The Origins of the Cheka

[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)