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116-688: More broadly, the term can be applied to Bolshevik political repression throughout the Russian Civil War (1917–1922). Bolshevik leaders attempted to excuse the severe repression as a necessary response to the White Terror initiated in 1917. When the Revolution took power in November 1917, many top Bolsheviks hoped to avoid much of the violence which would come to define this period. Through one of its first decrees on 8 November 1917,

232-766: A concentration camp ". Izvestia also reported that, in the 4 days since the attempt on Lenin, over 500 hostages had been executed in Petrograd alone. Subsequently, on September 5, the Council of People's Commissars issued a decree "On Red Terror", prescribing "mass shooting" to be "inflicted without hesitation;" the decree ordered the Cheka "to secure the Soviet Republic from the class enemies by isolating them in concentration camps", as well as stating that counter-revolutionaries "must be executed by shooting [and] that

348-608: A "day of Red Terror" to execute 300 people in one day, and took quotas from each part of town. According to the Chekist Karl Lander  [ ru ] , the Cheka in Kislovodsk , "for lack of a better idea", killed all the patients in the hospital. In October 1920 alone more than 6,000 people were executed. Gellately adds that Communist leaders "sought to justify their ethnic-based massacres by incorporating them into

464-578: A Red Terror was published in Izvestia on September 3, titled "Appeal to the Working Class": it had been drafted by Dzerzhinsky and his assistant Jēkabs Peterss and called for the workers to "crush the hydra of counter-revolution with massive terror!"; it would also make clear that "anyone who dares to spread the slightest rumor against the Soviet regime will be arrested immediately and sent to

580-776: A corresponding directive into the legislation. At the first stage, about 130 people were arrested who gave the necessary confessions under torture, and on December 17, 1933, the Presidium of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR decided to extend criminal liability to "unnatural relationship". The article was added to the Criminal Code of the RSFSR on April 1, 1934 in the section "sexual crimes" under number 154-a. "Voluntary" sexual intercourse between two men

696-907: A major purge of the Red Army during 1930-1931. In his book, Terrorism and Communism: A Reply to Karl Kautsky , Trotsky also argued that the reign of terror began with the White Terror under the White Guard forces and the Bolsheviks responded with the Red Terror. There is no consensus among the Western historians on the number of deaths from the Red Terror in Soviet Russia . One source gives estimates of 28,000 executions per year from December 1917 to February 1922. Estimates for

812-634: A modern example of genocide . A number of historians believe that, unlike the Red Terror proclaimed by the Bolsheviks as a means of establishing their political dominance, the term 'White Terror' had neither legislative nor propaganda approval in the White movement during the Civil War . Historians admit that the White armies were not alien to the cruelty inherent in the war, however, they believe that

928-474: A policy of persecuting revolutionaries as well as socialists of several factions. Kolchak's government issued a broadly worded decree on December 3, 1918, revising articles of the criminal code of Imperial Russia "in order to preserve the system and rule of the Supreme Ruler". Articles 99 and 100 established capital punishment for assassination attempts on the Supreme Ruler and for attempting to overthrow

1044-538: A total of 1,236 pogroms were committed against Jews in 524 towns in Ukraine . Estimates of the number of Jews who were killed in these pogroms range from 30,000 to 60,000. Of the recorded 1,236 pogroms and excesses, 493 of them were carried out by Ukrainian People's Republic soldiers who were under the command of Symon Petliura , 307 of them were carried out by independent Ukrainian warlords, 213 of them were carried out by Denikin 's army, 106 of them were carried out by

1160-658: A traitor to the Revolution. I was exiled to Akatui for participating in an assassination attempt against a Tsarist official in Kiev [now Kyiv]. I spent 11 years at hard labour. After the Revolution, I was freed. I favoured the Constituent Assembly and am still for it". Kaplan referenced the Bolsheviks' growing authoritarianism, citing their forcible shutdown of the Constituent Assembly in January 1918,

1276-444: Is considered to have officially begun between 17 and 30 August 1918. While recovering from his wounds, Lenin instructed: "It is necessary – secretly and urgently to prepare the terror." In immediate response to the two attacks, Chekists killed approximately 1,300 "bourgeois hostages" held in Petrograd and Kronstadt prisons. Bolshevik newspapers were especially integral to instigating an escalation in state violence: on August 31,

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1392-736: The Baltic states and Eastern Europe . State repression led to incidents of popular resistance, such as the Tambov peasant rebellion (1920–1921), the Kronstadt rebellion (1921), and the Vorkuta Uprising (1953); the Soviet authorities suppressed such resistance with overwhelming military force and brutality. During the Tambov rebellion, Mikhail Tukhachevsky (chief Red Army commander in

1508-836: The Brezhnev era , and it did not cease to exist until late in Mikhail Gorbachev's rule when it was ended in keeping with his policies of glasnost and perestroika . Secret police had a long history in Tsarist Russia. Ivan the Terrible used the Oprichina , while more recently the Third Section and Okhrana existed. Early on, the Leninist view of the class conflict and the resulting notion of

1624-546: The Kholmogory camp adopted the practice of drowning bound prisoners in the nearby Dvina river. Occasionally, entire prisons were "emptied" of inmates via mass shootings prior to abandoning a town to White forces. On 16 March 1919, Cheka stormed the Putilov factory . Hundreds of workers who went to a strike were arrested, of whom around 200 were executed without trial during the next few days. Numerous strikes took place in

1740-658: The National Academy of Sciences of Belarus the large, “fantastic” estimates derived from eyewitness accounts and White army emigre press. A Crimean Cheka report in 1921 showed that 441 people were shot with a modern estimation that 5,000–12,000 people in total were executed in Crimea. On 16 March 1919, all military detachments of the Cheka were combined in a single body, the Troops for the Internal Defense of

1856-598: The Omsk newspaper Omsk Gazette (no. 188 of July 1919). It provided a term of 5 years of prison for "individuals considered a threat to the public order because of their ties in any way with the Bolshevik revolt". In the case of an unauthorized return from exile, there could be hard labor for 4 to 8 years. Articles 99–101 allowed the death penalty, forced labor and imprisonment, and repression by military courts, and they also imposed no investigation commissions. An excerpt from

1972-550: The Petrograd Cheka headquarters in retaliation for the execution of his friend and other officers. On August 30, Socialist Revolutionary Fanny Kaplan unsuccessfully attempted to assassinate Vladimir Lenin . During interrogation by the Cheka , she made the following statement: "My name is Fanya 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

2088-703: The Red Army and 32 of them were carried out by the Polish Army . Ronald Suny estimates that 35,000 to 150,000 deaths occurred amongst Jews in the Russian Civil War, with about 17% of the these attributable to the White armies, rest being attributed at 40% to the Ukrainians under Simon Petlura, 25% by other Ukrainian forces and 8.5% by the Bolsheviks. After Lavr Kornilov was killed in April 1918,

2204-625: The Red Army . The Bolsheviks' Red Terror started a year later in early September 1918 in response to several planned assassinations of Bolshevik leaders and the initial massacres of Red prisoners in Moscow and during the Finnish Civil War . According to some Russian historians, the White Terror was a series of premeditated actions directed by their leaders. although this is contested by most Russian historians who view it as spontaneous and disorganized. Estimates for those killed in

2320-643: The Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic: Great plan! Finish it with Dzerzhinsky. While pretending to be the " greens " ( we will blame them later ), we will advance by 10–20 miles (versts) and hang kulaks, priests, landowners. Prize: 100.000 rubles for each hanged man. Leonid Kannegisser , a young military cadet of the Imperial Russian Army , assassinated Moisey Uritsky on August 17, 1918, outside

2436-701: The Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies abolished the death penalty . It had first been canceled by the February Revolution and then restored by the Kerensky's government . Not a single death sentence was issued in the first three months of Lenin's government, which consisted in fact of a coalition with the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries , who, albeit terrorists in

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2552-600: The Stalinist regime. Trotsky also argued that he and Lenin had intended to lift the ban on the opposition parties such as the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries as soon as the economic and social conditions of Soviet Russia had improved. At times, the repressed were called the enemies of the people . Punishments by the state included summary executions , sending innocent people to Gulag , forced resettlement , and stripping of citizen's rights . Repression

2668-700: The White Guard organizations, conspiracies and mutinies, that it is necessary to publicize the names of the executed as well as the reasons of applying to them that measure. As the Russian Civil War progressed, significant numbers of prisoners, suspects and hostages were executed because they belonged to the "possessing classes". Numbers are recorded for cities occupied by the Bolsheviks: In Kharkov there were between 2,000 and 3,000 executions in February–June 1919, and another 1,000–2,000 when

2784-597: The dictatorship of the proletariat provided the theoretical basis of the repressions. Its legal basis was formalized into the Article 58 in the code of the Russian SFSR and similar articles for other Soviet republics . According to the Marxist historian Marcel Liebman , Lenin's wartime measures such as banning opposition parties was prompted by the fact that several political parties either took up arms against

2900-635: The elections to which they had lost. When it became clear that Kaplan would not implicate any accomplices, she was executed in Alexander Garden , near the western walls of the Kremlin . "Most sources indicate that Kaplan was executed on 3 September, the day after her transfer to the Kremlin". In 1958 the commander of the Kremlin, the former Baltic sailor Pavel Dmitriyevich Malkov (1887–1965) revealed he had personally executed Kaplan on that date upon

3016-732: The ethnically cleansed territories. In most cases their destinations were underpopulated and remote areas (see Involuntary settlements in the Soviet Union ). Entire nations and ethnic groups were collectively punished by the Soviet government for their alleged collaboration with the enemy during World War II . At least nine distinct ethnic-linguistic groups, including ethnic Germans , ethnic Greeks , ethnic Poles , Crimean Tatars (recognized as genocide), Balkars , Chechens , and Kalmyks , were deported to remote and unpopulated areas of Siberia (see sybirak ) and Kazakhstan . Koreans and Romanians were also deported. Mass operations of

3132-501: The state-controlled media launched the repressive campaign through incitement of violence. One article appearing in Pravda exclaimed: "the time has come for us to crush the bourgeoisie or be crushed by it.... The anthem of the working class will be a song of hatred and revenge!" The next day, the newspaper Krasnaia Gazeta stated that "only rivers of blood can atone for the blood of Lenin and Uritsky." The first official announcement of

3248-528: The tsarist era , were staunch opponents of the death penalty. However, as pressure mounted from the White Armies and from international intervention, the Bolsheviks moved closer to Lenin 's harsher perspective. The decision to enact the Red Terror was also driven by the initial "massacre of their 'Red' prisoners by the office-cadres during the Moscow insurrection of October 1917", allied intervention in

3364-494: The "black pages" of the White armies differed fundamentally from the policy of the Bolsheviks : A number of researchers believe that the peculiarity of the White Terror was its disorganized, spontaneous nature, and that it was not elevated to the rank of state policy, did not act as a means of intimidating the population and did not serve as a means of destroying social classes or ethnic groups ( Cossacks , Kalmyks ), something

3480-404: The "conspiracy of the homosexual community" in Moscow , Leningrad and Kharkiv . As Yagoda pointed out in the explanatory note, "the conspirators were engaged in the creation of a network of salons and other organized formations, with the subsequent transformation of these associations into direct spy cells". Stalin ordered "to punish the scumbags" in a demonstrative way, and to introduce

3596-403: The Bolsheviks did. At the same time, a number of Russian historians point out that the orders issued by high officials of the White movement, as well as the legislative acts of the White governments, testify to the sanctioning by the military and political authorities of repressive actions and acts of terror against the Bolsheviks and the population supporting them, and their role in intimidating

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3712-535: The Bolsheviks. Many Soviet authors wrote about the heroism of the Russian people in combating the White Terror. Novels include Furmanov's Chapaev , Serafimovich 's The Iron Flood , and Fadeyev 's The Rout . Many of the early short stories and novels of Sholokhov , Leonov , and Fedin were devoted to this theme. Nikolai Ostrovsky 's autobiographical novel How the Steel was Tempered documents episodes of

3828-666: The Borovskaya and Petropavlovskaya volosts has been eliminated. During the liquidation, 23 armed deserters who offered resistance to our troops have been shot. In the southeastern part of the province, there is an unprecedented influx of deserters to the commissariats, which come with a request to enroll them in the ranks of the Red Army. Estimates suggest that during the suppression of the Tambov Rebellion of 1920–1921, around 100,000 peasant rebels and their families were imprisoned or deported and perhaps 15,000 executed. During

3944-527: The British military, once invited in, proceeded to execute members of the Bolshevik Party who had peacefully stood down from the Soviet when they failed to win the elections. As a result, the Bolsheviks banned each opposition party when it turned against the Soviet government. In some cases, bans were lifted. This banning of parties did not have the same repressive character as later bans enforced under

4060-535: The Cheka tied White officers to planks and slowly fed them into furnaces or tanks of boiling water; in Kharkiv , scalpings and hand-flayings were commonplace: the skin was peeled off victims' hands to produce "gloves"; the Voronezh Cheka rolled naked people around in barrels studded internally with nails; victims were crucified or stoned to death at Yekaterinoslav ; the Cheka at Kremenchuk impaled members of

4176-530: The Cheka, having been organized by the Red Army as well. In 1924, anti-Bolshevik Popular Socialist Sergei Melgunov (1879–1956) published a detailed account on the Red Terror in Russia, where he cited Professor Charles Saroléa 's estimates of 1,766,188 deaths from the Bolshevik policies. He questioned the accuracy of the figures, but endorsed Saroléa's "characterisation of terror in Russia", stating it matches reality. Modern historian Sergei Volkov, assessing

4292-632: The Cossack warlord ordered his troops to shoot and take hostages for the slightest display of opposition. In the village of Sugar, Dutov's men burned down a hospital with hundreds of Red Army patients. The Semenov regime in Transbaikalia was characterized by mass terror and executions. More than 1,600 people were shot. Semenov himself admitted in court that his troops burned villages. Eleven permanent death houses were set up, where refined forms of torture were practiced. Semyonov personally supervised

4408-756: The Czech-Slovaks, who had spearheaded the anti-Bolshevik uprising in Siberia, became appalled by Kolchak's regime in Omsk. On November 15, 1919, they delivered a memorandum to the Allied representatives in Vladivostok : The military authorities of the Government of Omsk are permitting criminal actions that will stagger the entire world. The burning of villages, the murder of masses of peaceful inhabitants, and

4524-478: The Gulag system has become primarily known as a place for political prisoners and as a mechanism for repressing political opposition to the Soviet state ." During the early years of World War II , the Soviet Union annexed several territories in Eastern Europe as a consequence of the German–Soviet Pact and its Secret Additional Protocol . In the Baltic countries of Estonia , Latvia and Lithuania , repressions and mass deportations were carried out by

4640-410: The KGB that served as the secret police for the Soviets. From spring 1918, the Bolsheviks started physical elimination of opposition and other socialist and revolutionary factions, anarchists among the first: Of all the revolutionary elements in Russia it is the Anarchists who now suffer the most ruthless and systematic persecution. Their suppression by the Bolsheviki began already in 1918, when – in

4756-431: The NKVD were needed to deport millions of people, many of whom died. According to various sources, more than 6 million people were deported, with the death toll ranging from 800,000 to 1,500,000 in the USSR only. The Gulag "was the branch of the State Security that operated the penal system of forced labour camps and associated detention and transit camps and prisons. While these camps housed criminals of all types,

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4872-454: The Red Army in 1918, around 2 million people deserted in 1919, and almost 4 million deserters escaped from the Red Army in 1921. In 1919, 612 "hardcore" deserters of the total 837,000 draft dodgers and deserters were executed following Trotsky's dracionan measures. According to Figes, "a majority of deserters (most registered as "weak-willed") were handed back to the military authorities, and formed into units for transfer to one of

4988-431: The Red Army in 1921. Around 500,000 deserters were arrested in 1919 and close to 800,000 in 1920 by Cheka troops and special divisions created to combat desertions. Thousands of deserters were killed, and their families were often taken hostage. According to Lenin's instructions, After the expiration of the seven-day deadline for deserters to turn themselves in, punishment must be increased for these incorrigible traitors to

5104-399: The Red Army were buried alive. More than 700 people from the village were executed. After capturing Troitsk , Orenburg , and other cities, a regime of terror was installed over 6,000 people, of whom 500 were killed just during interrogations. In Chelyabinsk , Dutov's men executed or deported to Siberian prisons over 9,000 people. In Troitsk, Dutov's men in the first weeks after the capture of

5220-514: The Red Terror by the Sovnarkom on 5 September 1918 stated: ...that for empowering the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission in the fight with the counter-revolution, profiteering and corruption and making it more methodical, it is necessary to direct there possibly bigger number of the responsible party comrades, that it is necessary to secure the Soviet Republic from the class enemies by way of isolating them in concentration camps, that all people are to be executed by fire squad who are connected with

5336-527: The Red Terror as the entire repressive policy of the Bolsheviks during the years of the Civil War (1917–1922), estimates the direct death toll of the Red Terror at 2 million people. Volkov's calculations, however, do not appear to have been confirmed by other major scholars. Collectivization in the Soviet Union was a policy, pursued between 1928 and 1933, to consolidate individual land and labour into collective farms ( Russian : колхо́з , kolkhoz , plural kolkhozy ). The Soviet leaders were confident that

5452-483: The Red Terror to a class war , explaining that "we are destroying the bourgeoisie as a class." On October 15, the leading Chekist Gleb Bokii , summing up the officially-ended Red Terror, reported that, in Petrograd, 800 alleged enemies had been shot and another 6,229 imprisoned. Casualties in the first two months were between 10,000 and 15,000 based on lists of summarily executed people published in newspaper Cheka Weekly and other official press. A declaration About

5568-482: The Red sailors' uprising at Kronstadt in March 1921. He particularly distinguished himself in the course of the pursuit, capture, and killing of captured sailors. Among the victims of the Red Terror were tsarists , liberals , non-Bolshevik socialists, anarchists , members of the clergy, ordinary criminals, counter-revolutionaries, and other political dissidents . Later, industrial workers who failed to meet production quotas were also targeted. The first victims of

5684-478: The Republic (a branch of the Cheka), which numbered at least 200,000 in 1921. These troops policed labor camps , ran the Gulag system, conducted prodrazverstka (requisitions of food from peasants), and put down peasant rebellions, riots by workers, and mutinies in the Red Army (which was plagued by desertions). One of the main organizers of the Red Terror for the Bolshevik government was 2nd-Grade Army Commissar Yan Karlovich Berzin (1889–1938), whose real name

5800-427: The Russian Civil War (compared to 8.5% for the Red forces). Suny stated that the casualties of the White Terror would have exceeded the Red Terror with the inclusion of anti-Soviet violence and Jewish pogroms into the death toll. The 1985 Whitaker Report of the United Nations cited that 100,000 to 250,000 Jews in more than 2,000 pogroms were killed by a mixture of Whites, Cossacks and Ukrainian nationalists as

5916-411: The Russian Civil War , and the large-scale massacres of Reds during the Finnish Civil War in which 10,000 to 20,000 revolutionaries had been killed by the Finnish Whites . In December 1917, Felix Dzerzhinsky was appointed to the duty of rooting out counterrevolutionary threats to the Soviet government . He was the director of the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission (aka Cheka ), a predecessor of

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6032-450: The Russian Civil War, including by the Whites. The 1985 Whitaker Report of the United Nations cited that 100,000 to 250,000 Jews in more than 2,000 pogroms were killed by a mixture of Whites, Cossacks and Ukrainian nationalists. Hundreds of thousands of Jews were left homeless and tens of thousands became victims of serious illness. Modern estimates of Jewish deaths during the Russian Civil War have been lower, between 1918 and 1921,

6148-596: The Soviet Union's dissolution have estimated victim totals ranging from approximately 3 million to nearly 9 million. Some scholars still assert that the death toll could be in the tens of millions. American historian Richard Pipes noted: "Censuses revealed that between 1932 and 1939—that is, after collectivization but before World War II—the population decreased by 9 to 10 million people. In his most recent edition of The Great Terror (2007), Robert Conquest states that while exact numbers may never be known with complete certainty, at least 15 million people were killed "by

6264-400: The Soviet Union. White Terror (Russia) The White Terror ( Russian : Белый Террор , romanized :  Belyy Terror ) in Russia refers to the violence and mass killings carried out by the White Army during the Russian Civil War (1917–1923). It began after the Bolsheviks seized power in November 1917, and continued until the defeat of the White Army at the hands of

6380-607: The Soviet authorities. A number of notable dissidents , including Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn , Vladimir Bukovsky , and Andrei Sakharov , were sent to internal or external exile. Estimates of the number of deaths attributable specifically to Joseph Stalin vary widely. Some scholars assert that record-keeping of the executions of political prisoners and ethnic minorities are neither reliable nor complete; others contend archival materials contain irrefutable data far superior to sources utilized prior to 1991, such as statements from emigres and other informants. Those historians working after

6496-400: The Soviets. The Serov Instructions , "On the Procedure for carrying out the Deportation of Anti-Soviet Elements from Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia" , contained detailed procedures and protocols to observe in the deportation of Baltic nationals. Public tribunals were also set up to punish "traitors to the people": those who had fallen short of the "political duty" of voting their countries into

6612-425: The Stalinist death toll are "finding it difficult to adapt to the new circumstances when the archives are open and when there are plenty of irrefutable data" and instead "hang on to their old Sovietological methods with round-about calculations based on odd statements from emigres and other informants who are supposed to have superior knowledge." Conversely, some historians believe that the official archival figures of

6728-429: The Terror were the Socialist Revolutionaries (SR). Over the months of the campaign, over 800 SR members were executed, while thousands more were driven into exile or detained in labor camps. In a matter of weeks, executions carried out by the Cheka doubled or tripled the number of death sentences pronounced by the Russian Empire over the 92-year period from 1825 to 1917. While the Socialist Revolutionaries were initially

6844-466: The USSR. In the first year of Soviet occupation, from June 1940 to June 1941, the number confirmed executed, conscripted, or deported is estimated at a minimum of 124,467: 59,732 in Estonia, 34,250 in Latvia, and 30,485 in Lithuania. This included 8 former heads of state and 38 ministers from Estonia, 3 former heads of state and 15 ministers from Latvia, and the then-president, 5 prime ministers and 24 other ministers from Lithuania. After Stalin's death ,

6960-485: The Victims of Political Repression (День памяти жертв политических репрессий) has been officially held on 30 October in Russia since 1991. It is also marked in other former Soviet republics except Ukraine, which has its own annual Day of Remembrance for the victims of political repressions by the Soviet regime, held each year on the third Sunday of May. Members of the Memorial society took an active part in such commemorative meetings. Since 2007, Memorial had also organised

7076-505: The White Terror in western Ukraine by anti-Soviet units. In his book, Terrorism and Communism: A Reply to Karl Kautsky , Trotsky argued that the reign of terror began with the White Terror under the White Guard forces and the Bolsheviks responded with the Red Terror . During the Soviet period, a significant number of monuments were dedicated to victims of the White Terror. Most monuments were constructed in Russia, mainly as memorials or in visible places of towns and cities. Since 1920,

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7192-425: The White Terror stands in Vyborg . It was erected in 1961 near the Leningrad Highway to commemorate 600 people shot by machine gun . The "In Memory of Victims of the White Terror" monument in Voronezh is located in a park near the regional Nikitinskaia libraries. The monument was unveiled in 1920 on the site of public executions in 1919 by the troops of Mamantov. In Sevastopol on the 15th Bastion Street, there

7308-442: The White Terror vary between 20,000 and 300,000 people. According to historian Ronald Suny , total estimates for the White Terror are difficult to ascertain due to the role of multiple administrations and violence perpetrated by undisciplined, independent anti-Bolshevik forces. However, Suny did highlight the higher proportion of anti-semitic attacks by the White military forces, who were responsible for 17% of pogroms throughout

7424-465: The Whites managed to smuggle more than 3000 rifles and machine guns into the city. The leaders of the plot decided to act on the night 9–10 March 1919. The rebels were joined by wealthy peasants from the villages, which suppressed the Committees of the Poor, and committed massacres against rural activists. Eyewitnesses reported atrocities in villages such as Ivanchug, Chagan, Karalat. In response, Soviet forces led by Kirov undertook to suppress this revolt in

7540-509: The area) authorized Bolshevik military forces to use chemical weapons against villages with civilian population and rebels. Publications in local Communist newspapers openly glorified liquidations of "bandits" with the poison gas. The Internal Troops of the Cheka and the Red Army practiced the terror tactics of taking and executing numerous hostages, often in connection with desertions of forcefully mobilized peasants. According to Orlando Figes , more than 1 million people deserted from

7656-407: The authorities. Under Article 103, "insults written, printed, and oral, are punishable by imprisonment". Bureaucratic sabotage under Article 329 was punishable by hard labor for 15 to 20 years. Additional decrees followed, adding more power. On April 11, 1919, the Kolchak government adopted Regulation 428, "About the dangers of public order due to ties with the Bolshevik Revolt", which was published in

7772-437: The categories that were recorded by Soviet authorities are unreliable and incomplete. In addition to failures regarding comprehensive recordings, as one additional example, Canadian historian Robert Gellately and British historian Simon Sebag Montefiore argue that the many suspects beaten and tortured to death while in "investigative custody" were likely not to have been counted amongst the executed. A Day of Remembrance for

7888-483: 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. In September 1918, in just twelve provinces of Russia, 48,735 deserters and 7,325 brigands were arrested: 1,826 were executed and 2,230 were deported. A typical report from a Cheka department stated: 23 June 1919. 19h 30min. Telegram from Yaroslavl by battalion commander Frenkel, № 279, 22 June. The uprising of deserters in

8004-401: The central square in Tsaritsyn has been called the "Square of Fallen Fighters", where the remains of 55 victims of the White Terror are buried. A monument established in 1957 in black and red granite has an inscription: "To the freedom fighters of Red Tsaritsyn . Buried here are the heroic defenders of Red Tsaritsyn brutally tortured by White Guard butchers in 1919." A monument to victims of

8120-401: The city shot about 700 people. In Ileka they killed over 400. These mass executions were typical of Dutov's Cossack troops. Dutov's executive order of August 4, 1918, imposed the death penalty for evasion of military service and for even passive resistance to authorities on its territory. In one district of the Ural region in January 1918, Dutov's men killed over 1,000 people. On April 3, 1919,

8236-491: The clergy and buried alive rebelling peasants; in Oryol , water was poured on naked prisoners bound in the winter streets until they became living ice statues; in Kiev , Chinese Cheka detachments placed rats in iron tubes sealed at one end with wire netting and the other placed against the body of a prisoner, with the tubes being heated until the rats gnawed through the victim's body in an effort to escape. Executions took place in prison cellars or courtyards, or occasionally on

8352-639: The day-long "Restoring the Names" ceremony at the Solovetsky Stone in Moscow every 29 October. The organization was banned by the Russian government in 2022. Some of Memorial's human rights activities have continued in Russia. The Wall of Grief in Moscow, inaugurated in October 2017, is Russia's first monument ordered by presidential decree for people killed during the Stalinist repressions in

8468-710: The death penalty as an ordinary jurisdictional measure by instructing the Revolutionary People's Courts to use it "as the only punishment for counter-revolutionary offences". On 11 August 1918, still prior to the events that would officially catalyze the Terror, Vladimir Lenin sent telegrams "to introduce mass terror" in Nizhny Novgorod in response to a suspected civilian uprising there, and to "crush" landowners in Penza who resisted, sometimes violently,

8584-553: The death toll in the range of six to 13 million. The Great Purge ( Russian : Большой террор , transliterated Bolshoy terror , The Great Terror ) was a series of campaigns of political repression and persecution in the Soviet Union orchestrated by Joseph Stalin in 1937–1938. It involved the purge of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union , repression of peasants , deportations of ethnic minorities , and

8700-570: The defeat of general Pyotr Wrangel at the end of 1920. They had been promised amnesty if they would surrender. This is one of the largest massacres in the Civil War. The figures related to the massacre in Crimea remain contested. Anarchist and Bolshevik Victor Serge gave a lower figure for White officers around 13,000 which he claims were exaggerated. Yet, he condemned Kun for his treacherous actions towards allied anarchists and surrendering whites. According to social scientist, Nikolay Zayats, from

8816-496: The destruction of the officer cadre of the Red Army happened during Stalin's Great Purge . However new data that emerged on the break of the 21st century radically changed this perception, and the information was uncovered about the so-called Vesna Case , a massive series of Soviet repressions targeting former officers and generals of the Russian Imperial Army who had served in the Red Army and Soviet Navy ,

8932-873: The elderly, women, and children. In the Don Province, the Soviet government was pushed out by a Cossack regime headed by Pyotr Krasnov . Approximately 25,000 to 40,000 people were executed by Krasnov's White Cossacks, which lasted until the Red Army conquered the region following their victory at Tsaritsyn . In 1918 when the Whites controlled the Northern Territory with a population of about 400,000 people, more than 38,000 were sent to prisons. Of those, about 8,000 were executed while thousands more died from torture and disease. In November 1918, after seizing power in Siberia , Admiral Alexander Kolchak pursued

9048-530: The leadership of the Volunteer Army passed to Anton Denikin . During the Denikin regime, the press regularly urged violence against Jews. For example, a proclamation by one of Denikin's generals incited people to "arm themselves" in order to extirpate "the evil force which lives in the hearts of Jew-communists ." In the small town of Fastov alone, Denikin's Volunteer Army murdered over 1,500 Jews, mostly

9164-543: The month of April of that year – the Communist Government attacked, without provocation or warning, the Anarchist Club of Moscow and by the use of machine guns and artillery "liquidated" the whole organisation. It was the beginning of Anarchist hounding, but it was sporadic in character, breaking out now and then, quite planless, and frequently self-contradictory. On 21 February 1918, the death penalty

9280-479: The names of the executed and the reasons of the execution must be made public." According to official numbers, the Bolsheviks executed 500 "representatives of overthrown classes" ( kulaks ) immediately after the assassination of Uritsky. Soviet commissar Grigory Petrovsky called for an expansion of the Terror and an "immediate end of looseness and tenderness." In October 1918, Cheka commander Martin Latsis likened

9396-640: The new Soviet government , or participated in sabotage, collaborated with the deposed Tsarists , or made assassination attempts against Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders. Liebman noted that opposition parties such as the Cadets who were democratically elected to the Soviets in some areas, then proceeded to use their mandate to welcome in Tsarist and foreign capitalist military forces . In one incident in Baku ,

9512-511: The number of people shot during the initial period of the Red Terror are at least 10,000. Estimates for the whole period go for a low of 50,000 to highs of 140,000 and 200,000 executed. Most estimations for the number of executions in total put the number at about 100,000. However, social scientist Nikolay Zayats from the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus has argued that the figures have been greatly exaggerated due to White Army propaganda. According to Vadim Erlikhman's investigation,

9628-444: The number of the Red Terror's victims is at least 1,200,000 people. According to Robert Conquest , a total of 140,000 people were shot in 1917–1922. Candidate of Historical Sciences Nikolay Zayats states that the number of people shot by the Cheka in 1918–1922 is about 37,300 people, shot in 1918–1921 by the verdicts of the tribunals—14,200, i.e. about 50,000–55,000 people in total, although executions and atrocities were not limited to

9744-574: The order of the government of Yenisei county in the Irkutsk Governorate , General. Sergey Rozanov said: Those villages whose population meets troops with arms, burn down the villages and shoot the adult males without exception. If hostages are taken in cases of resistance to government troops, shoot the hostages without mercy. A member of the Central Committee of the right-wing Socialist Revolutionaries, D. Rakov wrote about

9860-462: The outskirts of town, during the Red Terror and Russian Civil War . After the condemned were stripped of their clothing and other belongings, which were shared among the Cheka executioners, they were either machine-gunned in batches or dispatched individually with a revolver. Those killed in prison were usually shot in the back of the neck as they entered the execution cellar, which became littered with corpses and soaked with blood. Victims killed outside

9976-429: The peasantry, with the exception of the poorest part, resisted the collectivization policy, the Soviet government resorted to harsh measures to force the farmers to collectivize. In his conversation with Winston Churchill , Joseph Stalin gave his estimate of the number of " kulaks " who were repressed for resisting Soviet collectivization as 10 million, including those forcibly deported. Recent historians have estimated

10092-524: The persecution of unaffiliated persons, characterized by widespread police surveillance, widespread suspicion of "saboteurs", imprisonment, and killings. Estimates of the number of deaths associated with the Great Purge run from the official figure of 681,692 to nearly 1,2 million. On September 15, 1933, the deputy head of the OGPU , Genrikh Yagoda reported to Joseph Stalin about the disclosure of

10208-512: The population of controlled territories. Doctor of Historical Sciences G. A. Trukan notes that Soviet authors focused mainly on the White Terror, while many modern authors who sympathize with the White movement act the other way around. However, according to Trukan, in the territories occupied by the Whites, there were no less atrocities and outrages than in Bolshevik-controlled territory. Numerous pogroms were committed during

10324-499: The primary targets of the terror, most of its direct victims were associated with the preceding regimes. The Internal Troops of the Cheka and the Red Army practiced the terror tactics of taking and executing numerous hostages, often in connection with desertions of forcefully mobilized peasants. According to Orlando Figes , more than 1 million people deserted from the Red Army in 1918, around 2 million people deserted in 1919, and almost 4 million deserters escaped from

10440-404: The rear armies or directly to the front". Even those registered as "malicious" deserters were returned to the ranks when the demand for reinforcements became desperate". Forges also noted that the Red Army instituted amnesty weeks to prohibit punitive measures against desertion which encouraged the voluntary return of 98,000-132,000 deserters to the army. For a long time historians assumed that

10556-686: The rebellion, Mikhail Tukhachevsky (chief Red Army commander in the area) authorized Bolshevik military forces to use chemical weapons against villages with civilian population and rebels. Publications in local Communist newspapers openly glorified liquidations of "bandits" with the poison gas. This campaign marked the beginning of the Gulag , and some scholars have estimated that 70,000 were imprisoned by September 1921 (this number excludes those in several camps in regions that were in revolt, such as Tambov). Conditions in these camps led to high mortality rates, and "repeated massacres" took place. The Cheka at

10672-476: The replacement of individual peasant farms by kolkhozy would immediately increase food supplies for the urban population, the supply of raw materials for processing industry, and agricultural exports generally. Collectivization was thus regarded as the solution to the crisis in agricultural distribution (mainly in grain deliveries) that had developed since 1927 and was becoming more acute as the Soviet Union pressed ahead with its ambitious industrialization program. As

10788-529: The reply was that the people murdered were Bolsheviks and this explanation, apparently, satisfied the world. Conditions were represented as being horrible in Eastern Siberia, and that life was the cheapest thing there. There were horrible murders committed, but they were not committed by the Bolsheviks as the world believes. I am well on the side of safety when I say that the anti-Bolsheviks killed one hundred people in Eastern Siberia, to every one killed by

10904-456: The requisitioning of their grain by military detachments: Comrades! The kulak uprising in your five districts must be crushed without pity ... You must make example of these people. Do all this so that for miles (versts) 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. Lenin had justified

11020-641: The rubric of the 'class struggle ' ". Political repression in the Soviet Union Throughout the history of the Soviet Union , tens of millions of people suffered political repression , which was an instrument of the state since the October Revolution . It culminated during the Stalin era , then declined, but it continued to exist during the " Khrushchev Thaw ", followed by increased persecution of Soviet dissidents during

11136-573: The shooting of hundreds of persons of democratic convictions and also those only suspected of political disloyalty occurs daily. Two days later, General Radola Gajda led a revolt in Vladivostok against Kolchak's authority. In the Urals, Siberia, and the Far East, extraordinary cruelty was practiced by several Cossack warlords: B. Annenkov , A. Dutov , G. Semyonov , and I. Kalmykov . During

11252-562: The specific orders of Yakov Sverdlov , chief secretary of the Bolshevik Central Committee . She was killed with a bullet to the back of the head. Her corpse was bundled into a barrel and set alight so that her "remains [might] be destroyed without a trace", as Sverdlov had instructed. These events persuaded the government to heed Dzerzhinsky's lobbying for greater terror against opposition. The campaign of mass repressions would officially begin thereafter. The Red Terror

11368-455: The spring of 1919 in cities of Tula , Oryol , Tver , Ivanovo , and Astrakhan . Starving workers sought to obtain food rations matching those of Red Army soldiers. They also demanded the elimination of privileges for Bolsheviks, freedom of the press, and free elections. The Cheka mercilessly suppressed all strikes, using arrests and executions. In the city of Astrakhan, a revolt led by the White Guard forces broke out. In preparing this revolt,

11484-644: The state response to the kulak revolts due to the preceding 258 uprisings that had occurred in 1918 and the threat of the White Terror . He summarised his view that either the "kulaks massacre vast numbers of workers, or the workers ruthlessly suppress the revolt of the predatory kulak minority... There can be no middle course". In a mid-August 1920 letter, having received information that in Estonia and Latvia, with which Soviet Russia had concluded peace treaties, volunteers were being enrolled in anti-Bolshevik detachments, Lenin wrote to E. M. Sklyansky , deputy chairman of

11600-452: The suppressed census of January 1937, of fifteen to sixteen million, by making reasonable assumptions about how this was divided between birth deficit and deaths." Australian historian Stephen G. Wheatcroft claims that prior to the opening of the archives for historical research, "our understanding of the scale and the nature of Soviet repression has been extremely poor" and that some specialists who wish to maintain earlier high estimates of

11716-426: The suppression of dissent was dramatically reduced and it also took new forms. The internal critics of the system were convicted of anti-Soviet agitation , anti-Soviet slander , or they were accused of being "social parasites" . Other critics were accused of being mentally ill, they were accused of having sluggish schizophrenia and incarcerated in " psikhushkas ", i.e. mental hospitals which were used as prisons by

11832-493: The tense situation regarding workers in the Ural region . On 29 January 1920, he sent a telegram to Vladimir Smirnov stating "I am surprised that you are putting up with this and do not punish sabotage with shooting; also the delay over the transfer here of locomotives is likewise manifest sabotage; please take the most resolute measures." At these times, there were numerous reports that Cheka interrogators used torture. At Odessa ,

11948-412: The terror of Kolchak's forces: Omsk just froze in horror. At a time when the wives of dead comrades, day and night looked in the snow for bodies, I was unaware of the horror behind the walls of the guardhouse. At least 2500 people were killed. Entire carts of bodies were carried to a city, like winter lamb and pork carcasses. Those who suffered were mainly soldiers of the garrison and the workers. Even

12064-455: The torture chambers, during which some 6,500 people were murdered. Major General William S. Graves , who commanded North-American occupation forces in Siberia , testified that: Semeonoff and Kalmikoff soldiers, under the protection of Japanese troops, were roaming the country like wild animals, killing and robbing the people, and these murders could have been stopped any day Japan wished. If questions were asked about these brutal murders,

12180-1126: The town was taken again in December of that year; in Rostov-on-Don , approximately 1,000 in January 1920; in Odessa , 2,200 in May–August 1919, then 1,500–3,000 between February 1920 and February 1921; in Kiev , at least 3,000 in February–August 1919; in Ekaterinodar , at least 3,000 between August 1920 and February 1921; In Armavir , a small town in Kuban , between 2,000 and 3,000 in August–October 1920. The list could go on and on. In Crimea , Béla Kun and Rosalia Zemlyachka , with Vladimir Lenin 's approval, had 50,000 White prisoners of war and civilians summarily executed by shooting or hanging after

12296-441: The town were moved by truck, bound and gagged, to their place of execution, where they sometimes were made to dig their own graves. According to Edvard Radzinsky , "it became a common practice to take a husband hostage and wait for his wife to come and purchase his life with her body". During decossackization , there were massacres, according to historian Robert Gellately , "on an unheard of scale". The Pyatigorsk Cheka organized

12412-495: The trial against Annenkov, there was testimony about the robbing of peasants and atrocities perpetrated under the slogan: “We have no restrictions! God is with us and Ataman Annenkov: slash right and left!”. In September 1918, during the suppression of peasant uprisings in Slavgorod county, Annenkov tortured and killed up to 500 people. The village of Black Dole was burned down, after which peasants were tortured and shot, including

12528-865: The villages, and together with the Committees of the Poor restored Soviet power. The revolt in Astrakhan was brought under control by 10 March, and completely defeated by the 12th. More than 184 were sentenced to death, including monarchists, and representatives of the Kadets, Left-Socialist Revolutionaries, repeat offenders, and persons shown to have links with British and American intelligence services. The opposition media with political opponents like Chernov, and Melgunov, and others would later say that between 2,000 and 4,000 were shot or drowned from 12 to 14 of March 1919. However, strikes continued. Lenin had concerns about

12644-485: The whole range of Soviet regime's terrors". Rudolph Rummel in 2006 said that the earlier higher victim total estimates are correct, although he includes those killed by the government of the Soviet Union in other Eastern European countries as well. Conversely, J. Arch Getty and Stephen G. Wheatcroft insist that the opening of the Soviet archives has vindicated the lower estimates put forth by "revisionist" scholars. Simon Sebag Montefiore in 2003 suggested that Stalin

12760-521: The wives and children of the peasants. Girls of Slavgorod and surrounding areas were brought to Annenkov's train, raped, and then shot. According to an eyewitness, Annenkov behaved with brutal torture: victims had their eyes gouged and tongues and strips of their back cut off, were buried alive, or tied to horses. In Semipalatinsk , Annenkov threatened to shoot every fifth resident if the city refused to pay indemnities. On May 9, 1918, after Ataman Dutov captured Alexandrov Gay village, nearly 2,000 men of

12876-475: Was Pēteris Ķuzis. He took part in the October Revolution of 1917 and afterwards worked in the central apparatus of the Cheka. During the Red Terror, Berzin initiated the system of taking and shooting hostages to stop desertions and other "acts of disloyalty and sabotage". As chief of a special department of the Latvian Red Army (later the Russian 15th Army ), Berzin played a part in the suppression of

12992-478: Was also formally re-established, as an exceptional revolutionary instrument, with the famous decree Socialist Homeland is in Danger! . In article 8, it read as follows: "Enemy agents, profiteers, marauders, hooligans, counter-revolutionary agitators and German spies are to be shot on the spot". On 16 June, more than two months prior to the events that would officially catalyze the Terror, a new decree re-established

13108-623: Was conducted by the Cheka secret police and its successors , and other state organs. Periods of increased repression include the Red Terror , Collectivization , the Great Purges , the Doctors' Plot , and others. The secret police forces conducted massacres of prisoners on numerous occasions. Repression took place in the Soviet republics and in the territories occupied by the Soviet Army during and following World War II , including

13224-466: Was sentenced to three to five years in the camps , and for "cohabitation" with the use of violence - from five to eight. Nikolai Klyuev was the first known homosexual to suffer from Soviet repressions. The poet was accused of writing love lyrics that "were written from a male person to a male person." In February 1934, Klyuyev was arrested in his apartment on charges of "composing and distributing counter-revolutionary literary works", and in 1937 he

13340-525: Was shot . In later times, the most famous victim of the Soviet repression against the LGBT was a film director Sergei Parajanov . Population transfer in the Soviet Union may be divided into the following broad categories: deportations of " anti-Soviet " categories within the population, who were often classified as " enemies of the workers "; deportations of nationalities; labor force transfer; and organised migrations in opposite directions in order to fill

13456-408: Was ultimately responsible for the deaths of at least 20 million people. Some of these estimates rely in part on demographic losses. Conquest explained how he arrived at his estimate: "I suggest about eleven million by the beginning of 1937, and about three million over the period 1937–38, making fourteen million. The eleven-odd million is readily deduced from the undisputed population deficit shown in

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