Russian Civil War**

Russian Civil War

**The Red Terror begins**

After the assassination of the secret police leader Moisei Uritsky, and the attempted assassination of Lenin, Lenin gave the authorization to “introduce mass terror”. He had already sent out telegrams before to create terror against a possible peasant uprising in Nishny Novgorod, but after he was shot, he instructed, “it is necessary, secretly and urgently to prepare the terror.”

Lenin had also sent telegrams out to create terror against the landowners in Penza, who would not just accept the government taking from them, so they resisted, violently, against the military seizing their grain. The message said:

Comrades!  The kulak uprising in your five districts must be crushed without pity ... You must make example of these people.  Hang (I mean hang publicly, so that people see it) at least 100 kulaks, rich bastards, and known bloodsuckers.  Publish their names.  Seize all their grain.  Single out the hostages per my instructions in yesterday's telegram.  Do all this so that for miles around people see it all, understand it, tremble, and tell themselves that we are killing the bloodthirsty kulaks and that we will continue to do so ... Yours, Lenin.

P.S. Find tougher people.

Immediately after the assassination of Uritsky, the Bolsheviks executed 500 “representatives of overthrown classes”. Knowing that killing off hundreds of people would be pretty hard to keep secret, the Bolsheviks published an “Appeal to the Working Class” on September 3, 1918, telling workers to “crush the hydra of counterrevolution with massive terror! ... anyone who dares to spread the slightest rumor against the Soviet regime will be arrested immediately and sent to a concentration camp.”

On September 5th the Cheka issued the decrees “On Red Terror”, and the waves of executions had a name. In Petrograd 800 were shot, while another 6,229 were sent to concentration camps. In the first two months of the Red Terror thousands were executed, somewhere between 10,000 and 15,000, based on the names of the people executed, that was published in the “Cheka Weekly” and other official newspapers.

As the Bolsheviks occupied cities and towns during the Russian Civil War, they executed any they thought belonged to the “possessing classes”. In Kharkov there were between 2,000 to 3,000 executed in the first six months. When Kharkov was recaptured by the Bolsheviks in December of 1919, they executed another 2,000 people. In Rostov-on-Don, 1,000 murdered; Odessa, over 5,000; in Kiev, 3,000; Ekaterinodar, 3,000, and in the small town of Armavir in Kuban, about 3,000. And the list goes on and on and on.

In the Crimea, Béla Kun and Rosalia Zemlyachka had 50,000 White Army prisoners of war executed by shooting or hanging after General Pyotr Wrangel was defeated at the end of 1920. The White prisoners had been promised amnesty if they surrendered, and they unwittingly believed the communists. This was the largest massacre in the Russian Civil War.

When Nazi Germany did this same thing, the main military arm that was tasked with the executions and running the concentration camps were the SS. In Lenin’s Russia it was the Troops for Internal Defense of the Republic (TIDR). This had been the Cheka, but in 1921 all the military detachments of the Cheka were combined into the new unit, the TIDR. They ran the labor camps and the Gulag system, they requisitioned food (stole), they put down any peasant rebellions against their massed murders, ended riots, and eliminated any mutinies in the Red Army. Deserters would be executed, of course.

One of the main Bolsheviks in charge of the Red Terror was Yan Karlovich Berzin. This was his Bolshevik name, but his real name was Peteris Kuzis. He had taken part in the October Revolution of 1917, and afterwards was a part of the Cheka, the secret police. During the Red Terror, Berzin is the one who initiated the taking and shooting of hostages, to stop the desertions and other acts of disloyalty. So, if a Red Army soldier deserted, his family could be executed. During the Russian sailors’ mutiny in Kronstadt in March of 1921, Berzin tracked down, captured and then executed any sailors that were found.

The Red Army was plagued with desertions. In 1918, over one million deserted, and in 1919 that number doubled. In 1921 there were almost four million deserters of the Red Army. Thousands of these deserters were executed, and their families were taken hostage. Lenin gave the deserters a one-week period to turn themselves in, and after that their families would be executed. His instructions were, “After the expiration of the seven-day deadline for deserters to turn themselves in, punishment must be increased for these incorrigible traitors to the cause of the people.  Families and anyone found to be assisting them in any way whatsoever are to be considered as hostages and treated accordingly.”

A report from the Cheka Department stated, “Yaroslavl Province, 23 June 1919.  The uprising of deserters in the Petropavlovskaya volost has been put down.  The families of the deserters have been taken as hostages.  When we started to shoot one person from each family, the Greens began to come out of the woods and surrender.  Thirty-four deserters were shot as an example.”

During the Tambov Rebellion of 1920, around 100,000 peasant “rebels” and their families were either sent to the Gulags or deported. Around 15,000 of them were executed. The Red Terror campaign is where the Gulags were created. By September of 1921, it was estimated that around 70,000 were imprisoned. Surviving the Gulags was not likely and “repeated massacres” took place. At the Kholmogory camp prisoners were drowned in the nearby Dvina River. As a White Army neared these prisons, their prisoner populations were “emptied”, before being abandoned to the White forces.

When 900 workers at the Putilov factory went on strike, demanding food rations that matched the Red Army soldiers, the Cheka stormed the factory and executed 200 of them without trial. In Astrakhan, workers went on strike and many Red Army soldiers joined them. When the Cheka came in to break the strike, they loaded the strikers and Red Army soldiers onto barges and then threw hundreds of them into the Volga, with stones tied around their necks. In just three days, up to 4,000 were shot or drowned. This was the largest massacre of workers, until the Kronstadt rebellion.

In the Ural region, strikes continued, and Lenin sent an ominous message to Vladimir Smirnov, stating, “I am surprised that you are taking the matter so lightly, and are not immediately executing large numbers of strikers for the crime of sabotage”.

Besides executions, the Cheka also used torture or murdered their victims in gruesome ways to send a message.  In Odessa, the Cheka tied White Army officers to planks and then slowly fed them into tanks of boiling water, or into the furnaces. In Kharkov the Cheka would scalp their prisoners, or flay the skin off the victim’s hand. The skin was then peeled off to make what the Cheka called, “gloves”.

At Voronezh, the Cheka would strip prisoners naked, and them put them in barrels, studded with nails on the inside. The barrels would then be rolled around. At Dnipropetrovsk the victims were crucified or stoned to death. At Kremenchuk the Cheka impaled the members of the clergy, and buried any peasants that rebelled, alive. In Oryol, water would be poured onto naked prisoners, outside in the street, until they became ice statues. In Kiev, the Cheka made of Chinese detachments, would place rats in iron tubes, with one end sealed and the other end placed against a prisoner’s body. The tubes would be heated until the rats would gnaw through the victim’s body, trying to escape.

A typical execution would have the prisoner stripped of their clothing. The executioners would laugh and go through the clothing, taking anything they wanted. The victims were then gunned down in groups with machine guns, or shot in the back of the head individually with a Nagant revolver, the weapon of choice for the Cheka. In prison, the victims would be led down to a cellar, not knowing that it was their place of death, and as they entered the cellar they would be shot in the back of the neck. The cellar would be littered with the bodies of the dead, and the floors would be awash with blood. If the victims were killed outside a town, they were moved by truck, as they were bound and gagged, and once they got off the truck, they were forced to dig their own graves.

Many times, the Cheka would take a husband prisoner, and then wait for his wife to show up to ask for his freedom. They would then promise her to free the husband in return for sex. The wife would be raped, and then the husband would still be shot, or they both would be. In the areas where the Cossacks had ruled for centuries, the Bolsheviks had a program of decossackization. The Cheka was given quotas to execute 300 people in one day, in an organized “Day of Red Terror”. In Kislovodsk, the Cheka could not figure out who was to be executed when they came across the hospital, so “for lack of a better idea”, they killed all the patients in the hospital. In October 1920 alone, more than 6,000 people were executed. When the executions were mainly based upon a group’s ethnicity, the Cheka justified it by saying that the group was an enemy of the working people.

Since communism believed that there should be no religion, the clergy were singled out for brutal abuse. Priests, monks and nuns were crucified, or thrown into pots of boiling tar. They were scalped, strangled, drowned in holes cut in the ice, or given communion with melted lead instead of wine. In the first year it was estimated that around 3,000 were murdered.

There were never any reprisals or justice for the victims. Unlike Hitler’s Germany, no one ever defeated the Soviet Union, so other nations copied Lenin’s Red Terror. Mao Zedong, the greatest mass murderer in human history, wrote, “Red terror ought to be our reply to these counter-revolutionaries.  We must, especially in the war zones and in the border areas, deal immediately, swiftly with every kind of counter-revolutionary activity.”

People want a change when their children are hungry, and when they cannot get a job. Socialism promises radical change by a means of punishment and revenge. The money will be taken from those rich capitalists and given to those who are needy. But even if all the money was taken from every single millionaire, it can never pay for all of the programs that the socialists promise. Soon the average man realizes that his situation was worse than before. However, now if he wants a change, the socialists will use brutal force to remain in power. This force leads to executions and deaths in the millions. In Vietnam, one million were murdered. In Cambodia, there were two million victims and became known as the “Killing Fields”. North Korea has murdered at least two million, but since it is still a closed country, we will not know the total number. When the Soviet Union fell, and the records were able to be examined, it was estimated that between Lenin and Stalin, over 20 million were executed. And, the top murderer of all time was Mao, with somewhere between 65 million and 80 million murdered to make way for the workers’ paradise.