100 years ago, on September 5, 1918, the SNK decree on the "red terror" was issued. FE Dzerzhinsky, the initiator and leader of the terror, defined the Red Terror as "intimidation, arrest and destruction of the enemies of the revolution on the basis of their class affiliation."
The death penalty in Russia was abolished on October 26, 1917 by the decision of the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets of Workers 'and Soldiers' Deputies. On November 22, 1917, the Council of People's Commissars issued Decree on the Court No. 1. By this decree, workers 'and peasants' revolutionary tribunals were created to fight against counter-revolutionary forces. On December 7, 1917, the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage was established under the Council of People's Commissars. With the outbreak of the Civil War, the Cheka, being the body of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" to protect the state security of the RSFSR, "the governing body of the fight against counterrevolution throughout the country", receives extraordinary powers and will become the main instrument for the implementation of the Red Terror. On June 13, 1918, a decree was adopted to reinstate the death penalty. From that moment on, execution could be used upon sentences of revolutionary tribunals. On June 21, 1918, Admiral A. Shchastny became the first person sentenced to death by the revolutionary tribunal.
The Red Terror was declared on September 2, 1918 by Ya. Sverdlov in an appeal by the All-Russian Central Executive Committee as a response to the attempt on Lenin's life on August 30, as well as to the murder of the chairman of the Petrograd Cheka, Uritsky, on the same day. On September 3, the newspaper Izvestia publishes the words of Dzerzhinsky: “Let the working class crush the hydra of counter-revolution with mass terror! Let the enemies of the working class know that everyone detained with a weapon in hand will be shot on the spot, that everyone who dares to carry out the slightest propaganda against the Soviet regime will be immediately arrested and imprisoned in a concentration camp!"
On September 5, the Council of People's Commissars issued a decree - the Ordinance on the "Red Terror". Its text said: “It is necessary to secure the Soviet Republic from class enemies by isolating them in concentration camps; all persons involved in White Guard organizations, conspiracies and revolts are subject to execution; it is necessary to publish the names of all those executed, as well as the grounds for applying this measure to them. " The chief security officer, Felix Dzerzhinsky, greeted this resolution with joy: “The laws of September 3 and 5 finally gave us legal rights to what some party comrades have objected to so far, to finish immediately without asking anyone's permission, with the counter-revolutionary bastard. " A major action of the Red Terror was the shooting in Petrograd of more than 500 representatives of the former "elite" (officials, including ministers, professors). In total, according to the official data of the Cheka, about 800 people were shot in Petrograd during the Red Terror.
It is worth remembering that terror was not a Bolshevik invention. It is a common policy tool during major shocks. So, terror was used during the revolution and the civil war in England, the revolution in France, the Civil War in the United States. Terror is the companion of most wars in the history of mankind up to the present day. In particular, during the modern war in Syria and Iraq, Sunnis, Shiites and other warring parties massively slaughter opponents. Russia was no exception during the Civil War. Terror was used not only by the Bolsheviks (red), and their opponents, whites, as well as various bandits - "green", nationalists, Muslim radicals - Basmachi, and invaders.
The terror was associated with three main factors. Firstly, during any big shock, war, revolution, unrest, a large amount of various human garbage is brought to the surface. In normal times, renegades of the human race, bandits, murderers, sadists, maniacs try to hide their brutal inclinations, are isolated from society in prisons and camps, ordinary people are protected by law enforcement agencies. In 1917, there was a geopolitical, state catastrophe. Old Russia died, the state was destroyed along with the entire former punitive, repressive and law enforcement system. The criminals broke free. A real criminal revolution began, a common companion of any turmoil and big war. In Soviet Russia, the formation of a new system for the protection of law and order began. But the militia was in its infancy, did not have the previous databases (the card indexes were destroyed), the cadres did not have the appropriate experience and skills.
In addition, some of the criminals, born sadistic murderers, infiltrated the police, the Cheka, and the army. White had the same situation. They received authority, power and used it to satisfy their dark inclinations. At the same time, they could hide behind noble goals - the fight against counter-revolution (or commissars).
Secondly, the Red Terror was an extreme, forced, retaliatory a measure to protect the socialist homeland from whites, greens, nationalists, basmachi, western and eastern invaders. It was impossible to restore the unity of Russia, to preserve it within the framework of the new Soviet project and to defeat internal and external enemies only with a “kind word”; a “colt” was also needed, that is, strength and determination to use it. Thus, the Red Terror was justified by the need to recreate the Russian (Soviet) civilization, a new development project and a new state. This was in the interests of the overwhelming majority of the population.
Thirdly, we must clearly and always remember that this was a terrible disaster, turmoil. The old development project, the Russia of the Romanovs, collapsed. The end has come not only for the old state, but for the development project. Breakdown of Russian civilization. All the seals of hell have been torn off. The year 1917 led to the fact that all the contradictions that had accumulated for centuries in Russia burst out. Chaos reigned, a kingdom of horror and inferno came. There was a psycho-catastrophe. Previously, completely peaceful people, peasants, workers, artisans, students, teachers took up arms and killed, destroyed not only armed opponents, but class enemies.
A funnel has formed in the inferno (hell). And it has swallowed millions of people. Therefore, it is necessary to forget the tales of liberals and monarchists about the terrible and bloodthirsty red commissars and white, Christian knights who fought for "Great Russia". Everything is much deeper. There were no innocents. Everybody used terror. It was agony, the decay of old Russia. Everyone was killed, hanged and robbed - the Red Guards, the White Guards, the Cossacks, the Western "peacekeepers", and the nationalists, and the peasant detachments. Violence reigned in the vast expanses of Russia. A war of all against all, without rules, without mercy.
Therefore, in the vastness of Russia there were such horrors that they tried to hide in the USSR, and are still afraid to describe in the cinema. It was hell. For example, an American witness to the war, General Knox, wrote:
“In Blagoveshchensk, officers were found with gramophone needles under their nails, with torn out eyes, with traces of nails on their shoulders in place of epaulettes. Their appearance was terrible …”White officers taken prisoner were not spared: shoulder straps were cut out on their shoulders, nails were driven in instead of stars, cockades were burned on their foreheads, skin was ripped off their legs in narrow stripes in the form of stripes. The wounded officers were slowly burned on fire. Therefore, seeing the imminent captivity, the volunteer officers tried to commit suicide or asked their comrades to shoot them in the name of friendship.
During the offensive of the Reds in the South of Russia: in Taganrog, Sievers' men threw 50 junkers and officers bound hand and foot into a hot blast furnace. In Evpatoria, several hundred officers were thrown into the sea after being tortured. A wave of similar atrocities swept across the Crimea: Sevastopol, Yalta, Alushta, Simferopol, etc. Terrible atrocities were committed in the Red Navy. They tortured and shot aboard the Rumania hydro-cruiser. On Truvor, they brutally mocked the victims: they cut their ears, nose, lips, genitals, and sometimes their hands, and then threw them into the water. On the cruiser "Almaz" there was a naval military tribunal: officers were thrown into ovens, and in winter they were put naked on the deck and poured with water until they turned into blocks of ice. This was done not by the Nazis, but by ordinary Russian people. At the same time, the sailors committed atrocities, for example, in the Baltic, immediately after February, before the October Revolution.
But the opponents of the Reds were no better. The myth of the White Knights, the honor of officers and the nobility of the White Guards was created by "democratic" publicists. When capturing settlements, the Whites also "cleaned" them from the Reds, their supporters (or whoever was recorded as such). Ataman Krasnov noted in his memoirs: “They (the Kolchakites - the Author.) Did not apply to the Bolsheviks, and at the same time the population that had been under the rule of the Soviets, especially the“lower working class”, generally accepted legal norms and humanitarian customs. It was not considered a sin to kill or torture a Bolshevik. Now it is impossible to establish how many massacres against the civilian population have forever gone into oblivion, leaving no documentary traces, because in an atmosphere of chaos and anarchy, ordinary people had no one to ask for protection …"
Admiral Kolchak himself wrote in one of his letters: “… You must understand that you cannot get rid of this. Civil war must be merciless. I order the chiefs of the units to shoot all the captured communists. Either we will shoot them, or they will shoot us. So it was in England at the time of the Scarlet and White Roses, so inevitably it should be with us …"
It is not surprising that the whites established such "order" in their rear that the population howled and mass resistance began. In response, the whites "tightened the screws" even more, the punitive detachments hanged, shot, dammed entire villages, did not spare even pregnant women, beat them to miscarriages. A real peasant war began, which became one of the most important reasons for the defeat of the White Army.
Here is a short sketch of this hell from the memoirs of the famous Russian monarchist V. Shulgin: “In one house they hung a commission by the hands … a fire was laid out under it. And they slowly fried … a man … And around a drunken gang of "monarchists" … howled "God save the Tsar."
Again, this was not done by Hitler's Sonderkommando or brigades of red internationalists (Latvians, Hungarians or Chinese), but by the most "your honors". It seems to be Russian to the very roots. Bail Golitsyns and Cornets Obolensky. This is the nightmare of the fratricidal slaughter, the world of inferno, which was established in Russia and which was suppressed at the cost of a lot of blood. A mental epidemic of cruelty, bloodlust and destruction flooded Russia.
The common people were no better than the politicized reds and whites. So, in the South of Russia, there were gangs of people, whole gangs, armies, alternately fighting with the Reds, then with the Whites. They did not recognize any power at all, they had no ideology. Therefore, when the Denikinites found their own or the Reds, caught in the clutches of the "green", the picture was terrible: bodies with severed limbs, broken bones, burned and decapitated. The rebellious peasants burned or froze captured Red Army soldiers or whites. They staged demonstrative executions of the Bolsheviks - with hammering people, sawing or stripping off their skin.
Denikin wrote: “ … everything that has accumulated over the years, over the centuries in embittered hearts against the unloved power, against the inequality of classes, against personal grievances and one's own broken life by someone's will - all this has now poured out with boundless cruelty … First of all - the boundless hatred both for people and for ideas spread everywhere. Hatred of everything that was socially or mentally superior to the crowd, that bore the slightest trace of wealth. Even to inanimate objects - signs of some culture, alien or inaccessible to the crowd. In this feeling, one could directly hear the accumulated anger for centuries, bitterness over the three years of war …”.
And the "glorious" Don Cossacks? In Denikin's memoirs, they look not like "warriors of Holy Russia", but like a gang of marauders. They declared themselves "a separate people", proclaimed independence and half of the population of the Don region (Russians, but not Cossacks) were deprived of part of their civil rights. In battles with the Red Donets, they plundered Russian villages like the hordes of Mamai. They even plundered "their" peasants on the Don. For them, the rest of Russia was a stranger. They not only robbed, but shot the villages with guns, raped and killed. It is interesting that it was this passion for prey, greed that became one of the reasons for the defeat of the White Army. While the whites fought and attacked, the Cossacks robbed. They say, let the Russians free themselves, we are "another people", we are on our own.
The interventionists also staged a terror. The British, who landed in Arkhangelsk and Murmansk, shot the captured Red Army soldiers in droves, beat them with rifle butts, threw them into prisons and concentration camps, exhausting them to death with overwhelming work. They were fed from hand to mouth, forced to join the Slavic-British counter-revolutionary corps. It was the British who in August 1918 created the first concentration camp on the Mudyug Island in the White Sea (“the island of death” - the mortality rate reached 30%). The Japanese committed atrocities in the Far East. The terror was also staged by the Ukrainian self-styledists.
Thus, we see confusion, civil carnage. A psycho-catastrophe, a complete disintegration of the old Russian society. Hence the hell that reigned on the territory of Russia. Order, however, was able to restore, albeit at the cost of a lot of blood, only the Bolsheviks. They offered the people a new development project in the interests of the majority of the people, created a new statehood and restored order.
