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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.
Episode 10.83: Terror is Necessary
In the summer of 1918, Communist leaders looked out from the vantage point of the Kremlin and saw themselves surrounded by an array of enemies, both foreign and domestic. And because Lenin and his comrades made no distinction between the fortunes of the Communist Party and the fortunes of the Russian Revolution, that meant that the revolution was surrounded by an array of enemies, both foreign and domestic. This list of enemies now included their erstwhile coalition partners, the Left SRs, whose quixotic uprising on July the sixth, drove home the point to Lenin and his government that only the Communist Party could be trusted to defend the revolution. For them, the logic was axiomatic: for the revolution to survive, the Communist regime had to survive.
Lenin was not surprised by the array of threats facing the young Communist regime, nor believed that they could be avoided. The dialectic of events meant that revolution necessarily begat counterrevolution. Although, begat isn’t even the right word, because revolution does not precede counterrevolution temporarily or logically. Counterrevolution is embedded in the very fact of revolution. They are simultaneous events. One cannot stage a revolution such that one will not face a counterrevolution. No sensible revolutionary seeks to avoid conflict with counter-revolutionaries, they seek to win that conflict. So the Communist leadership was historically literate, and they had studied all the revolutionary precursors, most especially the original French Revolution, and more immediately the tragedy of the Paris Commune. Lenin believed that the latter had failed in part for their lack of iron will, that the Communards, in their idealism, dithered with administrative minutiae, instead of quickly arming and striking for Versailles before Versailles struck them. The Communards had hesitated to shed blood, and so, instead their blood was shed. For Lenin, revolutions are kill or be killed propositions, and he did not plan on getting killed.
So, in the summer of 1918, everything was happening pretty much as expected. On the one hand, there were the forces of revolution, with the assumption still in place that Russia was simply the leading edge of a broader international socialist revolution. And on the other hand, there were the forces of counterrevolution, of bourgeois capitalist imperialism, similarly joined by their own kind of international solidarity: international banks, stock exchanges, and exploitive colonial enterprises, managed by the diplomatic corps and defended by military apparatuses. These forces were of course currently enmeshed in a murder/suicide pact called World War I, which is what made international socialist revolution plausible to the point of being an almost guaranteed necessity. But they were still very powerful, still dangerous. And so even while the bourgeois imperialists were engaged in this capitalist civil war called World War I, they would stop at nothing to crush the socialist revolution in its infancy. Which brings us to the component of the Russian Revolution and the Russian Civil War that we have not yet talked about, but which appeared to the Communists to be ironclad proof that their analysis of the situation was correct: in the summer of 1918, the Allied Powers began a whole series of armed interventions into Russian territory.
Now, ironically, the first armed Allied intervention after the October Revolution came at the behest of the young Soviet regime. Remember back in February, when Trotsky said neither war nor peace, and then walked out of Brest-Litovsk, and the central power said, okay, so war, and invaded? Well, recall that in this brief window, the Bolsheviks reached out to the allies, in case the Germans decided to just never stop advancing. We talked about this in Episode 10.78, this is when Lenin said, please add my vote in favor of taking potatoes and weapons from the bandits of Anglo French imperialism. Well, in the midst of this little window, local Soviet leaders in the far northern port of Murmansk faced a possible threat from encroaching White Finns. The British wanted to prevent Murmansk from falling into the hands of forces allied with the Germans, and they disembarked 170 Marines on March the fourth. The fact that Trotsky had invited the British in was later thrown in his face during the intraparty squabbles of the 1920s. But this very brief window coincidentally closed the same day the British Marines landed in Murmansk when the Russian signed the treaty of Brest-Litovsk. And though the treaty obviously upended the political dynamic, it did not change the Allied interest in putting troops into places like Murmansk.
Their overriding objective was all about winning World War I. They read the terms of the treaty of Brest-Litovsk and knew how much of the store Lenin was ready to give away. So while they couldn’t, for example, stop the takeover of the Ukrainian breadbasket, Allied forces could block access to strategic ports, not yet in German hands. They also saw value in holding these ports to possibly run soldiers and supplies to forces inside Russia who were willing to reopen the eastern front. And despite the communist assumption, the initial Allied incursions were not about the forces of counter-revolution gathering to snuff out revolutionary socialism. It was entirely about the strategic imperatives of the war. From everything I have read, I have no doubt whatsoever that had Lenin buckled to left Communist and Left SR pressure to abandon Brest-Litovsk and resume the war against Germany, the pipeline of munitions, resources, and money from Britain, France, and the United States would have opened right back up.
In May 1918, the revolt of the Czechoslovak Legion accelerated the ambitions of the Allied interventionists. The whole motivation for the Legion was to keep fighting the Central Powers, which meant that they were in complete strategic alignment with the Allies. But no matter what the Communist believed, it is not the case that the Czechs rose up at the behest of the Allies. It was simply that their interests neatly coincided, and they were obviously now on the same side. Though, it is worth mentioning that the Allies disagreed about what to do with the Czechoslovak legion. The British wanted them to stay in the region to help form the nucleus of a reformed Eastern front that would at least tie down the Central Powers in the spring of 1918; the French meanwhile were hoping to affect their speedy evacuation, and race them around the world. So they could shore up the western front. But more than anything, the Czechoslovak Legion served as an incredibly useful piece of propaganda. All the Allied governments could sell their people on the idea of committing troops to save the brave and beleaguered Czechoslovaks — that’s certainly what American president Woodrow Wilson is going to run with. So in late June, for example, 600 more British Marines landed in Murmansk, this time, not at the request of the Soviets, but in opposition to them. Moscow responded by sending up Red Guards to push them out, leading to the first skirmishes between the Allies and the Communists. The Allies won these skirmishes and were then able to set up a small defensive line about 300 miles south of Murmansk, which they now controlled.
Coinciding with this foreign intervention, other insurrections started breaking out that seemed very closely linked to Allied interests — for example, in the city of Yaroslavl, just about 200 miles northeast of Moscow on the rail line linking Moscow out to the northern ports where Allied navies are now landing troops. On July the sixth, 1918, which just so happened to coincide with the Left SR uprising in Moscow, a group of anticommunist Right SRs staged a successful armed uprising of their own. It was led by Boris Savinkov.
Savinkov had been a part of the SR combat organization during the days of the Revolution of 1905, but ever since then had drifted towards the center, and in 1917 served as deputy minister of war in Kerensky’s government. After October, he became an implacable anticommunist. When his forces took Yaroslavl, they were not benevolent in victory. They summarily executed any Red agents they got their hands on — because let’s never forget both sides in the Russian civil war engaged in ruthlessly punitive brutality. It was the nature of the Russian Civil War.
Savinkov’s uprising was meant to coincide with the Allied invasion of the Port of Arkhangelsk, but miscommunications had led Savinkov to strike too early. And so, within a matter of weeks, Red Army forces retook Yaroslavl, though Savinkov himself managed to flee into exile abroad.
Within days of Savinkov’s revolt, another rebellion broke out that seemed connected to Allied interests, this one more troubling because it involved treasonous betrayal. After the Czechoslovak Legions rose up, the Volga River had become a major front in the burgeoning civil war. The critical forces of the Red Army mobilizing to hold the line on the Volga were put under the command of Mikhail Muravyov. Now, ever since he had volunteered to defend Petrograd in the days after the October Revolution, Muravyov had been among the Red’s most dependable officers. He had never been a Bolshevik, and was never considered a hundred percent politically reliable by Lenin or the other members of the Bolshevik Central Committee, but time and again, Muravyov proved his military reliability.
That came to an end in July of 1918. Muravyov had never supported the treaty of Brest-Litovsk, and after the Left SR revolt was crushed, he got it in his head to revive the call to cancel the treaty and to have Russian stop fighting Russians, and instead, have everyone go off and fight Germans together. So on July the 10th, 1918, Muravyov publicly defected from the Red Army and led a thousand loyal troops down the Volga River from Kazan to Simbirsk, issuing orders for the rest of his troops to stop fighting the Czech Legions, and instead head west to reform the eastern front. Once Muravyov got to Simbirsk, he occupied several key points in the city, but his revolt was as brief as the Left SRs in Moscow: the very next day, July 11th, he was ambushed in Simbirsk by a mix of Red Guards, Latvian riflemen, and Cheka units, and he was killed in the subsequent exchange of fire.
To replace the dead trader Muravyov, Lenin appointed someone he believed he could trust: the commander of the Latvian riflemen who had just suppressed the Left SR revolt in Moscow. His name, and I apologize if I butcher this, was Jukums Vācietis.
Vācietis set up his headquarters in the city of Kazan, but faced daunting setbacks before he even got his feet wet. The Komuch, that self-declared government in exile of the constituent assembly that had set up shop in Samarra on June the eighth, had started raising what they called the People’s Army, and in conjunction with the Czech Legionaries, had made rapid advances all along the Volga River. At the end of July, they captured Simbirsk, costing the Reds the provincial capital, a key railway junction, and its munitions depot — to say nothing of letting Lenin’s hometown fall into the hands of the enemy — then on August 5th, they descended on Kazan and took the city after two days of street fighting. Vācietis watched several of the officers on his staff defect to the enemy, and then he himself was forced to slip out of the city with a couple of dozen rifleman under the cover of a heavy fog.
For the communist leadership in Moscow, all the threats coming at them in the summer of 1918 were merely aspects of a single phenomenon: the phenomenon of counterrevolution. On July 29th, Lenin told the executive committee of the Soviet, “What we are involved in is a systematic, methodical, and evidently long planned military and financial counter-revolutionary campaign against the Soviet Republic, which all the representatives of Anglo-French imperialism have been preparing for months.”
With the benefit of hindsight, we know that this isn’t really the case. There wasn’t some carefully planned counter-revolution that was being executed from some central location in the halls of western imperialism. But I also don’t think Lenin was crazy to draw this conclusion. The facts on the ground seemed to perfectly conform to his prior beliefs, and there was a broad alliance of anticommunist forces forming out there. It’s just that they were never all tendrils of a single counter-revolutionary leviathan. They were individual snakes in the grass, doing their own things for their own reasons.
But in August, the Allies gave Lenin little reason to doubt that they were not in fact embarking on a single coordinated counterrevolutionary operation. By now, the British presence around Murmansk had grown to six thousand. Then on August the First, Allied ships finally arrived at the northern port of Archangel bearing 1500 British and French Marines. After brief skirmishes between rival political factions in the city drove the Red leaders out, allied Marines disembarked to secure the port. The British and French, however, did not have many more troops to spare, and so they pressed other Allied nations to provide reinforcement. The Americans, Canadians and Italians would all respond, but there wouldn’t be too much to do beyond simply hold the coastal enclaves. It would have been extremely difficult to invade Russia from these northern ports across a thousand miles of not particularly hospitable country, so when the additional Allied reinforcements showed up at these coastal cities, there they would sit.
Of more far reaching impact were events in the far east. By July 1918, the Czechoslovak Legion had risen up and taken over Vladivostok, the terminus of the Trans-Siberian railroad. Nearly every Allied power proceeded to land some kind of expeditionary force in the city, and they had agreed amongst themselves to place about 25,000 troops total to make sure they controlled Vladivostok. The British landed a battalion on August the third; shortly thereafter, 500 French Marines came from their colonial holdings in Asia; between August 15 and August 21, the first 3000 Americans disembarked, the beginning of a force that would eventually grow to over 8,000. The Americans’ stated objective was simply to aid the evacuation of the Czechoslovak Legion, and they tried to hew to that narrow parameter. But by far, the largest contingent was the Japanese. The Japanese were both eager to extend their own influence in the region, but also justifiably concerned that the British and Americans were planning to box the Japanese out once they had gotten the Russians out of the picture. Now at first, the Allies requested the Japanese sent 7,000 men for this joint Vladivostok mission. The Japanese government then approved 12,000. Eventually they poured over 70,000 troops into the area. Without question, the Japanese were the largest influx of foreign troops into Russia during the civil war.
With this apparent leviathan of counter-revolution enveloping the Soviet Republic, Lenin concluded the time had come to follow the lead of their Jacobin forebears, who had faced a similar multi-front crisis in 1792 and1793. It didn’t really matter if the Terror was right or wrong, moral or immoral; it was necessary, and that was all that mattered. As we’ve noted, Lenin prided himself on being able to do the hard thing if it was necessary. He wasn’t going to let sentimentality or morality prevent him from doing that which needed to be done, because if sentimentality or morality caused him to flinch, that would mean they would lose. The revolution would be overthrown. And that would not mean that there would not be a Terror, it would simply mean that the terror would be inflicted by the Whites, rather than the Reds.
Lenin believed a Terror was necessary not just to kill opponents, but also to snap the population to attention, to ensure that areas under Red control stayed under Red control, to make sure people didn’t waiver from their revolutionary commitments, to make sure that conscripts into the Red Army maintained discipline, even if they didn’t want to be a part of the Red Army.
But also yes, to root out and exterminate enemies of the revolution.
Now, even before the Red Terror officially commenced, Lenin had already drafted what is now an infamous order on August the 11th. It was sent to loyal cadres in the city of Penza, where there had been some local resistance to grain requisitioning. “Comrades!” “Lenin’s” communique read, “The Kulak uprising in your five districts must be crushed without pity. You must make an example of these people.” Then he gave them orders in four bullet points:
1. Hang. I mean, hang publicly so that people can see it. At least 100 Kulaks, rich bastards, and known blood suckers.
2. Publish their names.
3. Seize all their grain.
4. 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.
This communiqué also gets to another component of the Terror, which is, trying to draw a sharp distinction between us, the good guys and those, the bad guys, the rich bastards, the bloodsuckers. This distinction would make the Terror, not merely something the population would endure with trembling fear, but also maybe even actively support.
Meanwhile out on the war front, things started to turn in the Red’s favor, and Trotsky was right in the thick of it. The commissar of war was now cruising around in a mobile train command center, and on August 28th was at the Romanov Bridge, a huge bridge that spanned the Volga 20 miles west of the city of Kazan. He was there surveying the scene when 2000 forces of the People’s Army marched out of Kazan and tried to take it over. But they had marched all day by the time they reached the bridge and were so tired that when they got there, the Red Army forces under Trotsky fought them off. But it was not a clean victory. One regiment broke and fled in the middle of the battle, and the next day, showing his own clear affirmation for uncompromising discipline and will, Trotsky had the commander of the offending regiment shot, along with one out of every 10 men. After its brief hiatus following the February Revolution, the death penalty was back with a vengeance.
The victory at the bridge meant General Vācietis had a clear path to retake the city of Kazan, and Lenin suggested to Trotsky that if Vācietis stalled, delayed, or hesitated in any way, that he should be shot; this too hearkening back to the good old days of the French revolutionary armies.
But while all this was going on, far more momentous events unfolded in Moscow.
Lenin was very much more in favor of killing than being killed, so he rarely left the safety of the Kremlin. But on August 30th, he gave a speech at a munitions factory on the southern outskirts of Moscow. After the speech, he was walking out of the building towards a waiting car. A woman called out Lenin’s name, and when he turned, she pulled out a gun and fired three shots at him. One of the shots missed and went through his coat, another one lodged in his shoulder, but the other one was the bad one. It passed through his neck, and partially punctured a lung. Lenin dropped in a bloody heap on the ground as confusion exploded all around him. Still conscious, Lenin refused to go to a hospital because he didn’t trust anyone there, and he demanded he be taken to the Kremlin and that doctors be brought to him. Now given the scope of the injuries, and the inadequate medical facilities at the Kremlin, there seemed to be very little chance that Lenin would survive this. I mean, if you move these bullets just a centimeter, he’s dead before he even hits the ground, and history starts doing its summary assessment of the life and career of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, who was assassinated at the age of 48 here on August 30th, 1918.
But the bullets landed where they did. And he did not die that day. Through that magical combination of luck and will, he survived.
Now as for the would be assassin, it turned out to be a woman named Fanny Kaplan. At least, that’s the official story. Fanny Kaplan was a longstanding member of the SRs. She had joined the party as a teenager in 1905 and been arrested in 1906 as a part of a bomb plot. After 11 trying years in Siberian exile, she was set free in the political amnesties following the February Revolution. Kaplan had no love for Lenin and the Bolsheviks, and she had completely soured on their vision for revolution after October. With the outset of deep political repression in the summer of 1918, she and several SR comrades — who she refused to subsequently name — decided to start assassinating people. She was assigned Lenin.
There were a bunch of arrests in the wave of the shooting, and under questioning Kaplan made the following recorded confession:
My name is Fanny Kaplan. Today, I shot Lenin. I did it on my own. I will not say from 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 Siberia for participating in an assassination attempt against a tsarist official in Kiev. I spent 11 years at hard labor. After the revolution I was freed. I favored the Constituent Assembly and am still for it.
This confession was good enough for a speedy conviction; Fanny Kaplan was taken out and shot in the back of the head on September 3rd.
Now, the thing about this is so far as I can tell, there were no actual witnesses saying, oh yes, I saw that woman there, Fanny Kaplan fire the three shots at Lenin. Nor was she wrestled to the ground gun in hand right at the moment that it all happened. So, there are lingering alternate theories that maybe she wasn’t actually the shooter, and that she either willingly gave herself up as the shooter to protect her comrades, or that the very clear and straightforward confession she offered was extracted after some good old fashioned enhanced interrogation techniques. The further details about Kaplan and the assassination attempt came from one of her comrades who turned informant a few years later and was the star witness for the public trials of the SRs in 1922. And yes, that witness confirms and elaborates on all these details, but he isn’t exactly the most reliable source either. Now, I’m not trying to inject conspiracy theories into this, I’m just reporting that what actually happened is surprisingly muddled. Uh, if you’re ever on jeopardy and they say this SR shot Lenin on August 30th, 1918, the answer is Fanny Kaplan, that’s the historical answer.
So Lenin managed to live, but he is now confined to a recovery bed. And in that bed, he absolutely resolved at the time had come for Terror. Now, Cheka was already out there arresting people and interrogating people and executing people, but it’s all about to get ramped up to vast national policy. Just a few days after the assassination attempt on September 3rd, Pravda published an appeal to the working class, which said that the people must crush the hydra of counterrevolution with massive terror. And it said the defenses could be slight, but invite swift and permanent retribution. “Anyone who dares to spread the slightest rumor against the Soviet regime will be arrested immediately and sent to a concentration camp.”
Then on September 5th, the Peoples’ Commissars issued the following decree:
The Council of Peoples’ Commissars, having heard the report of the chairman of the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counterrevolution Speculation and Crime [which is by the way, just the official name of Cheka] about the activities of this commission finds that in the present situation the safeguarding of the rear by means of terror is necessary; that it is necessary to send a greater number of responsible party comrades to the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counterrevolution speculation and Crime in order to strengthen its work, and introduce into it a more systematic character; that it is necessary to safeguard the Soviet Republic from class enemies by isolating them in concentration camps; that all persons associated with White Guard organizations, plots, and rebellions are liable to be shot; that it is necessary to publish the names of all those shot and the reasons for shooting them.
This decree of September 5th, 1918 is the legal embarkation point for what becomes the Red Terror and the foundations for a generally repressive police state.
So, the Red Terror is going to last for years, and go through periods of winding up and winding down, and obviously the first several weeks and months after the decree were a period of major windup. There is a lot of conflicting information out there about casualties and victims; some people tend to downplay how many people were killed, other people obviously exaggerate it beyond all reason. The Communists were often fastidious record-keepers about who was being killed, where, and why, but oftentimes local decisions were simply made on the fly. Groups of people were taken to the outskirts of town and shot. The who, what, when, and why of their deaths never recorded. Among the first victims were those who had already been rounded up and held in custody, whether as hostages or as potential threats to the regime; they were executed. Lots of SRs were executed. There were also large police sweeps to pick up all kinds of suspects, people were just rounded up and crammed into prisons. There were little revolutionary tribunals operating at the local level, haphazardly and ruthlessly. Now very often, yes, they were identifying real threats to the Communist regime, arresting them and executing them — or they were picking up people from rival political parties. But as often as not, the basis for an arrest is extremely flimsy: a single denunciation from an anonymous informant; maybe somebody is arrested for the crime of being a foreigner. And as history has seen in several different times and locations, sometimes people are arrested for having the same name as somebody who the government is looking for, that happens a lot during the initial phase of the Red Terror. And then of course as we’ve also seen many times throughout history going all the way back to, let’s say, the Sullan Proscriptions and people like Crassus and Catiline, where denunciations and arrests are driven entirely by greed and avarice, or maybe a ruthless desire to get ahead, settling personal grudges, settling old scores, none of which had anything to do with politics. Now, this is all just the very beginning of it, and as we move forward, there will be dungeons and tortures and executions, and the whole thing will become an absurd, paranoid blanket spreading out over everything. Initially justified by the context of the civil war, it would become a permanent feature of post-revolutionary Soviet life.
As the Cheka fanned out and fulfilled its mandate to grow its operation and systematically impose a reign of terror, the Red Army advanced on the Volga. They recaptured Simbirsk on September the second, and then on September the 12th took Kazan, which meant, by the by, that General Vācietis did not become an early victim of the Red Terror, which he surely would have had he failed, and instead is on his way to being promoted to commander in chief of the whole Red Army.
In the face of this onslaught, the Komuch collapsed as a potential threat to the Communist regime. The People’s Army they created topped out at just 30,000 soldiers and they couldn’t get any more as the Red Army poured reinforcements into the region. In the first week of October 1918, with the Red Army closing in on Samarra, the Komuch disbanded, and everyone fled east, seeking the protection of White armies that were forming inside Siberia.
Meanwhile, the Czechoslovaks grew demoralized and frustrated. They’d never wanted to get involved in a Russian civil war in the first place, but it tolerated it because the Reds were putting up practically no resistance. Now that it was turning into a real war, they wanted out. And as they reoriented themselves back to their original goal of trying to get out of Russia, the Allies continued to bring forces into Russia, under the cover of getting the Czechoslovaks Legions out of Russia. On September the fourth, 4,500 Americans arrived at Arkhangelsk — they were officially dubbed the American Expeditionary Force, and unofficially they were called the Polar Bear Expedition — and then more troops flooded into Vladivostok, most especially the Japanese. But if you take a quick glance over at the calendar, you know that in next week’s episode, everything is about to get rocked by another major event that is going to re-destabilize the whole Eurasian continent. The 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month is just around the corner. And I have taken pains to impress upon you that everything that we have understood so far about the Russian Revolution has to be understood in the context of World War I.
So, how are things going to change when World War I isn’t a thing anymore?