to the Bolsheviks. In response, he expressed his firm belief that if all socialist parties united, as they did during the Kornilov rebellion, then there would be no civil war. But the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries remained deaf to these reasonable calls.
Having taken power almost bloodlessly (except for the “assault” of Winter Palace, during which 6 people were killed and 50 wounded), the Bolsheviks tried to win over all classes to their side. All parties, the intelligentsia, and the military were invited to cooperate.
The fact that the Soviet government hoped for peaceful development is evidenced by the plans for the economic and cultural development of the country and especially the beginning of the implementation of major programs. For example, the opening of 33 scientific institutes in 1918, the organization of a number of geological expeditions, and the beginning of the construction of an entire network of power plants. Who starts such things if they are preparing for war? The Soviet government tried to create mechanisms to prevent the outbreak of civil war in the country, but it had too few forces and too many enemies. And therefore the development of events took a different path.
Already on October 25, by order of the former head of the Provisional Government, Kerensky, the 3rd Corps of General Krasnov was moved to Petrograd. And the so-called Committee for the Salvation of the Motherland and the Revolution, consisting of liberals, Socialist Revolutionaries and Mensheviks, raised a revolt of the cadets. But already on October 30, the troops of Kerensky-Krasnov, and even earlier, the rebellion of the cadets were defeated. This is how the Civil War began in Soviet Russia. So who was its instigator? The answer is clear and understandable. And, nevertheless, at first the Soviet government treated its opponents quite humanely. Participants in the first Soviet rebellions and their leaders (generals Kornilov, Krasnov and Kaledin) were released “on their word of honor” that they would not fight Soviet power. No reprisals followed either the members of the Provisional Government or the deputies of the Constituent Assembly.
And how did the enemies they forgiven respond to the humane actions of the Bolsheviks? Generals Kornilov, Krasnov and Kaledin fled to the Don and organized a White Cossack army there. After their release, many tsarist officers took an active part in conspiracies and counter-revolutionary actions.
Conspiracies, sabotage, and murders of government officials forced the Bolsheviks to take measures to defend the revolution. In May 1918 (only seven months after the October events) the Central Committee of the RCP (b) decided: “... to introduce death sentences for certain crimes.” It should be noted that in many cities, local authorities, faced with acts of terror, sabotage, torture and murder, demanded that the central government take decisive measures, and sometimes they themselves took retaliatory measures. The Central Committee, headed by Lenin, had to sharply condemn such “amateur activity.” For example, a letter from the Central Committee to the Yelets Bolsheviks said: “Dear comrades! We consider it necessary to point out that we consider any repressions against the Yelets Left Socialist-Revolutionaries to be completely unnecessary” (July 1918).
And this is after the security officers seized documents from the Socialist Revolutionary headquarters about the preparation of terrorist attacks: “... in the interests of the Russian and international revolution, it is necessary to put an end to the so-called respite, created thanks to the ratification of the Brest Peace Treaty by the Bolshevik government in the shortest possible time... The Central Committee of the party (Socialist Revolutionaries) considers it possible and it would be expedient to organize a series of terrorist acts...” (From the minutes of the meeting of the Central Committee of the Left Socialist Revolutionary Party on June 24, 1918).
Trying to pit the Bolsheviks against the Germans, the Left Social Revolutionaries kill the German ambassador Mirbach. The Soviet government is forced to take retaliatory measures against terrorists. But can these measures be called “red terror” if the direct killers of the German ambassador, Blyumkin and Andreev, were sentenced by the Revolutionary Tribunal of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee on November 27, 18 to three years of forced labor. The organizers of the murder, Spiridonov and Sablin, received one year in prison. Having learned about such an “ultra-cruel” sentence, Blumkin voluntarily surrendered to the security officers and was released early on May 16, 1919. But the failure of the peace treaty threatened the continuation of the war and hundreds of thousands of dead.
The terrorists considered this policy a weakness of the Bolsheviks, and terrorist attacks began to follow one after another. However, until the autumn of 1918, the terror of the Soviet regime did not have a mass character, and the repressions themselves took a mild, humane form.
Nevertheless, anti-communists still accuse Lenin and the Bolsheviks of cruelty, and for proof they cite the “terrible” phrase spoken by Ilyich: “We must encourage the energy and mass character of terror.” At the same time, as usual, they take it out of context and do not explain why it was said. They seem to lead the average person to the idea that since there is mass terror, it means it is directed against the masses, primarily against peasants and workers.
The full phrase reads like this: “Terrorists will consider us wimps. It's arch-war time. It is necessary to encourage the energy and mass scale of terror against counter-revolutionaries, and especially in St. Petersburg, whose example decides.” Written by Lenin (letter to Zinoviev dated June 26, 18) in response to the murder of Volodarsky. As we can see, Ilyich proposed directing the energy and mass scale of terror against terrorists, and not against the people.
The “Red Terror” became massive and cruel after the serious wounding of V.I. Lenin, the murder on the same day of the chairman of the Petrograd Cheka M.S. Uritsky, and even earlier the prominent Bolshevik V. Volodarsky. This was a forced response of the Soviet government to the intensified terror on the part of its enemies. On September 5, the Council of People's Commissars issued a resolution on the “Red Terror” and entrusted its implementation to the Cheka. Only after this did the executions of people imprisoned for political reasons begin.
The largest action of the “Red Terror” was the execution in Petrograd of 512 representatives of the bourgeois elite (former dignitaries, ministers and generals). According to official data, in total about 800 people were shot in Petrograd during the “Red Terror”. The “Red Terror” ended on November 6, 1918, and in fact in most regions of Russia it was completed in September-October.
Generally speaking, terror (from the French word “terror”) of a state aims to suppress the actions of its internal enemies by creating a climate of fear that paralyzes its will to resist. For this purpose, a brief but very intense and visual shock-inducing repression is usually carried out. In Russia at that time, the idea of terror was shared by all revolutionary parties without exception.
But the Bolsheviks failed to paralyze resistance to Soviet power with the help of terror. It’s just that obvious enemies of the Bolsheviks fled to the places where the White Army was formed or to areas where Soviet power was overthrown. The final demarcation of the “whites” and “reds” took place, and the rear was cleared of counter-revolutionaries. After this, the “Red Terror” was officially ended, since there was no longer any point in it.
And when on September 25, 1919, terrorists threw two bombs into the meeting room of the Moscow Party Committee in Leontyevsky Lane, building 18, where a party meeting was taking place, as a result of which about 40 people were killed and injured, including the secretary of the Moscow Party Committee V. M. Zagorsky, no terror was declared in response. The Central Committee of the RCP (b) sent a circular to all provincial committees: “The Central Committee decided: the assassination attempt committed in Moscow should not change the nature of the activities of the Cheka. Therefore, we ask: do not declare terror” (4.10. 1919).
Particular mention should be made of the terror on the fronts during the Civil War. There is a lot of evidence that both whites and reds showed considerable cruelty towards each other. But in war it’s like in war. Either you kill or you will be killed. And the war became a reality when a large-scale intervention by the Entente countries took place (it began with the landing of the Japanese in April 1918). And here Lenin, as a man of action, acted decisively and mercilessly, because he no longer had a choice.
There is a lot of evidence about white terror among the participants of the white movement themselves. Thus, in Roman Gul’s book “The Ice March,” dozens of pages are devoted to white terror. Here is a fragment from this book: “50-60 people are leading from behind the huts... their heads and hands are lowered. Prisoners. Colonel Nezhintsev overtakes them... “Those who want to be killed! - he shouts... About fifteen people came out of the ranks... It came: pli... The dry crackle of shots, screams, groans... People fell on each other, and from about ten steps... they were shot at, hastily clicking the shutters. Everyone fell. The moans stopped. The shots stopped... Some finished off the living with bayonets and rifle butts.”
Not all officers took part in such savage massacres, but many did. As R. Gul shows, there were among them those who simply felt a zoological hatred of workers and peasants, of the “cattle” who dared to encroach on their private property.
An even more gloomy picture is painted by the chief of staff of the 1st Army (Volunteer) Corps, Lieutenant General E.I. Dostovalov, in his memoirs under the characteristic title “On the Whites and the White Terror.” “The path of such generals,” he writes, “as Wrangel, Kutepov, Pokrovsky, Shkuro, Slashchev, Drozdovsky, Turkul and many others, was littered with those hanged and shot without any reason or trial. They were followed by many others, of lower ranks, but no less bloodthirsty.” One commander of a cavalry regiment showed the author of the memoirs in his notebook the number 172. This was the number of Bolsheviks he personally shot. “He hoped,” General Dostovalov writes further, “that he would soon reach 200. And how many were shot not with his own hands, but on orders? And how many of his subordinates shot innocent people without orders? I once tried to do some approximate calculations of those shot and hanged by the white armies of the South alone and gave up - you could go crazy.”
Here it is, genuine, without embellishment, the truth, about the Civil War and the White Terror. General A.I. Denikin also writes about this in his “Essays on Russian Troubles.” He bitterly admits that it was the “white terror” that discredited the “white idea” and alienated the peasants from the whites. Blind rage towards the “cattle” who dared to raise a hand against their masters pushed the whites to extrajudicial executions of tens of thousands of ordinary Red Army soldiers - workers and peasants. Thus, the memoirs of participants in the white movement, in contrast to modern “liberal democrats,” indicate that it was the whites, and not the reds, who subjected the working people of Russia to mass terror. That is why the workers and peasants for the most part supported the Bolsheviks led by V.I. Lenin, and not the white guard of Denikin, Wrangel and Yudenich.
Sholokhov devoted many pages to the white and red terror in his immortal epic “Quiet Don”. And if the Reds, as follows from the novel, terrorized, first of all, rich Cossacks, officers, atamans and merchants, then the Whites terrorized mainly captured Red Army soldiers, whom they either simply shot, starved, or hanged to intimidate the population. But they mocked the commanders and commissars in a sophisticated manner. This is how Sholokhov describes the death of the commander of one of the red detachments under torture by the rebel Cossacks.
“The next day they drove him to Kazanskaya. He walked ahead of the guards, lightly stepping on the snow with bare feet... He died, seven miles from Veshenskaya, in the sandy, stern breakers, the guards brutally hacked him to death. The living man's eyes were gouged out, his hands, ears, and nose were cut off, and his face was mangled with sabers. They unbuttoned their pants and violated and desecrated a large, courageous, beautiful body. They violated the bleeding stump, and then one of the guards stepped on the flimsily trembling chest, on the prone body, and with one blow cut off the head obliquely.”
How the whites abused the civilian population in the Far East was described in the newspaper “Duel” dated February 25, 2003 in an essay about the popular commander of the Red Cossack detachment, Gavriil Matveyevich Shevchenko (1886-1942). He carried out many successful operations against the White Guards and Japanese invaders and rose to the rank of deputy commander of the Ussuri Front. The Japanese even put a reward of ten thousand yen on his head. But Shevchenko was elusive. Then the faithful dog and hired the Japanese, Ataman Kalmykov, ordered his mother to be stripped naked along with her daughters-in-law and, through the autumn slush, drove them captives along the main street of the city of Grodekov. Then they tracked down the commander’s younger brother Pavlushka in the neighboring area, cut off his nose, lips, ears, tore out his eyes, and cut off his arms and legs with sabers. Only after this they cut the body into pieces. As you can see, reader, both on the Don and in the Far East the White Guards behaved the same way.
Shevchenko still continued to attack white outposts and derail trains. Then Kalmykov doused the commander’s hut with kerosene and burned it and his family.
For sympathy or assistance to the partisans, the White Guards shot peasants, and their families were mercilessly flogged with ramrods and their huts were burned. And sometimes people were grabbed on the street without any pretext or raided. The prey was dragged into the “death train”, where drunken sadists mocked innocent victims. Ataman Kalmykov himself loved to observe medieval torture. From this he quickly went into a rage and took his vile soul away by torturing people. In the “train of death,” those arrested were flogged with whips with wire ends, their noses, tongues and ears were cut off, their eyes were gouged out, bloody strips of skin were torn off, their stomachs were ripped open, and their arms and legs were chopped off with butcher axes. This is how the whites were sophisticated throughout the Kolchak movement under the reliable protection of the Japanese interventionists.
And there were quite a lot of executioners in the White Guard like Ataman Kalmykov: atamans Dutov and Semyonov, Baron Ungern and others, not to mention Admiral Kolchak himself. It is not surprising that the people, having experienced all the delights of Kolchakism on their own skin, joined the partisans and resisted as much as possible.
Other materials on the topic:
47 comments
cat Leopold 29.09.2014 19:03
..."General A.I. Denikin also writes about this in his “Essays on the Russian Troubles.” He bitterly admits that it was the “white terror” that discredited the “white idea” and alienated the peasants from the whites...
Thus, the memoirs of participants in the white movement, in contrast to modern “liberal democrats,” indicate that it was the whites, and not the reds, who subjected the working people of Russia to mass terror. That is why the workers and peasants for the most part supported the Bolsheviks led by V.I. Lenin, and not the white guard of Denikin, Kolchak, Wrangel and Yudenich.”
And for the “liberal democrats”, lies and fraud are the only way to stay afloat. True, the limit of this method is almost over for them.
Maryana Zavalikhina 30.09.2014 13:33
Don't cheat, dear cat Leopold. If A.I. Denikin, as an educated Russian officer and a talented writer, who put the personal dignity of a person at the head of his work, condemned cruelty, including his subordinates, which in those conditions was not always possible to resist, this does not mean that there was no cruelty with the opposing sides. Moreover, publicly available archival documents indicate atrocities on both sides. And this dispute is resolved very simply. We open any search engine and look at photos of the Bolsheviks in the dungeons of tsarism, sitting in prison cells with books in their hands and eating “inkwells” made of soft bread with milk poured into it and photos of “enemies of the people” in the dungeons of the NKVD, when the civil war was officially over a long time ago . And no comments are needed. And, by the way, it was not Nicholas II who called on his gendarmes to throw acid in the faces of the Bolsheviks, but V. Lenin who called on his supporters to throw acid in the faces of the gendarmes.
Maryana Zavalikhina 04.10.2014 01:48
Who is this Lavrov?
Vilorik Voytyuk 29.09.2014 19:31
The history and meaning of the Civil War are distorted by Bolshevik historians. The Reds were those who voted in the elections to the Constituent Assembly for the Socialist Revolutionary Party and for the socialism that was proclaimed by the leadership of this party that won the elections. The Whites were those who fought against the results of the February Revolution and for the revival of the monarchy and power. landowners in the country, no one represented the Bolshevik meaning in this war EXCEPT THE COMMISSARS AND REVIEW COMMITTEES, THE HERO OF THE CIVIL
Maryana Zavalikhina 30.09.2014 13:49
Leave the Constituent Assembly alone. The very fact that the Bolsheviks took power from him speaks of his non-viability. And I want to make a note to you, V. Voytyuk, that before you begin discussing a subject, you need to study it. And the study of the creativity of A.I. Denikin gives us the discovery that both he and his comrades in the White movement, while remaining convinced monarchists at heart, accepted the choice of the Russian people during the February Revolution and continued to serve it. And it should be noted that, in their understanding of personal dignity and honor, they turned out to be completely superior to the SA and Navy officers who, 70 years later, found themselves in a similar situation.
Vilorik Voytyuk 01.10.2014 00:31
THE ENTIRE TRUTH ABOUT THE PARTICIPANTS AND HEROES OF THE WAR IS EXPRESSED IN THE WORDS OF THE COMMANDER OF THE SECOND CAVED ARMY MIRONOV, WHO TOGETHER WITH THE MAKHNO DIVISION LIBERATED THE CRIMEA FROM VRANKEL. NOT FRUNZE AND BUDYONNY, BUT MIRONOV AND MAKHNO DID THIS. SO, MIRONOV SAID AT THE RALLY, LET'S BREAK DENIKIN - LET'S TURN BAYONETS TO MOSCOW.
Vilorik Voytyuk 01.10.2014 00:47
The entire Russian history, smeared with fraudulent classism, must be washed clean. So, Pugachev’s uprising was not an uprising of peasants and Cossacks with landowner Russia. The people’s uprising under the leadership of Pugachev was a campaign for the salvation of the Motherland. In St. Petersburg, the Orthodox Tsar was killed and power in the country was seized by the Germans, Basurmans, and Latins.
Maryana Zavalikhina 01.10.2014 04:06
I draw the attention of V. Voytyuk and his associates that both K. Marx and V. Lenin were right when they said that nothing can be understood in politics and economics if one does not see class interest. Another thing is that, in addition to the fact that K. Marx made a number of miscalculations and mistakes in his theory, which are well known, as well as the reasons that caused them are known, communist political parties pull out parts from K. Marx’s theory to satisfy their party interests. And V. Lenin cannot be blamed for the fact that he turned out to be more dexterous than the leaders of other political parties of a communist orientation. Moreover, due to the fact that I have already given an example of Lenin’s article, in which he got confused in his thoughts and uttered nonsense, among V. Lenin’s political opponents there was no one who would expose his demagoguery at a theoretical level (as indeed Today). And the problem of today's communists is that they are going to continue to extract fragments from the theory of K. Marx to satisfy their party interests, in which, in addition to the already known miscalculations and mistakes, the moral obsolescence of the political economy of the 19th century was added. Not only among the communists, but also among their political opponents from the “left,” there is no one visible who would simply try to give a new principle for defining classes that fits into the logic of the developing modern political economy and globalization of the economy.
Vilorik Voytyuk 01.10.2014 17:13
RUSSIA, THANK GOD, HAS NOT LIVED TO SUCH IDIOTISM THAT SOME CLASSES APPEARED IN A NORMAL ORTHODOX HUMAN ENVIRONMENT. BUT SHE LIVED UNTIL THE TIME WHEN FOREIGN SCAMBLERS BEGAN TO USE THIS FOLLOWING WORD TO DIVIDE PEOPLE AND PICK THEM AGAINST EACH OTHER, WHILE STAYING ALONG. ABOUT THE CIVIL WAR TROTSKY SAID ‘NON-JEWS DO NOT KILL JEWS.Long live the civil war.’
Vilorik Voytyuk 01.10.2014 17:21
MARX WOULD BE ROLLING IN HIS GRAVE IF HE KNEW THAT SOMEONE WAS USING HIS THEORY IN APPLICATION TO RUSSIA.
Vilorik Voytyuk 01.10.2014 17:31
Fraudsters and only scammers can explicitly or implicitly introduce Marxism in Russia. Russia has its own from head to toe and its own millennial socialism.
Vilorik Voytyuk 01.10.2014 17:58
Russia is the country of the world, if we take the development of the human spirit on Earth as progress and history, and not something else, albeit important. RUSSIA HAS PROVED THIS IN THE LAST THREE HUNDRED YEARS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. And the rich West is the most reactionary piece of territory on this very Earth..
Maryana Zavalikhina 02.10.2014 00:50
I won’t even ask V. Voytyuk what the theory about the ruling class and the source of income of the ruling class has to do with Orthodox teaching, for the simple reason that he is illiterate in both.
Vladlen 02.10.2014 02:30
02.10.2014 07:18
Maryana, you shouldn’t have a bad opinion of the officers. Especially about the Soviet ones. It was they who all unanimously wrote reports in the 90s about their dismissal from the Ukrainian army that was then being formed, and it was they, as I see from information in the media, and under their leadership in Donbass and Lugansk who defended the right of people to their lives.
In general, history cannot be perceived and interpreted one-sidedly and based on unverified sources; it cannot be conjectured without reservations. Otherwise, in Russia it will be the same as in Ukraine: a big historical lie that causes mass deaths of innocent people (children).
alexander chelyab.reg.city of asha 04.10.2014 20:15
Well, let them “knock it out.” You have nothing to be ashamed of: after all, they won’t give you too much anyway. If you don’t remind them, they won’t remember.
Alexander Chelyabinsk region Asha 02.10.2014 07:24
The big historical lie becomes, in the hands of unclean-minded people (non-humans), a political and ideological tool for manipulating people’s consciousness.
cat Leopold 02.10.2014 14:36
Hello, Alexander. Haven't met for a long time. Always glad to hear from you. How's life? What worries?
Alexander Chelyabinsk region Asha 02.10.2014 15:28
Hello, cat Leopold! My life is busy. I've been very busy all summer. Over the summer, he completely withdrew from political life. I watched and worried only about our “Kievan Rus”.
Now the computer at home is broken, we need to fix it. In short, it’s a mess. That’s why I can only communicate briefly at work. And now I’m already heading home. I wish you all the best, and I always praise the site’s editors for their feedback from the site’s fans. Such consistency will lead in the future to a qualitative change in communist propaganda work.
cat Leopold 03.10.2014 10:35
All the best to you too, Alexander.
Alesya Yasnogortseva 02.10.2014 21:37
The White Terror, of course, was 100 times worse than the Red Terror. It's clear why.
http://knpk.kz/wp/?p=38575
http://knpk.kz/wp/?p=48026
Another thing is not clear: why was Grevs not quoted in Soviet times? Where he says: “I will not be mistaken if I say that for every one person killed by the Bolsheviks, there are 100 people killed by anti-Bolshevik elements.”
Vilorik Voytyuk 03.10.2014 10:45
Alesya, you are talking about the white terror, that it was worse than the red one. Alesya, the Civil War was one part of the Russian people against another part of the also Russian people. The third force - the Bolsheviks did not go to the bayonet and did not participate in saber attacks, but sat in Moscow with their tail between their legs, waiting for who would take it, and also because their interests did not coincide with the interests of the Reds and Whites.b They had their own special interest - how to defeat the Russian people, invincible for a thousand years, and create their own national state on the site of the former Russian Empire. Stalin was the first to disperse them in 1937
Vilorik Voytyuk 03.10.2014 11:13
Stalin was the first to figure out the secret meaning of the Bolsheviks - these Kremlin pederasts / Stalin... and destroyed them all.. Stalin was the first. who began to build real socialism in Russia, relying on its indigenous people. I stopped calling the Communist Party Bolshevik. AND YOU ARE HERE ON THIS page, whatever you want, whatever you don’t like..
Maryana Zavalikhina 03.10.2014 13:27
Stop the fight! I. Stalin was the only Bolshevik who consistently carried out the work of V. Lenin. And if someone cannot understand this, then this is his personal problem. It seems that this site claims to be a Marxist-Leninist site, but its readers, it is unclear, what relation they have not only to Leninism, but also to Marxism in general.
Maryana Zavalikhina 03.10.2014 14:13
And regarding which terror was more terrible, white or red, I note that in the Far East, the Red Guard detachments were mainly led by representatives of the criminal world, who had the opportunity, on behalf of the working people’s power, to rob those who could previously give them a worthy rebuff. By the way, the pogrom of the monastery, in the buildings and on whose territory the Shmakovsky military sanatorium was located, by a detachment of the Red Guard began with the abbot driving a rifle bayonet into his foot with a demand to tell where the treasury was hidden. And what is curious is that traces of the valuable things collected in the monastery were lost immediately outside the gates, after the Red Guards left. Yes, what can I say, if you just look at sites selling antiques, where countless personalized jewelry is offered for sale, including crosses, not always made of precious metals, made in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Vilorik Voytyuk 03.10.2014 20:42
Maryana is talking about some matter. Lenin. This person never thought about socialism in Russia. Speaking before the security officers, where not a single person was Russian, this socialist said, “Let 90 percent of Russian people die, if only 10 percent live to see communism'. Obviously, in order to have someone to sweep the streets and clean the toilets.
Maryana Zavalikhina 04.10.2014 02:22
Really, how stubborn you are, you think that you surprised someone with your discovery, if more than one generation of Soviet people studied from a school textbook that told how the Bolsheviks were preparing the world revolution.
Vilorik Voytyuk 05.10.2014 03:09
Marxism-Leninism in the field of sociology and philosophy is the same fraud as abstract art in painting, like tarpabarism in music, like the soulless ballet of Plisetskaya, Bejart, Grigorovich. The authors of this common soulless, nationalless, cosmopolitan, deceptive creation are the characters of the famous to the entire world of nationality in order to fool the European nations and in such a deceptive way to finally establish themselves, persecuted and unfortunate from everywhere, on European soil. The Russian people especially suffered from this Zionist cosmopolitan idea
Vilorik Voytyuk 05.10.2014 03:24
Wake up, Maryana. WE NEED REAL SOCIALISM AND OUR OWN NATIONAL WORLDVIEW..We don’t need to be taught how to live. We have existed for a thousand years and we defeated Napoleon
Vilorik Voytyuk 05.10.2014 06:59
The case of Lenin, Sverdlov, Trotsky is the genocide of the Russian people...; The best territory is empty space. This was the case with the Indians in America, and it will also be with Russia ‘Trotsky.
Maryana Zavalikhina 05.10.2014 15:04
Dear V. Voytyuk! The truth will be with those who will be the first to present the concept of building a modern state capable of uniting Russian society around itself. Everything else is demagoguery, which has a very specific purpose - a split in Russian society.
It’s a pity that you advertise your lack of your own national worldview. I don’t need to wake up, because the noodles falling on my ears don’t let me sleep.
Nicholas II demonstrated real atrocity by not caring about his responsibility to Russia and handing over the reins of government to an absolutely incompetent Constituent Assembly, consisting of political punks who never fully realized that they had become the head of the Great State.
Vilorik Voytyuk 06.10.2014 08:07
The real atrocities were demonstrated not by the Reds and Whites, but by a third force - hired foreigners, who were widely used by the Bolsheviks. Among the Russian people, as the results of the elections to the Constituent Assembly showed, these people, for obvious reasons, did not enjoy SUPPORT. Then they decided to help the foreigners of Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Finland and Bessarabia in exchange for a promise of independence to them. Add here 40 thousand prisoners of Austro- Hungarians and 2oo thousand Chinese thugs, from whom they formed punitive detachments. THE 6TH LATVIAN REGIMENT UNDER THE LEADERSHIP OF URITSKY SHOOTED A DEMONSTRATION IN SUPPORT OF THE CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY, FINNISH SPECIAL FORCES UNDER THE COMMAND OF SMILGI ARRESTED THE PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT, and AUSTRO-V THE ENGERS AND MRE NADY BAYONET THE CHILDREN OF THE RUSSIAN TSAR, THE CHINESE MERCENARIES TOGETHER WITH LATTIANS SUPPRESSED THE PEASANT UPRISING IN THE TAMBOV PROVINCE. IN LENIN’S PERSONAL GUARD CONSISTED OF 70 CHINESE...LATVISH REGIMENTS SUPPRESSED WITH THE HELP OF CANnonS THE MUTINY OF LEFT SOCIALIST REVOLUTIONARIES IN MOSCOW’.
Vilorik Voytyuk 06.10.2014 08:41
The Tsar of Maryana transferred power to his brother Mikhail, whom the Bolsheviks killed. And the many millions of people of Russia elected not punks, as you say, to the Constituent Assembly. and the overwhelming majority of deputies from the Socialist Revolutionary Party, who proclaimed the country’s transition to socialism.
Alexander Chelyabinsk region Asha 08.10.2014 06:28
Vilorik Voytyuk, where did you get this from? And in what place did the peasants (approximately no less than 93% of the population) in the conditions of the First World War “many millions” choose the Constituent Constitution?
Vilorik Voytyuk 11.10.2014 07:47
Maryana, the Zionists were the first to introduce the form of statehood of Russia in October 1917, and to this day they have not given this concept to anyone. They sank their teeth in. They even managed to remove the huge titular Russian people from the legal field, taking away two capitals from them and forgetting about their existence altogether..
Vilorik Voytyuk 12.10.2014 06:28
Maryana says that Vilorik Voytyuk is illiterate. Well, if five years at the Faculty of Philosophy of Moscow State University is not enough for her, then I don’t know what else she needs.
Masha Smart 06.08.2015 03:07
two idiots (Vilorik and Maryana) have gathered and are talking complete nonsense to each other.)) one blames some Jewish Bolsheviks for everything (apparently he has such a new race :)), and the other positions herself as a kind of communist, but at the same time vows to the Red Guards , thanks to which, by the way, Soviet power and socialism took place in the country (and secretly probably pities the white officers as representatives of the “white and fluffy” last intelligentsia).)) in short, a parade of schizophrenics.)))
vilora73 29.08.2016 09:11
Masha is smart, you are talking about two idiots, but add yourself, because God loves a trinity.
vilora73 29.08.2016 09:30
Alexander from Asha, there were no military actions on Russian territory, so the elections to the Constituent Assembly took place normally and calmly. Another interesting thing is that the Bolsheviks received a crushing minority in the elections, even taking into account the alliance with the left, the female Social Revolutionaries.
Vasilina 21.12.2016 16:55
White terror served as a victory for the common man. They not only just killed, they executed the Reds and those who sympathized with them. There is testimony from an American general and the Whites themselves. The destruction of churches was transferred to the Reds, but this is what the Whites did when they went abroad, and they also had to destroy parish books, Indeed, many remained in Russia and changed documents, etc. Vasilina
Adolf 22.05.2018 01:10
What are you ignoramuses arguing about? Apart from Soviet propaganda, you haven’t read anything and haven’t spoken to any of the eyewitnesses?
First, ask yourself why the “revolutionaries” were all Jews and came from Switzerland, England and the USA, where they lived on handouts from Jewish bankers? Why did their numerous guards initially also include foreigners: Latvians, Finns, Poles, and Chinese? Why were numerous urban and peasant riots suppressed by the Latvians, Magyars and Chinese? And has no one really thought about how peasants and tsarist officers (some) were driven into the “Red Army”, and who did the driving? If you are faced with the question of choosing to join the Red Army or the death of you or your family, what could people do? Thank you, Stalin gained power, cleaned up a lot of Jews and non-Russians, whose hands were up to their elbows in blood. And you don’t have to discuss the “whites”, these are Russian people and this was their land and fatherland, which cannot be said about the Jew, especially about the one who lived outside Russia for decades and did nothing for Russia.
103. "Red Terror" and "White Terror"
Revolutions are not made with white gloves... Why be indignant that counter-revolutions are made with iron fists?
I.A. Bunin
The history of the White Movement we are considering is coming to an end, so it is worth taking a closer look at some of the factors accompanying the entire civil war. For example, the phenomenon of terror. As you know, it is usually divided into “red” and “white”. Let's touch on red first. Many examples of its implementation have already been given in other chapters, and it hardly makes sense to bring up specific facts again. They are too numerous, and listing them, even superficially, would take up too much space. Those interested can be recommended to refer to the book by S.P. Melgunov “Red Terror”, which was based on the materials of the Denikin commission to investigate Bolshevik atrocities. Let us qualitatively analyze how the phenomenon of “red terror” differed from the classic cruelties of paramilitary regimes and repressive campaigns in some other states. We can come to the conclusion that it differed in scope, direction and internal content, with the first and second directly following from the third.
Terror, which had been gradually spreading since the victory of Soviet power, was openly legalized and introduced into the system immediately after the establishment of one-party rule - in the summer of 18th, along with food surplus appropriation, a ban on commodity relations, committees of the poor, etc. And just as food appropriation was not a consequence of famine (on the contrary, it was often its cause), but part of Lenin’s unified plan for building communism, so the “red terror” was by no means a response to the “white” one. He, too, was an integral part of the new order created by the Bolsheviks. The peculiarity of the “Red Terror” is that it was not a punishment for any offenses. And not even a method of suppressing opponents - that was just one of its functions. It was not a means to achieve any specific goal, but at the same time it was also an end. One of the foundations of the emerging communist order - and this foundation, in turn, was built and improved together with other components of the “new society”. In the monstrous dystopia of the Leninist state, with the party leadership giving orders and the cogs-executors blindly implementing them, terror was supposed to perform the same functions that the death camps later performed in Nazi Germany: to destroy those parts of the population that do not fit into the scheme outlined Leader, and therefore are considered superfluous. Or at some stages they begin to interfere with the implementation of the overall plan
This was not yet the terror of the Stalinist camps, which used slave labor of people rejected by the regime. After all, according to Lenin’s original plan, the whole country was supposed to become such a camp, giving free labor on command and receiving a ration of bread in return. Therefore, people deemed unsuitable for such a scheme simply had to be exterminated. Hence the direction of terror. Since the right to think, make plans and draw conclusions in the new society was granted only to the party elite, it was the thinking part of the population that turned out to be superfluous and in the way. First of all, the intelligentsia, as well as the adjacent layers of citizens who have learned and are accustomed to thinking for themselves, for example, the cadre workers of Tula or Izhevsk, the most advanced and economic part of the peasantry, declared “kulaks.” Therefore, the “Red Terror” did not just carry out mass destruction of people - it sought to destroy the best. He suppressed everything cultural and progressive, killed the very soul of the people in order to replace it with a party propaganda surrogate. There was a kind of “zombification” of an entire people. Ideally, for such purposes, a permanent punitive apparatus should have “cut off” everything that rose in the slightest degree above the gray mass suitable for unconditional obedience.
Naturally, for such extensive tasks a very powerful repressive system was required. And it was created - multi-layered, covering the entire country with a network of terror: the Cheka, people's courts, the several types of tribunals listed earlier, army special departments. Plus the rights to repression granted to commanders and commissars, party and Soviet commissioners, food detachments and detachments, and local authorities. The basis of this entire complex apparatus was, of course, the Cheka. It was they who not only punished specific offenses, but also carried out a nationwide, centralized policy of terror.
We can only guess about the extent of the repressions and judge approximately, based on indirect data (and it is unlikely, given the Bolshevik carelessness, that any complete accounting of those destroyed was kept). Thus, the executioner-theorist Latsis in his book “Two Years of Struggle on the Internal Front” cited the figure of 8,389 people executed. with many caveats.
Firstly, this number refers only to 1918 and the first half of 1919, i.e. it does not take into account the summer of 1919, when many people were exterminated “in response” to the offensive of Denikin and Yudenich, when “executions according to the lists” began ", when, when the whites approached, hostages and prisoners were shot, drowned in barges, burned or exploded along with prisons (as, for example, in Kursk). The years 1920–1921, the years of the main reprisals against the defeated White Guards, members of their families and “accomplices,” are also not taken into account.
Secondly, the figures given refer only to the Cheka “in the manner of extrajudicial execution”; it does not include the actions of tribunals and other repressive bodies.
Thirdly, the number of those killed was given only for 20 central provinces, not including the front-line provinces, Ukraine, Don, Siberia, etc., where the security officers had the most significant “amount of work”
And fourthly, Latsis emphasized that these data are “far from complete.” Indeed, even with all the reservations, they look understated. In Petrograd alone and in just one campaign, after the assassination attempt on Lenin, 900 people were shot. However, casuistry is possible here, since in the “Lenin days” they were shot not “in the order of extrajudicial execution”, but “in the order of the Red Terror”.
A special feature of the “Red Terror” was that it was carried out centrally, according to the instructions of the government - either in massive waves throughout the state, or selectively in individual regions. For example, telegram No. 3348 to the Southern Front during Mamontov’s raid brought to the attention of divisions and regiments:
“The Revolutionary Military Council of the Southern Front orders, in a change to previous resolutions regarding the general policy of the Don region, to be guided by the following: to most mercilessly suppress the attempted rebellion in the rear, using in this suppression measures of mass destruction of the rebels.”
In the summer of 1920, during Wrangel’s offensive, Trotsky declared “red terror” in the Yekaterinoslav province. In previous chapters, numerous telegrams from Lenin with similar instructions were cited. Centralized instructions stipulated the categories of the population subject to extermination in a particular campaign, and sometimes even the type of execution. Thus, in a telegram to Penza dated August 11, 2018, Lenin ordered:
"...Hang (certainly hang, so that the people can see) at least 100 notorious kulaks, rich people, bloodsuckers... Find tougher people."
Another feature is the reinforcement of terror by class theory. The “bourgeois” or “kulak” was declared a subhuman, in all respects he acted as a kind of inferior being, “untouchable.” Therefore, from the point of view of communist morality, his destruction, in general, was not murder. Just like later, in Nazi Germany - the destruction of “racially inferior” peoples. Only in Russia it was not about the people, but about their class-inferior part. Therefore, from a “class” point of view, torture was considered completely acceptable. It has already been said that the question of their applicability was openly discussed in the press and was decided positively. The range of them already in civilian life was very diverse - torture with insomnia, light - car headlights in the face, a salty “diet” without water, hunger, cold, beatings, flogging, burning with a cigarette. In addition to “improvised” means, special ones were also used. Several sources, including a report by the Central Committee of the Russian Red Cross, talk about cabinets in which one could only stand upright (an option was to sit crouched) and in which prisoners were locked for long periods of time, sometimes cramming several people into a “single” cabinet. Savinkov and Solzhenitsyn, citing witnesses, mention a “cork chamber,” hermetically sealed and heated, where the prisoner suffered from lack of air and blood came out of the pores of the body. Taking into account the cultural composition of the victims, torture of another kind was also used, moral: placing men and women in a common cell with a single bucket, all kinds of mockery, humiliation and mockery. For example, for arrested women from cultural backgrounds, kneeling for many hours was practiced. Option - in the nude. And one of the Kyiv security officers, according to the Red Cross report, on the contrary, drove the “bourgeois women” into tetanus by interrogating them in the presence of naked girls groveling before him - not prostitutes, but the same “bourgeois women” whom he had previously managed to break.
It is no coincidence that N. Teffi recognized the commissar, who terrified the entire district of Unecha, as a quiet and downtrodden dishwasher who had always volunteered to help the cook cut chickens. “No one asked - she went willingly and never let her pass.” The portraits of security officers and prison commandants drawn by eyewitnesses - sadists, cocaine addicts, half-mad alcoholics - are also not accidental. It was precisely these people who were needed by the new government and took positions that corresponded to their inclinations. And for massacres, according to the summary of the 1st Kutepov Corps, they tried to attract the Chinese or Latvians, since ordinary Red Army soldiers, despite being given vodka and permission to profit from the clothes and shoes of the victims, often could not stand it and ran away.
If torture remained at the level of “amateur performance” and experiments carried out differently everywhere, then executions were unified and brought to a single methodology. Already in 1919–1920. they were carried out in the same way in Odessa, Kyiv, and Siberia. The victims were stripped naked, laid face down on the floor and shot in the back of the head. Such uniformity suggests centralized guidelines that take into account the regime of maximum “savings” and “convenience.” One cartridge per person, a guarantee against unwanted incidents at the last moment, again - it writhes less, does not cause inconvenience when falling, it stays the same as you put it in, pull it away and put the next one in. Only in mass cases did the form of murder differ - barges with pierced bottoms, rifle volleys or machine guns. However, even in these situations, the prescribed ritual was observed whenever possible. So, in 1919, before the surrender of Kyiv, when in one fell swoop they threw many prisoners under the volleys of the Chinese (adding to them a party of civilian employees of the Cheka, clerical and intelligence officers, who apparently knew too much), even in the prevailing rush of those under firing squad who were waiting for their turn , do not forget to undress punctually. And during the period of massacres in Crimea, when whole crowds were driven under machine guns every night, the doomed were forced to undress while still in prison, so as not to have to drive vehicles to get their things. And in winter, in the wind and frost, columns of naked men and women were driven to the place of execution.
But, perhaps, this order was not explained by sadism and the desire to mock. It fit perfectly into the initial projects of the new society and was justified by the same iron logic of Lenin’s dystopia, which completely lost all moral and ethical “remnants” and left only the principles of naked rationalism to the new state. Therefore, the system that destroys unnecessary people was obliged to scrupulously preserve everything that could be useful, not disdaining dirty linen. It’s just that they didn’t cut hair onto mattresses, like Nazi followers, but in conditions of raging typhus it would have been unsafe. And the clothes and shoes of those executed (with the exception of those stolen by the direct perpetrators) were carefully accounted for and entered into the “asset” of the Cheka. By some accident or oversight, a curious document ended up in Lenin’s PSS, vol. 51, p. 19:
“An invoice to Vladimir Ilyich from the economic department of the IBSC for the goods sold and released to you...”
In it, signed by the head. The economic department of the Moscow Cheka lists the following items: boots - 1 pair, suit, suspenders, belt.
“Only for 1 thousand 417 rubles 75 kopecks.”
One inevitably wonders who owned the Lenin suits, coats and caps that were later exhibited in museums? Did they have time to cool down after the previous owner, when the leader pulled them on himself?
When, after the “red” terror, you turn to the “white” terror and begin to examine materials, the question inevitably arises - did it even exist? If we define “terror” by its Bolshevik appearance, as a centralized, mass phenomenon, part of the general policy and state system, then the answer will definitely be negative.
No, the White Guards were not “angels” at all. The civil war is a terrible, cruel war. There were reprisals against the enemy and violence. But when you touch on specific facts, it turns out that such cases are completely incomparable with the “Red Terror”, neither quantitatively nor qualitatively. I’ll make a reservation right away - everything said applies to the areas of operation of regular white armies, and not to the independent “atamanshchina”, where both sides destroyed each other approximately “as equals”. But the “atamanshchina” did not obey the orders of the supreme white power. On the contrary, atrocities were committed in defiance of these orders.
As for other areas, a general pattern can be noted: the overwhelming share of atrocities occurs in the “partisan” phase of the White Movement. For example, the beginning of the Kornilov campaign, when no prisoners were taken - and what could they do with if the Volunteer Army had neither a rear nor a shelter. But already during the retreat from Ekaterinodar in April 18, the situation began to change - even many prominent Bolsheviks were released on the condition that with their influence they would protect the non-transportable wounded left in the villages from reprisals. Of course, cases of extrajudicial executions were repeated later. But they were strictly prohibited by the command and were in the nature of spontaneous excesses. And they usually only treated commissars, security officers, communists and Soviet workers. Often “internationalists”, i.e. Germans, Hungarians, and Chinese, were not taken prisoner. Former officers who ended up serving in the Red Army were not favored either - they were treated as traitors. And regarding the bulk of prisoners, they became one of the main sources of replenishment of the white armies: the peasant will come or will not come after mobilization, and the prisoner will not go anywhere, especially if he was forcibly mobilized by the Reds. For comparison, on the red side, cases of massacres of prisoners were observed both in the 19th and in the 20th.
The main outbreaks of repression against the Reds and their sympathizers, known in fact, occurred during the anti-Bolshevik uprisings in the Kuban, Don, Ural, Volga region, taking on a particularly fierce character where social discord was complemented by ethnic discord (Cossacks against non-residents, Kyrgyz against peasants, etc. .). Again, we are dealing with a kind of “partisan” phase. With spontaneous explosions, when the reciprocal hatred of the population, driven by them to rebellion, spilled out on the Bolsheviks. But even during such outbreaks, the degree of red and white reprisals was by no means unambiguous. Remember Serafimovich's "Iron Stream". The Taman army, carving out villages on its way, sparing neither women nor children, in order to raise the fighting anger, is forced to turn off the path and make a detour of 20-30 miles to look at the five hanged Bolsheviks. More rigorous examples can be given. The Veshensky rebels almost immediately after their victory (after the genocide!) decided to cancel the executions. Or, say, in 1947, the trial of Shkuro, Krasnov, Sultan-Girey Klych and other White Guards who collaborated with Germany took place. Their activities during the civil war were also examined. So, in the materials of the trial published in Soviet literature, there is no mention of any massacres against the civilian population - even in 1918, when Shkuro led the rebels. Everywhere we talk only about “commanders and commissars,” and the victims are listed by name. The same applies to Sultan-Girey Klych, who commanded the Wild Division. But these were the acts of the most “brutal” white units that were being investigated!..
Around the same time, in the summer of 18th, A. Stetsenko, Furmanov’s wife, went to Yekaterinodar and arrived at the moment of its capture by the Whites. And she fell into the clutches of Denikin’s counterintelligence. The whole city knew that she was a communist, the daughter of a prominent Ekaterinodar Bolshevik who was shot by the Rada. And she arrived from the Soviet of Deputies... After making sure that she was not a spy, but simply came to visit her relatives, no crime was found and she was released. During the uprisings on the Volga and Siberia, prominent communists who managed to avoid the spontaneous wave of popular anger, as a rule, remained alive. Mention has already been made of the Red leaders in Samara, who were gradually exchanged or escaped from prison. The leader of the Vladivostok communists P. Nikiforov quietly sat in prison from June 1918 to January 1920 - both under the government of Derber, and under the Ufa Directory, and under Kolchak, and without much difficulty he led the local party organization from there. In 1919–1920 The Bolshevik Krasnoshchekoe, the future chairman of the government of the Far Eastern Republic, was also in Kolchak’s prison. And Mamontov’s Cossacks from the raid, hundreds of kilometers away, took with them the captured commissars and security officers for trial in Kharkov - and many of them later also remained alive.
On the Soviet side, terror was introduced centrally - up to direct instructions from the government on the scale and methods of repression. Among the whites, it manifested itself in the form of spontaneous excesses, which were suppressed and curbed in every possible way by the authorities as this “element” was organized. If in open Soviet literature, in Lenin’s PSS, many documents have been preserved demanding merciless and wholesale reprisals, then you will not find excerpts from such orders and instructions for the white armies anywhere - despite the fact that many archives, headquarters and government ones, fell into the hands of the Reds enemy documents in “liberated” cities. There are simply no such orders. And Soviet historical literature is forced to make its statements about the “White Terror” either unfounded or relying on “terrible” documents, such as the telegram of the Stavropol governor dated 08/13/19, which demanded such punitive measures to fight the rebels as compiling lists of partisan families and evicting them outside the province (impressive atrocity compared to Lenin’s directives!). The order of the general is often cited as an example. Rozanov, who, with reference to Japanese methods, proposed “strict and cruel” measures to suppress the Yenisei uprising. They just keep silent about the fact that Rozanov was fired by Kolchak for this. And Wrangel, declaring Crimea a besieged fortress, threatened to mercilessly... expel opponents of the government behind the front line.
The main difference between the “red” and “white” terrors stems from the very essence of the struggle between the parties. Some imposed a hitherto unfamiliar regime of totalitarianism (and, according to the original plans, perhaps super-totalitarianism), others fought to restore law and order. Was the concept of “terror” compatible with law and order? Laws are the first thing that white commanders and governments tried to restore, having found liberated territory under their feet. For example, in the South, the pre-February wartime laws of the Russian Empire were in effect. In the north - the most lenient legislation of the Provisional Government. Even in the Yaroslavl uprising, one of the first orders of Colonel Perkhurov restored pre-October laws, legal proceedings and prosecutorial supervision.
Yes, the white authorities executed their enemies. But the executions were again personal, not general. By court verdict. And the death sentence, in accordance with the law, was subject to approval by a person no lower than the commander of the army. I wonder if the Soviet army commanders would have time left for direct duties if they were given all the verdicts in the areas occupied by their troops for approval? By the way, the same order existed with Petlyura. If you don’t believe me, open Ostrovsky’s “How the Steel Was Tempered,” where the Petliuraites are discussing whether to impute several years to the arrested person, since the “chief ataman” will not approve the sentence of the minor.
The descriptions of white counterintelligence - with torture, dungeons and executions - usually look groundless. It was as if they were copied from the Cheka. Counterintelligence had many of the shortcomings mentioned earlier, but it did not have the right to execute or pardon. Its functions were limited to arrest and preliminary inquiry, after which the materials were transferred to the judicial investigative authorities. How would she carry out torture and torment without even having her own prisons? Those arrested were kept in citywide prisons or guardhouses. And how, after torture, would she present those arrested to the court, where, unlike amateur counterintelligence officers, there were professional lawyers who would immediately make a fuss about an obvious violation of the law? And besides, they didn’t like counterintelligence officers. Finally, when the whites abandoned the cities, the Soviet side for some reason did not document any “creepy dungeons”, unlike the whites, who repeatedly did this when the Bolsheviks abandoned the cities. However, everything is relative. In Yekaterinoslav, for example, the public and the legal profession expressed violent protest against the excesses of counterintelligence. They expressed that she kept those arrested for 2-3 days without interrogation or bringing charges. From the point of view of legality, such actions, of course, were outrages.
As for the courts that decided the fate of the accused communists, their approach, although strict, was far from unambiguous. Guilt was determined personally. So, in the spring of 19, several dozen people were caught red-handed in Dagestan, the entire underground revolutionary committee and the Bolshevik committee, at the last meeting, on the eve of the impending uprising. Five of them were executed. On April 22, 2020, in Simferopol, the entire meeting of the city party and Komsomol committees, also several dozen people, was arrested. Nine were sentenced to death. 4.06.20. in Yalta they took 14 underground workers. Six were shot.
In general, the literature on “white terror” is extensive. But usually he gets off with general phrases. About how the advancing Reds liberated prisons full of workers. Forgetting to clarify, these “workers” ended up in prison for their beliefs or for theft and banditry. Well, as soon as it came to specific facts, the accusations began to limp. Thus, the solid work of Yu. Polyakov, A. Shishkin and others, “The Anti-Soviet Intervention of 1917–1922 and Its Collapse,” gives as many as ... two examples of reprisals by landowner officers against peasants who plundered their estates. This is for the entire Kolchak front (let us also take into account the fact that such actions were officially prohibited by Kolchak, as well as by Denikin). A fact from a leaflet of the Ufa Bolshevik Committee about some lieutenant Gankevich, who shot two high school students for working in a Soviet institution, wandered from book to book. It does not say whether this Gankevich was mentally healthy and how the command treated him later. In the same way, the books repeat the example given by Furmanov in “Chapaev” - about drunken Cossacks who chopped up two red cooks who accidentally stopped by their location. Such rewriting of facts from each other seems to speak for itself - and not at all about their widespread nature. (By the way, the same Furmanov quite calmly describes how he himself ordered an officer to be shot just because they found a letter from his fiancée, where she writes how bad life is under the Reds and asks to release them as soon as possible.)
It cannot be denied that there were also atrocities and lawlessness on the part of the whites. But they were carried out contrary to the general policy of the command. And they were not a mass campaign, but isolated cases, so the question remains open - are such facts subject to any generalization? Thus, the “green commander-in-chief” N. Voronovich told in his memoirs how Colonel Petrov’s punitive detachment, suppressing a peasant rebellion, shot 11 people in the village of Tretya Rota. But this execution was the only one. As Voronovich writes:
“What happened then in the village of Third Company, in its horror and monstrous cruelty, surpasses all the massacres committed before and since by volunteers...”
And this reprisal cost the Denikins a powerful uprising in the Sochi district... In Stavropol in 1920, when the front was already collapsing, the Cossacks, brutalized by defeat, vented their rage by killing about 60 people. political prisoners held in prison. The entire local public was outraged, and protests immediately followed at all levels of the city prosecutor Krasnov (who soon became the Minister of Justice in the Denikin government). But this case was also one of a kind. Unlike the Bolsheviks, who destroyed prisoners during the retreat, the Whites could not afford this, realizing that the Reds would take it out on the civilian population. On the contrary, as already mentioned, in a number of cases, for example, in Yekaterinodar, communist prisoners were released in order to prevent the atrocities of the Red Army entering the city.
B. Aleksandrovsky, who worked as a doctor in Gallipoli, in one of the camps of the defeated White Army, wrote:
“The prevailing belief among Wrangel’s officers was that the main mistake, one of the reasons for the defeat, was softness in the fight against Bolshevism.”
Indeed, the extent of the repressions can be judged from documents such as the appeal of the Crimean Regional Committee of the RCP (b) to workers, soldiers and peasants:
"Comrades! The blood of the innocently tortured nine of your representatives calls to you! To vengeance! To arms!"
Innocently tortured nine - Sevastopol underground city party committee, arrested on 02/04/20 during the preparation of the uprising and shot. I wonder what numbers the Whites would have to operate with if they had thought of issuing similar appeals about the work of the Cheka?
But the most eloquent example of a comparison of red and white repressions is given by a former gene. Danilov, who served at the headquarters of the 4th Soviet Army. In April 1921, the Bolsheviks decided to hold a solemn funeral for the victims of the “White Terror” in Simferopol. But no matter how much they searched, they found only 10 underground fighters, convicted by a military court and hanged. The figure seemed “unrespectable,” and the authorities took the first dead people they found from hospitals, bringing the number of coffins to 52, which were buried magnificently after a solemn procession and meeting. This happened at a time when the Reds themselves had already shot 20 thousand people in Simferopol...
From the book History of Russia from Rurik to Putin. People. Events. Dates author Anisimov Evgeniy Viktorovich“Red Terror” Undoubtedly, by the summer of 1918, “combustible material of resistance” had accumulated in society. The Bolsheviks took it very seriously, as Lenin wrote, “to cleanse the Russian land of all kinds of harmful insects,” which he considered to be the huge masses of their enemies - from
From the book Russia, washed in blood. The worst Russian tragedy author Burovsky Andrey MikhailovichChapter 12 Red Terror Pretexts and reasons In the USSR, it was officially believed that initially the communists were very kind and did not intend to use terror at all. They say that the Red Terror had to be introduced solely in response to the White Terror. The White Terror was expressed in the fact that
From the book Red Terror through the eyes of eyewitnesses author Volkov Sergey VladimirovichRed Terror Three prisoners were transferred from prison to our cell again. All three are very young people. They were accused of allegedly extorting a bribe of 20 thousand rubles from a well-known person in Odessa - during a search of her. These three faces, as well as their
From the book History of Wars and Military Art by Mering Franz From the book Alien Invasion: A Conspiracy Against the Empire author Shambarov Valery Evgenievich45. How the Red Terror grew The civil war left behind ruins, chaos and graves. In the winter of 1919–20, after the collapse of the Kolchak front, the entire space from the Urals to the Pacific Ocean turned into a huge kingdom of death. Bloody anarchy was sweeping across Siberia. Barely
From the book The Black Book of Communism: Crimes. Terror. Repression by Bartoszek Karel3. Red terror The Bolsheviks openly say that their days are numbered, the German ambassador in Moscow Karl Gelfreich reported to his government on August 3, 1918. - Moscow was gripped by real panic... Incredible rumors are circulating around the city about “traitors” who have infiltrated
From the book Red Terror in Russia. 1918-1923 author Melgunov Sergey Petrovich“RED TERROR” “In a country where individual freedom provides the opportunity for honest, ideological struggle... political murder as a means of struggle is a manifestation of despotism.” Exec. Committee Nar. Will I lived through the first five years of Bolshevik rule in Russia, when I
From the book "Red Terror" in Russia 1918 - 1923 author Melgunov Sergey PetrovichRed Terror “In a country where personal freedom provides the opportunity for honest, ideological struggle... political murder, as a means of struggle, is a manifestation of despotism.” Exec. Committee Nar. Voli. I lived through the first five years of Bolshevik rule in Russia. When I left for
From the book Russian Revolution. Bolsheviks in the struggle for power. 1917-1918 author Pipes Richard EdgarCHAPTER 10. RED TERROR Terror is mainly unnecessary cruelty committed by frightened people for the sake of their own peace of mind. From a letter from Engels to Marx1 Systematic state terror was not invented by the Bolsheviks: they resorted to it long before them
From the book Secret Operations of the Cheka author Golinkov David LvovichRed Terror On January 1, 1918, at about 19:30, the car in which V.I. Lenin, M.I. Ulyanova and the secretary of the Swiss Social Democratic Party F. Platten were returning from a meeting in the Mikhailovsky Manege was fired at on the Simeonovsky Bridge ( now the Belinsky Bridge)
author Simbirtsev IgorChapter 5 Was the “Red Terror” a response to the “White”? History and traditions are being destroyed, the struggle is becoming fiercer to the point of bestial anger. Soviet People's Commissar A.V.
From the book of the Cheka in Lenin's Russia. 1917–1922: At the dawn of the revolution author Simbirtsev IgorWhat was the “White Terror” It is often the cruelty of the White counterintelligence that the Bolsheviks and their defenders justify their “Red Terror”. Although during the Civil War itself, and even in the 20s and 30s of the first decades of Soviet power, the ideologists of Bolshevism did not even defend such
From the book All Against All: The Unknown Civil War in the Southern Urals author Suvorov Dmitry VladimirovichRed terror in the Urals Now discussions about red terror have even become somewhat commonplace: they refer to it in all cases - just as before everyone blamed white terror. We still have a long way to go before we understand what the Red Terror is as a phenomenon in the history of the 20th century.
From the book The Emperor Who Knew His Fate. And Russia, which did not know... author Romanov Boris SemenovichRed Terror The wave of revolutionary terror in Russia of the 20th century is usually counted from the murder in 1901 of the Minister of Public Education Nikolai Pavlovich Bogolepov (he was killed by a student expelled from Moscow University, Socialist Revolutionary P. Karpovich). Total victims from 1901 to 1911
From the book The Black Book of Communism by Bartoszek Karel3. Red Terror On August 3, 1918, the German ambassador in Moscow Karl Gelfreich reported to his government: “The Bolsheviks openly say that their days are numbered. Moscow was gripped by real panic... Incredible rumors are circulating around the city about “traitors” who have infiltrated
From the book Provincial “counter-revolution” [White movement and civil war in the Russian North] author Novikova Lyudmila GennadievnaLocal government and white terror White terror traditionally occupied a special place in red propaganda and later Soviet historiography, which believed that it was the widespread use of violence that allowed whites to keep power in their hands. It was argued that only through
Red Terror
The official date of the beginning of the Red Terror is considered to be August 17, 1918, when in St. Petersburg, the People's Commissar of the Northern Commune, the head of the St. Petersburg Extraordinary Commission, Uritsky, was killed by a former student, cadet during the war, socialist Kannegiesser. The official document about this act reads: “During interrogation, Leonid Kannegiesser stated that he killed Uritsky not by order of the party or any organization, but by his own motive, wanting to take revenge for the arrest of the officers and the shooting of his friend Pereltsweig.”
In response to these two terrorist attacks, the Soviet government announced the start of an entire campaign of terror. At the same time, the objects of mass executions were not individuals, not any class, but entire segments of the population, namely, everyone who did not belong to the working class or the poorest peasantry.
We do not know and probably will never know the exact number of these victims - we do not even know their names. It is safe to say, however, that the actual figure is significantly higher than the figure given later in the semi-official report (no official announcement was ever published). In fact, on March 23, 1919, the English military chaplain Lombard reported to Lord Curzon: “In the last days of August, two barges filled with officers were sunk and their corpses were thrown out on the estate of one of my friends, located on the Gulf of Finland; many were tied up in twos and three with barbed wire."
One of the leaders of the Cheka, Peters, called these days in Petrograd “historical terror” in an interview given to a newspaper correspondent in November: “Contrary to popular belief,” said Peters, “I am not at all as bloodthirsty as they think.” In St. Petersburg, “the soft-bodied revolutionaries were thrown out of balance and began to be overzealous. Before the murder of Uritsky, there were no executions in Petrograd, and after it there were too many and often indiscriminately, while Moscow, in response to the assassination attempt on Lenin, responded only by shooting several tsarist ministers.” And then, however, the not too bloodthirsty Peters threatened: “I declare that any attempt by the Russian bourgeoisie to once again raise its head will meet such a rebuff and such reprisal, before which everything that is understood as the Red Terror will pale.”
White terror
Violence and terror have been indispensable companions of the centuries-old history of mankind. Russia has traditionally been one of the countries where the cost of human life was scanty and humanitarian rights were not respected. Lenin argued that the Red Terror during the Civil War in Russia was forced and became a response to the actions of the White Guards and interventionists.
Currently, the thesis of the historian Melgunov has become widespread that the whites, more than the reds, tried to adhere to legal norms when carrying out punitive actions.
N 
o legal declarations and resolutions of the confronting parties did not protect the population of the country in those years from tyranny and terror. Neither the decisions of the VI All-Russian Extraordinary Congress of Soviets (November 1918), nor the resolution of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee on the abolition of the death penalty (January 1920), nor the instructions of the governments of the opposite side could prevent them. Both of them shot, took hostages, and practiced torture. The Whites also had institutions similar to the Cheka and revolutionary tribunals - various counterintelligence and military courts, propaganda "Red" terror
organizations with intelligence tasks, such as Denikin’s Osvag (propaganda department of the Special Meeting under the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of the South of Russia). Already the first acts of violence carried out by the one- and then two-party Soviet government (Bolsheviks and left Socialist Revolutionaries): the closure of newspapers that defended the ideas of February, and not October 1917, the outlawing of the Cadet Party, the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, the introduction of the right of extrajudicial struggle for power - caused the rejection of many. Lenin proceeded from the fact that “the benefit of the revolution, the benefit of the working class - this is the highest law”, that only he is the highest authority that determines “this benefit”, and therefore can resolve all issues, including the main one - the right to life and activity. The principle of expediency of means used to protect power was guided by Trotsky, Bukharin and others: “Proletarian coercion in all its forms, from executions to labor conscription, is a method of developing communist humanity from the human material of the capitalist era.” In a note by E.M. Sklyansky (August 1920), deputy. Prev. Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic, Lenin wrote: “...Under the guise of the “greens” (we will blame them later) we will walk 10-20 miles and outweigh the kulaks, priests, and landowners. Prize: 100,000 rubles for a hanged man”.
TO 
Autsky argued that viewing the Red Terror as a response to the White Terror is the same as justifying one’s own theft by the fact that others steal. He prophetically predicted that “Bolshevism will remain a dark page in the history of socialism.”
The leadership of the Soviet Republic officially recognized the creation of a non-legal state, where arbitrariness became the norm and terror was the most important tool for maintaining power. It is characteristic that the right of the Cheka to extrajudicial killings, created by Trotsky, was signed by Lenin; the tribunals were given unlimited rights by the People's Commissar of Justice; the resolution on the Red Terror was endorsed by the People's Commissars of Justice, Internal Affairs and the Administrator of the Council of People's Commissars; The tasks of the military tribunals were determined by the chairman of the Revolutionary Military Tribunal of the Republic. “Military tribunals are not and should not be guided by any legal norms. These are punitive bodies, created in the process of intense revolutionary struggle, which decide
their verdicts, guided by the principle of political expediency and the legal consciousness of communists.”. On September 11, 1918, from the pages of the newspaper Pravda, Osinsky stated: “From the dictatorship of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie, we moved to extreme terror - a system of destruction of the bourgeoisie as a class.”. The Decree of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of February 15, 1919 allowed “to take hostages from the peasants with the understanding that if the snow is not cleared, they will be shot”.
The territories occupied by whites cannot be considered as isolated territories: there was a civil war, which means the warring parties influenced each other. At the same time and interconnected with the red, white terror dominated the country.
U 
In 1918, “environmental terror” began to reign, when the symmetry of the parties’ actions became inevitably similar. This continued in 1919-1920, when both the Reds and the Whites simultaneously built their dictatorial states. None of the leaders of the warring parties avoided the use of terror against their opponents and civilians. The forms and methods of terror were different. but they were also used by adherents of the Constituent Assembly (Komuch in Samara, the Provisional Regional Government in the Urals, the Provisional Siberian Government, the Upper Administration of the Northern Region), and the white movement itself.
Kolchak and Denikin were professional military men, patriots who had their own views on the future of the country. In Soviet historiography, Kolchak is characterized as a reactionary and a hidden monarchist. The image of a liberal who enjoyed the support of the population was created abroad. These are extreme points of view. During interrogations at the Irkutsk Cheka in 1920, Kolchak stated that he did not know about many facts of the ruthless attitude towards workers and peasants on the part of his punishers. Perhaps he was telling the truth. But it is difficult to talk about support for his policies in Siberia and the Urals, if out of approximately 400,000 Red partisans of that time, 150,000 acted against him, and among them were 4-5% of wealthy peasants, or, as they were then called, kulaks.
The Kolchak government created the punitive apparatus based on the traditions of pre-revolutionary Russia, but changing the names: instead of the gendarmerie - state security, police - militia, etc. The managers of punitive authorities in the provinces in the spring of 1919 demanded “not to comply with legal norms created for peacetime, but to proceed from expediency”. This was true, especially during punitive operations. General Sakharov, by order to the army of October 12, 1919, demanded that every tenth hostage or resident be shot, and also in the event of armed uprisings against the military: “such populated areas should be immediately surrounded, all residents shot, and the village itself destroyed to the ground.” “A year ago, - wrote the Minister of War of the Kolchak government A. Budberg in his diary on August 4, 1919, - the population saw us as deliverers from the harsh captivity of the commissars, and now they hate us as much as they hated the commissars, if not more; and, what’s even worse than hatred, it no longer believes us, it doesn’t expect anything good from us.”.
The White Terror turned out to be as meaningless in achieving its goal as any other. As the commander of US troops in Siberia, General Graves, recalled, “in Eastern Siberia, for every person killed by the Bolsheviks, 100 people were killed by anti-Bolshevik elements” And “The number of Bolsheviks in Siberia by the time of Kolchak had increased many times in comparison with their number at the time of our arrival”.