The Red Terror as the Origin of Violent Rhetoric

The literature of 1932-34 frequently recalls the “Red Terror” that began in August 1918. It makes reference to the militant rhetoric and pamphlets such as Lenin’s State and Revolution, which was written and published just prior to the October Revolution.

In 1932-34, the conflict in the countryside is described in similar escha­tological terms. The elimination of kurkuls, nationalists, and saboteurs is described as accompanying the final struggle against forces that represent capitalist reaction and human greed. A new monolithic, militarized state is to remove them. The kurkuls, who at the time owned an estimated 3-5% of the land, will, according to the rhetoric, be eliminated in six months, ostensibly to make agricultural production more efficient and to finance industrialization.

Appadurai argues that fear is the conscious and subconscious motiva­tion behind violence. Constructed out of anxiety caused by a sense of incompleteness, or a desire for moral purity, or a fear of potential disrup­tion to the collective by an obdurate minority, it can lead to genocidal behavior (Appadurai 2006, 17). Eyewitnesses of the Red Terror and com­munal violence unleashed in 1918 confirm this appraisal. Isaak Stein­berg (Shteinberg) was a Left Socialist-Revolutionary who served as the Commissar of Justice in 1918 before being imprisoned by Lenin in the following year. He argued in 1923 that those employing terror are often aware that it is a symptom of weakness:

In spite of its grim and externally bold forms, it in essence reflects the continuous anxiety and alarm of the terrorists, who are more and more afraid of the rustle of leaves on a tree. [...] Only in a situation of permanent panic can the cruelties of terror take place. That is why a dictatorship of terror in a certain degree is a dictatorship of panic.

(Steinberg 1923, 101, emphasis in original)

The pervasive fear of the surrounding masses, he wrote, stemmed from the regime’s illegitimacy, the fact that it was a small minority masquerad­ing as a majority, a dictatorship by a bureaucracy, and in effect a “dicta­torship of the secret police (and of the army that works with it)” (ibid., 99-100, emphasis in original).

Martin Latsis, one of the Cheka’s top officials, published an article in Izvestiia on 23 August 1918 entitled “There Are No Laws in Civil War.” He stated:

In almost all periods, among almost all nations, the established cus­toms of war were formulated in written laws.

(Quoted in Steinberg 1953, 151-152)

On 1 November 1918 in the Ezhenedelnik Chresvychainoi Kommissii Kazani (Kazan Cheka Weekly), Latsis instructed tribunals to sentence disarmed people without searching for evidence of whether the accused opposed Soviet power in deed or with words: “The first questions you ought to put are: to what class does he belong? What is his origin? What is his education and profession? And it is these questions that ought to decide the fate of the accused” (quoted in Gellately 2007, 71-72). This is described by Leggett as a classic statement of the fanatical attitude. Latsis formulated it when he was Chairman of the Eastern Front Cheka. In 1919, he became Chairman of the Ukrainian Cheka. When his article was criticized by E. M. Yaroslavskii in December 1918, he responded with an adamant defense: “In a moment of most desperate class war it is impossible to obtain material evidence. At a time of total class confron­tation, the investigator’s most valuable information consists precisely of data concerning (present) class affiliation, class origin, [...] education and profession” (quoted in Leggett 1981, 390).⁴

From that moment, the Soviet secret police no longer focused on any particular crime, but killed by category and quota.

The categorization of social groups as incorrigible—along with the practice of killing civilians en masse—was standard practice during the Red Terror. Hostages, even wives of husbands who had joined the Red Army and then deserted, were put to death (Leggett 1981, 97). Lenin con­tinually urged more terror, violence, and executions. When in February 1918 the German army launched an attack, the government published a decree on 21 February entitled “The Socialist Fatherland is in danger!” It appealed to the heroism of the Russian people, called for a scorched- earth policy in case of retreat, and demanded that “enemy agents, profi­teers, marauders, hooligans, counterrevolutionary agitators, and German spies” be “shot on the spot” (Steinberg 1923, 35). When Steinberg as Commissar of Justice objected to these measures, Lenin retorted: “Do you really believe that we can be victorious without the very cruelest revolutionary terror?” Steinberg writes:

We were discussing a harsh police measure with far-reaching terror­istic potentialities. Lenin resented my opposition to it in the name of revolutionary justice. So I called out in exasperation, “Then why do we bother with a Commissariat of Justice? Let’s call it frankly the Commissariat for Social Extermination and be done with it!” Lenin’s face brightened and he replied, “Well put... that’s exactly what it should be... but we can’t say that.”

(Steinberg 1953, 145)

According to Steinberg, the years 1918-20 entrenched a system of cynical terror and created the foundation on which the Bolshevik state was constructed: “the soil of revolutionary Russia was poisoned in that period; it was inevitable that in the future it should bear poisonous fruit” (ibid., 146).⁵ It is the language of total war from this period that resurfaces in the poetry of the early thirties.

Other perspectives always existed, and were voiced. In 1923, Petr Arshinov, a leader of the Ukrainian anarchists within the Makhnovite movement, described the Bolshevik obsession with centralization and control. He saw Bolshevism’s main trait as the “violent overcoming of the will of all others” and “the complete suppression of the personality” (Arshinov 1923, 67-68). In Arshinov’s view, the Bolsheviks had little sup­port in Ukraine, arrived as an invading army from the north, established their rule by military means, disbanded councils (soviets) that had been organized by local people and instead set up their own, to which they attached party commissars (ibid., 77-78, 96, 153). Invariably, whenever a village was entered, hostages would be executed in order to terror­ize the population (ibid., 159-60). Torture was used by the Cheka to turn captured anarchists into spies and informers (ibid., 161). Arshinov detailed atrocities committed against the civilian population, insisting, like Steinberg, that the ideals of the February 1917 revolution and the Bolshevik movement were “antipodes,” that communism had “crushed freedom of organization, speech, press, and [a belief in] the inviolability of life” (ibid., 245).

The discourse on Bolshevik violence in Ukraine also includes works produced by local party members. Two disaffected Ukrainian Bolsheviks, Mazlakh and Shakhrai, wrote On the Current Situation in the Ukraine, a text that brought them expulsion from the party in June 1919.⁶ They asked whether the party’s internationalism was merely verbal, a tactic to blunt opposition in Ukraine, and they emphasized that Soviet Russia, as heir to the Russian empire, had assimilated a chauvinistic attitude toward other nations. Shakhrai reported that on one occasion while he lived in Saratov, he had argued in favor of Ukraine’s independence. As a result, he was accused of counter-revolution by a comrade who threatened to report him to the Cheka (Mazlakh and Shakhrai 1970, 168). When Shakh­rai discussed Ukrainian independence with Stalin, who was at the time Commissar for Nationality Affairs, the latter also threatened him with the Cheka, but then suddenly checked himself, saying that he was joking (ibid., 168).

Throughout the twenties, the GPU continued to treat Ukrainian intel­lectuals with suspicion and kept many under surveillance. One example, that of Ivan Dniprovskyi (real name Shevchenko), will have to suffice. He complained on 16 December 1926 to the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the CP(B)U:

By virtue of someone’s wild and senseless denunciation, for the last year and a half the GPU has every few months summoned my wife Maria Mykh[ailivna] Piliniska, to examine her past and mine. [...] The calls from the GPU are like thunder bolts in the home, oppres­sive and destructive. After recuperating in Odesa, my wife spent three days waiting for “a time and day” to visit the investigator, lost the results of her two-month-long treatment and has once more become an invalid. The “questioning” appears innocent but is profoundly offensive to me. Some sort of facts about me are being collected from my wife... (I myself have never been asked anything, although I am ready to stand before the “Revolutionary Tribune” at any time and have nothing to hide either in my past or my work).

(Kharkiv Literary Museum, Vst. 19405, RP-2804/1-5)

The couple was from Kamianets-Podilsk, in which the government of the Ukrainian People’s Republic had briefly resided. They moved to Kharkiv in 1923, where Pilinska found work as a translator, and Dniprovsky gained fame as a playwright.⁷

A psychological explanation for the extreme violence to which Ukraine was subjected in the thirties might be traced back to the idea behind the Red Terror. War, as Clausewitz famously stated, is the continuation of politics “by other means” (Clausewitz 1982, 119). In his view, it is an act of violence designed “to compel the enemy to fulfil our will” (ibid., 123). Disarming an enemy nation can be done in one of three ways: by defeat­ing it militarily, disarming the country (thus preventing the formation of a military force), or by paralyzing the enemy’s will (through intimidation, humiliation, and rape). Seen in this way, Stalin’s war on Ukraine in the early thirties set about accomplishing the goals of defeating the oppo­sition by military means (stopping the peasant revolts), disarming the country (ending the threat of secession, removing the national leadership, halting Ukrainization outside the republic and altering its course within), and breaking the national will (weakening the sense of national-cultural identity, making it less assertive and more pliable by “teaching a lesson”). The rhetoric of violence, from this perspective, can be interpreted as a thinly camouflaged war against a recalcitrant people.

Notes

1. For examples, see Stasiuk (2008, 102-108, 128-129).

2. Concerned with the seriousness of the secessionist threat, the party leadership, it has been argued, decided to use the grain requisitioning crisis in order to subdue the republic. Stalin’s attention shifted from collecting grain to deliver­ing a pre-emptive blow to a recalcitrant republic, escalating “a serious but limited famine, caused by his own policies, into a Holodomor intended not to eradicate, but to emasculate the Ukrainian nation by breaking its peasantry and crippling its intellectual and political elite” (Graziosi 2015, 69).

3. The Detachments of Special Purpose (Chasti osobogo Naznacheniia—abbreviated to CHON or Osnaz) emerged in mid-1919 as a result of a resolution by the party’s Central Committee published in Pravda on 23 April 1919, calling for the urgent mobilization of all party resources for the revolution’s defense. These detachments were used for guarding key political, economic and mili­tary installations, for suppressing counter-revolutionary risings, for assisting Cheka operations, and for giving combat support to the Red Army (Leggett (1981, 226-227).

4. Yaroslavskii was published in Pravda on 25 December 1918. Latsis responded in Pravda on 29 December 1918.

5. For further examples of the will to violence during the Red Terror, see Stein­berg (1923, 44; 1953,147-149); and Leggett (1981, 113-114).

6. Mazlakh was reinstated following an appeal to the Central Committee of the Russian Party. He became a member of the Central Statistical Bureau of the Soviet Ukrainian republic, and then disappeared during the purges of the late thirties. Shakhrai did not try to regain his party membership, but left Saratov for Ukraine, which was being occupied by Denikin at the time. He worked as an editor for several underground newspapers in the Kuban region and was executed by Denikin’s forces in the autumn of 1919. The book was first published in Saratov in 1919. The Russian edition was immediately confis­cated and destroyed. Only 100 copies of the Ukrainian edition were allowed distribution.

7. Dniprovskyi died of tuberculosis on 1 December 1934. Although denounced as a “nationalist” along with his fellow writers, his long sojourns in Crimean sanatoriums and relatively early death saved him from arrest, and his archive from destruction. It is now in the Kharkiv Literary Museum.

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