The XXth Century Political History of Russia: lecture materials. Gennady Bordyugov

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СКАЧАТЬ (the Cheka) to protect the gains of the Revolution. Felix Dzerzhinsky became the Cheka’s head. He made the relationship of these organs to law enforcement agencies clear in his inaugural address: «Do not think that I am seeking any forms of revolutionary justice; we do not need justice today. Now we have to fight, face to face, it is a struggle for life or death, who will win out?! I propose – indeed, I insist on organizing revolutionary slaughter of counter-revolutionary agents».

      However, only three months later did the Cheka obtain the right to found local Extraordinary Commissions in provincial and district centers. The decree of the Council of People’s Commissars of February 21, 1918 – «The Socialist motherland in danger» – gave it the right of extrajudicial killing of «enemy agents, speculators, housebreakers, hooligans, counter-revolutionary propagandists as well as German spies.»

      It goes without saying that there was nothing unusual in the formation of extraordinary agencies. However, there was one condition – that their activity should have been based on the people’s self-activity; emergency measures and corresponding bodies should have compensated for the failures and weaknesses of the Soviets. Under an authoritarian administration, special governing bodies take a different meaning and play a different role in the power structure.

      In May 1918, the Bolshevik government found itself at an impasse regarding economic policy. It was impossible to establish a bread monopoly gently. External as well as internal military pressure had reached its critical point. In such conditions for their own sake the authorities made a conscious decision to go beyond the limits of simple emergency measures. They plunged themselves and the society into the «extreme emergency» regime. The commissars believed that only extreme measures, and not planned legal activities, could solve acute contradictions and transform them into something new. Provisional dictatorship was imposed; the VTsIK began to expel the Mensheviks, right orientated social revolutionaries and then left orientated social revolutionaries from the Committee. In his speech at the rally in Butyrsky district of Moscow, after the attempted assassination of Lenin, which took place on August 30, 1918, Nikolai Osinskii said: «All the bourgeois elements placed on record and taken under public supervision must be divided into three groups. We will annihilate the active ones and those who constitute a threat. The others will be clapped by the heels. The third group will be subjected to hard labor, and those who are not able to work will go to camps.

      Little by little, such methods assumed an uncontrollable character. Moreover, extraordinary agencies did not yet have strictly determined prescriptions and legitimate principles regulating their activity. The committees of the poor (kombeds), food brigades (prodotryads), blocking troops (barrier troops), revolutionary tribunals and local authorities were becoming almost uncontrollable. Quite soon the Cheka formed its net in all guberniyas and uyezds (provincial centers); it gained the right of peremptory judgments on questions of life and death. In a number of offices it could even exercise control over the activity of local judicial bodies and subordinate local committees of the ruling party.

      In their letters people asked Lenin avowedly and harshly: «Why has the dictatorship of the proletariat in local offices turned into a criminal dictatorship of lower class criminals?» «How come, that even on this great day, the day of the anniversary of the Great October Revolution, working people do not have any real rights and possibilities but have to fear the Cheka agents and their searches?»

      The «extreme emergency» regime did not manage to strengthen the communist government. On the contrary it weakened it and generated a situation of anarchy. Neither the upper class, nor the lower class could control the activity of the other. A weak system of power was rapidly losing its social foundation. All classes of the society tired of the anarchy engulfing the country. Peasants and ordinary citizens had only one dream: order. The destiny of the Bolsheviks depended on the transformation of the «extreme emergency» regime into a strictly organized form of dictatorship.

      Beginning in September 1918, one could record the reining in of some manifestations of the «extreme emergency» regime, first and foremost the use of mass terror as a form of governing. The emergency measures and agencies were also brought within bounds of the law and strict regulatory activity. Only with this strategy could they manage to win over the majority of the population and form a firm rear echelon.

      The decrees of the IV All-Russian Extraordinary Congress of Soviets in November 1918 proclaimed amnesty. Local extraordinary committees lost the right to seize hostages, and consequently only the central office of the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission was authorized to do so. A considerable number of hostages who had been seized before were freed. The committees of the poor (the kombeds) were eliminated. «Revolutionary law» came into force. All these decisions manifested the readiness of the Bolsheviks for a long-term war, as well as comprehension that they could not make war in the conditions of disorder and instability that marked the «extreme emergency» regime. In justifying the necessity of the aforementioned decrees, and primarily of the one concerning amnesty, the authorities wanted to demonstrate that they were sufficiently strong, and that they were ready to reconcile with all their enemies who would agree to submit to Soviet power.

      On February 17, 1919, with reference to the decision of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, the VTsIK declared the transfer of the right of adjudication from the extraordinary commissions to revolutionary tribunals. But this did not mean that these measures put an end to the manifestations of the «extreme emergency» regime. The Cheka kept its full powers in the regions where Soviet power had proclaimed martial law, and in 1919 such regions prevailed. Revolutionary tribunals were not, and could not be, a model of justice. Extraordinary commissions issued their judgments at the end of a trial, and revolutionary tribunals examined the cases on the basis of these judgments. Moreover, members of extraordinary committees were required to be members of the revolutionary tribunals. Standing orders on the revolutionary tribunals, which were adopted by VTsIK on April 12, 1919, prescribed that they were to be governed only by the conditions of the case and revolutionary conscience while judging.

      Revolutionary tribunals were formed in the Military Revolutionary Councils at the fronts, and in the armies and corps as well; they were called Military Revolutionary Tribunals. Not only military men and prisoners of war were under their jurisdiction, but all criminals who had committed crimes within the zone of military operations as well. The sentences were enforced immediately. Death sentences were executed after two days; their enforcement could be stopped by the corresponding Military Revolutionary Council.

      All extraordinary committees underwent organizational changes. This was, perhaps, the main sign of a return to the regime of regular emergency measures. Indicative in this context were the warnings by Petr Kropotkin, the anarchist theorist, in his letter to Lenin dated September 17, 1918, that the extraordinary bodies were on the eve of a serious trial. Like all other theorists of the revolution, Kropotkin appealed to the experience of the French Revolution. He tried to show how the terrorists of the Committee of General Security (the National Guard) became its grave-diggers in 1794. His studies of the literature made Kropotkin conclude that along with the Committee of General Rescue and particularly with the Paris Commune founded in 1793, «along with this revolutionary force, which was already partly constructive, another type appeared that was a police force, presented by Committee of General Security and its police departments. At first, this police force that had achieved momentum during the Reign of Terror, demolished the Sections (agencies of the People’s Revolution that appeared in large cities – G. B.), then the Commune and finally the Committee of General Security itself,» he wrote to Lenin.

      Kropotkin did not conceal from Lenin the reason why he needed to examine this period of history: «Your comrades/terrorists are about to do the same in the Soviet Republic.» The Russian people have a great reserve of creative potential. Hardly had these forces begun to rebuild life on a new foundation from the complete ruin brought on by the war and revolution, when «the police, with their duties imposed on them by the Terror, commenced their corrosive and pernicious activity». They paralyzed any kind of construction and appointed completely inadequate people. Police cannot be a «builder» of a new life. But nevertheless it was the police who were СКАЧАТЬ