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.

[Taz]

Hi Chuck,
I hope you do not take offense to any of the comments in the article, It's not meant to either insult nor offend anyone whatsoever. This is just one persons view like many to be found on the web.
This particular Aricle is an excert from "War Communism", the Red Terror, and Lenin's Famine on the web site of The Museum of Communism.
I am totaly neutral to any views in History as every Nation be it England, Germany, America and of course Russia all have had their darker sides in World History. Not least the points you mentioned. Although being English the treatment and indeed the refusal to take Jewish refugees during WWII is for me personally far more shamefull, but like I said just my view. Maybe this comes more to the forefront because I now live in Germany and one seems to be confronted with WWII on a regular basis. Also my father was serving with the Royal Engineers during the war and was in one of the first British Units to arrive at Bergen-Belsen.
With that said if any of the Autors views does indeed offend any Forum user I will try to rewrite or delate any parts that may cause offence.
Thank you very much for your views Chuck I'm glad it is as imformative for you as it is for me.
I was going to carry on with the forming of the GPU, later the OGPU the NKVD and on to the KGB.
Would this also be of interest?

Eddie.

[Taz]

1883–1936, Soviet Communist leader, originally named Radomyslsky.
He joined the Russian Social Democratic Labor party in 1901 and sided with Vladimir Lenin's Bolshevik faction after 1903. He conducted agitation in St. Petersburg during the 1905 revolution and was elected to the central committee of the party in 1907.
After a brief period in jail, he went abroad in 1908.
Zinoviev was one of Lenin's closest collaborators in exile (1909–17) and returned to Russia with him after the Feb., 1917, revolution. He and Lev Kamenev opposed Lenin's plan for the Bolshevik seizure of power in Nov., 1917 (Oct., 1917, O.S.), which they regarded as premature, but they were outvoted and abided by the majority decision. After the Bolshevik takeover, Zinoviev served as head of the Comintern (1919–26) and as a member of the Communist party politburo (1921–26).
On Lenin's death (1924), Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Joseph Stalin formed a ruling triumvirate. Zinoviev led the triumvirate's attack on Leon Trotsky, calling for his expulsion from the party. After an initial victory over Trotsky (1924), Stalin, in an effort to consolidate his own power, turned against Zinoviev and Kamenev, defeating them and their so-called left opposition in 1925. Zinoviev and Kamenev then allied themselves with Trotsky (1926), but to no avail. Zinoviev was removed from his party posts in 1926 and expelled from the party in 1927. He recanted and was readmitted in 1928 but wielded little influence. Many features of the Zinoviev-Kamenev program, emphasizing rapid industrialization and collectivization, were incorporated (1928) in Stalin's first Five-Year Plan. In 1935, Zinoviev was sentenced to 10 years' imprisonment purportedly for giving his encouragement to the assassins of Sergei Kirov. Accused (1936) of conspiring to overthrow the government, he was the chief defendant in the first of the trials held by Stalin, which resulted in Zinoviev's execution along with Kamenev and 13 other old Bolsheviks. In 1988, he was posthumously rehabilitated and the verdict of his show trial was annulled by the Soviet supreme court. The so-called Zinoviev letter was published (1924) in the British press. It was allegedly written by Zinoviev in his capacity as Comintern chief and contained instructions for Communist revolution in England. Although a forgery, the Zinoviev letter helped to defeat Britain's first Labour government in elections that year.

[Chuck In Oregon]

Hey Eddie

Offense or insult? You're kidding, right? I never even gave any thought to the possibility. In fact, I was hoping that you wouldn't be offended if I chipped in my two cents worth.

I love history and I take every opportunity to learn more and listen to those more knowledgeable than I. I value this forum for many reasons, not the least of which is simply learning. Just learning. History is just that, and the challenge for us is to separate the wheat from the chaff, made even more difficult if you are interested in Soviet history. How else to do that but by sharing, as you so generously have?

I am currently in Tbilisi, Georgia, as I have been for almost all of the past 2.5 years and I will be here until July 31. One of the best things, of the many great things, about my visit has been the opportunity to meet people who are extremely knowledgeable about the history of the USSR, even though their knowledge may be a little suspect here and there, at least from a western perspective.

My senior counterpart here is from a persecuted and notorious family. His grandfather (a senior White Army officer) and his uncle (a dissident) were both shot for having anti-Soviet attitudes (yeah, no kidding) and his father was expelled from the university and Komsomol for being a relative of a liquidated person. Real, unvarnished and ugly history.

One of my other friends, after serving his obligatory service in the Red Army, was repeatedly arrested for expressing anti-Soviet opinions. He was quite the dissident. After several beatings failed to quiet him, he got a show trial and was sentenced to 15 years in the gulags. He only served 6-7 months until the Glasnost signings, which called for, among other things, the release of many Soviet political prisoners. He was one of them. To this day he thinks that Ronald Reagan walks on water. His reality, our history.

I have bought a LOT of Soviet and more than a few Tsarist items while I have been here, from the most ordinary to some very extraordinary things and many plain old oddball things. Among them have been quite a number of Chekist items, many of them quite early and some are surely unique.

When you wrote "I was going to carry on with the forming of the GPU, later the OGPU the NKVD and on to the KGB. Would this also be of interest?" My only response is, "How soon can you start?" I am very much looking forward to reading what you will write. I have some very early GPU and OGPU items, mostly from the Batumi (Black Sea) area. I will share pictures of some of them once I get back home and re-retire.

I have gotten to know one KGB general fairly well and another one slightly. They are both well-educated, clever, sociable and as nice a guys as you could ever want to meet. One, for sure, has a very dark past. I'm not sure about the other. I am also pretty close friends with a Kurd retired MVD colonel. What stories he tells! These are the kinds of guys you just don't meet back home in Oregon. At least, not where I hang out.

Would it interest you to know that, in this male-dominated society, when we are out together and one of the wives calls, it is common for the guy to hold his hand over the phone mouthpiece and stage-whisper "Cheka!"

In these days of "arguably" and "may have been", I have come to value very highly people with real opinions . It is not that your opinion should agree with mine, for me it is a matter that you should have an opinion at all. Those are the kinds of people that interest me and are, to me, worth knowing. People like you.

I hope you will keep up your good work and keep on teaching students like me. Thank you for the effort.

Chuck In Oregon
Currently, Chuck In Tbilisi, Georgia

[Taz]

Fanya Kaplan was born into a poor peasant family and her four brothers and two sisters were all educated at home. Her parents both emigrated to the United States.

Kaplan became involved in radical politics and joined the Socialist Revolutionary Party. In 1906 she took part in a plot to kill a Tsarist official in Kiev. Kaplan was caught and sentenced to a life of hard labour in Siberia.

After eleven years in Siberia she was released after the February Revolution. Like many Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries, Kaplan was furious when the Bolsheviks closed down the Constituent Assembly.

On 30th August, 1918, Vladimir Lenin spoke at a meeting in Moscow. As he left the building Kaplan tried to ask Lenin some questions about the way he was running the country. Just before he got into his car Lenin turned to answer the woman. At that moment Kaplan fired three shots at him. Two bullets entered his body and it was considered too dangerous to remove them.

Kaplan was soon captured and in a statement she made to Cheka that night, she explained that she had attempted to kill him because he had closed down the Constituent Assembly and was a "traitor to the revolution."

Fanya Kaplan was shot by Pavel Malkov, a Baltic Fleet sailor, on 3rd September, 1918. Yakov Sverdlov, who organized the execution, gave instructions that she was not to be buried. He told Malkov: "her remains are to be destroyed so that not a trace remains."

The attempt on Lenin's life and the assassination of Moisei Uritsky, chief of the Petrograd Secret Police, marked the beginning of the Red Terror. It is estimated that in the next few months 800 socialists were arrested and shot without trial. In the first year the official figure, almost certainly an underestimate, suggested 6,300 people were executed without trial.

Fanya Kaplan's statement made to the Cheka before being executed (30th August, 1918)
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My name is Fanya Kaplan. Today I shot at Lenin. I did it on my own. I will not say whom I obtained my revolver. I will give no details. I had resolved to kill Lenin long ago. I consider him a traitor to the Revolution. I was exiled to Akatoi for participating in an assassination attempt against a Tsarist official in Kiev. I spent eleven years at hard labour. After the Revolution I was freed. I favoured the Constituent Assembly and am still for it.

Victor Serge, Year One of the Revolution (1930)
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Lenin arrived alone; no one escorted him and no one formed a reception party. When he came out, workers surrounded him for a moment a few paces from his car. It was at this moment Kaplan fired at him, three times, wounding him seriously in the neck and shoulder. Lenin was driven back to the Kremlin by his chauffeur, and just had the strength to walk upstairs in silence to the second floor: then he fell in pain. There was great anxiety for him: the wound in the neck could have proved extremely serious; for a while it was thought that he was dying. The wounded man's own strength carried him through. Lenin was back on his feet in around ten days.