The Origins of the Cheka

[Taz]

The origins of the Soviet Secret Police, known as the Cheka, 1917 until its formal abolition in 1922.
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Russia's first political police, the distant ancestor to the KGB, was the Oprichnina founded in 1565 by Ivan the Terrible, the first Grand Duke of Muscovy to be crowned Tsar.
The 6,000 Oprichniki dressed in black, rode on black horses and carried on their saddles the emblems of a dog's head and a broom, symbolizing their mission to sniff out and sweep away treason. As in Stalin's Russia, most treason which they swept away only existed in the minds of the Oprichniki and their ruler. Their victims included whole cities, chief among them Novgorod, most inhabitants were massacred in a five-week reign of terror that would later be equalled and surpassed by Josef Stalin. Between the years of 1823 and 1861 290,000 people were sentenced to Siberian exile or hard labour camps, the first concentration camp in the Soviet Union was the Solovki Camp which was located in the Solovetsky Islands and where all political prisoners were sent.

Although the Soviet Secret Police was officially formed as the Cheka (VChK; Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counterrevolution and Sabotage) in December 1917, shortly after the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia, its origins go back to the earliest tsarist times. Ivan the Terrible, Russia’s first tsar, established his secret police, the Oprichniki in 1565. The members of the Oprichnina dressed in black and rode atop black horses while carrying emblems of a dog’s head and a broom. This symbolized their mission: to sniff out treason and sweep it away.

The basic tsarist mission of finding treason and eliminating it was essentially the same as the one given to Feliks Dzerzhinsky, the first head of the Cheka, by the ruling cabinet, the Council of People’s Commissars (Sovnarkom):

1. To investigate and liquidate all attempts or actions connected with counter-revolution or sabotage, no matter from whom they may come, throughout Russia.

2. The handing over for trial by Revolutionary Tribunal of all saboteurs and counter-revolutionaries, and the elaboration of measures to fight them

By April 1918, the Cheka had set up its own three-man courts, known as troikas, to carry out extra-judicial reprisal. This extra-judicial reprisal gave the Cheka the power to perform investigation, arrest, interrogation, prosecution, trial, and execution of the verdict, including the death penalty.

During the summer of that year, three events occurred that greatly increased the scope of the Cheka’s activities and initiated the period known as the Red Terror that lasted until the end of the Russian Civil War. These were the assassination of the German ambassador to Russia and the attempted assassination of Lenin by members of the Left Social Revolutionaries as well as the murder of the head of the Petrograd Cheka by a member of another socialist faction that were rivals to the ruling Bolsheviks.

From this point the Cheka initiated a period of mass executions of people not based only on their specific actions, such as sabotage, but also for their beliefs and class origins. In reprisal for the assassination of the German ambassador, the Cheka executed 350 Social Revolutionaries and 512 hostages were shot by the Secret Police after the assassination attempt on Lenin. It has been estimated that between 100,000 and 500,000 people were executed by the Cheka during the Red Terror.

In addition to mass executions, the Cheka also initiated the infamous slave labor camps to imprison not only those considered undesirable but also people who happened to have the wrong class origins, most particularly the bourgeoisie. By the end of 1920 Soviet Russia had 84 of these concentration camps with about 50,000 prisoners. This prison system grew rapidly immediately following the Russian Civil War so that by 1923 the number grew to a total of 315 camps.

Perhaps the greatest crime committed by the Cheka during the Red Terror was its campaign of executions and starvation against the peasantry. Lenin demanded strict adherence to the law that required the peasantry to sell all their excess grain to the state at fixed prices. Because of runaway inflation these payments were worth virtually nothing so most of the peasants opted not to sell any of their grain to the state. Lenin retaliated by sending Cheka teams to carry out executions against speculators who purchased grain from the peasants and then sold it on the black market. Since this succeeded only in driving up grain prices, the Cheka was ordered to seize the grain directly from the peasants. Whether wealthy or not, all peasants were branded as rich kulaks and the full fury of the Cheka was unleashed on them in what came to be known as the “Bread War.” Not only were individual peasants executed but entire families and whole villages as well.

By the time the Russian Civil War ended in 1921 the Cheka was thoroughly hated by most of the populace, including even many Bolsheviks, because of its brutal methods committed during the Red Terror. Lenin found it necessary to remove its authority over ordinary crimes and limited its jurisdiction to only prosecution of state crimes. The Cheka was officially abolished on February 6, 1922 and immediately replace with a new security organization called the State Political Administration or GRU (Gosudarstvennoe Politicheskoe Upravlenie).

In 1924 this organization was renamed OGPU or Unified State Political Administration. Dzerzhinsky and most of the leaders of the old Cheka remained in the new GPU. Like the Tsarist secret police, the Okhrana, under Nicholas II, the GPU was made a part of the Ministry of the Interior. Over the next few years the GPU (OGPU) regained most of the powers of the old Cheka. For the next seven decades, this was to remain a pattern of the Soviet Secret Police; the names might change but the duties and powers of this organization in its various incarnations did not.

Eddie. ( CO PageWise, Inc.)

[Taz]

born Sept. 11, 1877, Dzerzhinovo, near Minsk, Russian Empire
died July 20, 1926, Moscow, Russia, U.S.S.R.

Russian Bolshevik leader, head of the first Soviet secret-police organization.

Son of a Polish nobleman, he was repeatedly arrested for revolutionary activities beginning in 1897. After the Russian Revolution of 1917, he headed the newly created Cheka, which became Soviet Russia's security-police agency. He organized the first concentration camps in Russia and acquired a reputation as a ruthless and fanatical communist. In 1924 he was given control of the Supreme Economic Council.

Eddie.

[Taz]

(November 21,1886 - April 25, 1938)
Was a deputy director of the Cheka in the Soviet Union and acting director from July 7 to August 22 1918. In English he was known as "Jacob Peters" or "Jan Peters" and "Peter the Painter".

Born in Latvia, he lived in London for a time after the 1905 Revolution and married an Englishwoman and had a daughter. He was involved in a violent incident at Houndsditch in which policemen were killed during the robbery of a jewelry shop, but escaped prison, much to the dismay of the then Home Secretary Winston Churchill.

He returned to Russia in May 1917 and his wife later divorced him. He participated in the events of the Russian Revolution and joined the Cheka.

In later life he lived in Tashkent and perished in the Great Purge in 1938.

Excerpt from Churchill and the Secret Service
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Late in 1910 the police surprised a gang of burglars attempting to break into a jeweller's shop in the East End of London. Three policemen were shot and two badly wounded. One of the criminals was killed and it emerged that he was a member of a gang led by one `Peter the Painter', a Latvian. Two of its members were traced to a house at Sidney Street in Stepney, who began to fire wildly at the police.

Churchill received the news in his bath and within an hour was at the scene dressed in silk hat and astrakhan coat. Eager for a direct view he took shelter from the shooting in a doorway. One bullet pierced the coat of Patrick Quinn, head of the police Special Branch. Seven hundred police and Scots Guards armed with rifles surrounded the house joined by a horde of journalists, photographers, newsreel cameramen and curious bystanders. One report described Churchill `moving restlessly hither and thither among the rather nervous and distraught police, a professional soldier among civilians, talking, questioning, advising ...' The image was caught in countless newspaper photographs and cinema newsreels.

Eventually the house caught fire. Churchill, alarmed for the safety of the fire brigade, instructed it to hold back until the shooting had stopped. When police finally kicked their way into the burned-out interior they found two bodies, one asphyxiated by smoke, the other shot by a police bullet. They were identified as Fritz Svaars, a Latvian, and William Sokolow, a Russian.

The Tory Opposition poured scorn on Churchill's appearance at the scene and his search for headlines. He later accepted he should have stayed away, but this affair exposed more than his impetuosity. It also revealed his fascination for the mysterious world of anarchists and revolutionaries, the darkness that lurked beneath the surface of Edwardian society. He termed the Sidney Street gang `a germ cell of murder, anarchy, and revolution ... pursuing their predatory schemes and dark conspiracies'. Peter the Painter was `one of those wild beasts who, in later years ... were to devour and ravage the Russian state and people'. Again, this is typical Churchillian language, but also not so far from the truth. Peter the Painter -- or Peter Piatkow, a Latvian painter of street signs -- was never caught and was probably far less significant than legend affords. But the larger group comprised mostly Latvian Bolsheviks carrying out `expropriations' to finance their crusade against Tsarist Russia. Fritz Svaars, one of the Sidney Street dead, was a proven activist, while the man who in fact shot the police at Houndsditch -- and who miraculously escaped imprisonment -- was Jacob Peters. He was another Latvian Bolshevik who after 1917 became known as the `Robespierre of the Revolution' as right-hand man to Felix Dzerzhinsky, head of Lenin's secret police the Cheka, where he indulged in an orgy of killing and executions of enemies of the regime before himself falling victim to Stalin's purges.


Eddie.

[Taz]

Actually called the Vecheka, Vecheka stands for All-Russian Extraordinary Commission to Combat Counter-Revolution and Sabotage.

Feliks Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky 1917 - 1918

Yakov Khristoforovich Peters, "Jacob Peters", "Jan Peters", "Peter the Painter". 1918

Feliks Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky 1918 - 1922

[Taz]

After a July 1918 revolt by SRs, the Cheka turned its guns on fellow socialists, executing 350 captured SR rebels. One month later, the SR Fanya Kaplan nearly succeeded in assassinating Lenin. Her noble effort unfortunately gave the Cheka the excuse to initiate the Red Terror, i.e., mass executions of people based not upon their actions but their class origins and beliefs.
The first conspicuous act of government-ordered reprisals on a large scale without regard for individual guilt came after the assassination of Michael Uritzky and the attempt on Lenin's life on August 30. These events were not in themselves apt to justify measures against the bourgeoisie, for the two assassins, Kenigiesser and Fania Kaplan, were both members of the Social Revolutionary party and therefore not "bourgeois." But the minds of the Soviet leaders were dominated by the theory that Social Revolutionaries and Mensheviks were tools of the "class enemy," and it appeared logical to the Bolsheviks to strike at the group which allegedly had inspired the assassination. Five hundred hostages were shot in reprisal in Petrograd alone by order of Zinoviev, the head of the local soviet.
On September 5, the people's commissars officially legalized the red terror.

From then on the Cheka's executions never ceased. The exact number murdered is usually estimated at between 100,000 and 500,000, but the chaotic wartime conditions make the accounting especially difficult. But execution was not the Cheka's only tool; it also pioneered the development of the modern slave labor (or "concentration") camp. Inmates were generally frankly treated as government-owned slaves, and used for the most demanding sorts of work - such as digging arctic canals - while receiving pitifully small rations. As Pipes explains, "Soviet concentration camps, as instituted in 1919, were meant to be a place of confinement for all kinds of undesirables, whether sentenced by courts or by administrative organs. Liable to confinement in them were not only individuals but also 'categories of individuals' - that is, entire classes: Dzerzhinskii at one point proposed that special concentration camps be erected for the 'bourgeoisie.' Living in forced isolation, the inmates formed a pool of slave labor on which Soviet administrative and economic institutions could draw at no cost." (The Russian Revolution) The number of people in these camps according to Pipes was about 50,000 prisoners in 1920 and 70,000 in 1923; many of these did not survive the inhuman conditions.

The mildest manifestation of the Red Terror was the official policy excluding "class enemies" entirely from the wartime rationing system; i.e., legally, it was often impossible for disfavored groups to even purchase food. As a consequence, the average "bourgeois" had only the choice between death and illegal activities." Bourgeoisie with valued technical training could usually get around these rules, but otherwise their plight - and the plight of their families - was bleak indeed, though naturally far better than the inmates of the slave labor camps.


SR Fanya Kaplan ( Lenin's would be assasin) and Grigori Zinoviev (Head of the Petrograd local soviet)

[Chuck In Oregon]

This is great reading. I am learning a lot here. However, I can't help but think that some might dispute your statement "it also pioneered the development of the modern slave labor (or "concentration") camp.

It is an interesting and gruesome question of when did pogroms become genocide -- as if there was a difference for their victms -- and when did round-ups become concentration camps. However, it is difficult to ignore England's contributions to modern mass civilian extermination in the Boer War. Even though it was a much smaller war (but at least it was a war), the concentration camp principles were pretty consistent. You can find some enlightening reading on this subject just by googleizing the words "boer concentration camp" (no quotes) or by starting out with http://www.boer.co.za/boerwar/hellkamp.htm . Even at that, the English were building on the lessons of the brutal internment camps of their various Indian campaigns.

Slave labor camps go back to the beginning of recorded history. Witness, for example, Roman salt mines. No, England was likely not the originator of modern hellish internment/concentration camps, but neither was the Cheka a pioneer in the field.