“THE TERROR WAS FORCED UPON US”
Usage of force in all its forms, from executions downwards,
is the only method which can enable the proletariat to evolve
Communistic Man from the human material of the present
Capitalistic epoch.--BUKHARIN.
Bolshevist spokesmen frequently declare that the Terror was the outcome
of “popular indignation against counter-revolution,” and that only
because of pressure exercised upon it by the working-classes did the
Bolshevist Party resort to terrorist measures. Still more frequently do
they assert that at least did terrorism, when assumed as a weapon by
the State, “legalise and normalise” popular activities which otherwise
were taking the law into their own hands.
A more pharisaical attitude it is not easy to conceive. But at least it
is easy to bring forward facts illustrative of the gulf between it and
the truth.
On February 17, 1922, Dzherzhinsky, “People’s Commissary of the
Interior,” and the real creator and director of the Red Terror, said in
a memorandum addressed to the Council of People’s Commissaries:
Throughout, my object has been to systematise a Revolutionary
Government poorly equipped with punitive apparatus. From the
first I saw that the centuries-old hatred of the proletariat for
its oppressors might express itself in senseless, sanguinary
episodes which would arouse such elements of popular fury as
would sweep away friends as well as foes, useful and vital
sections of society as well as sections hostile and noxious
to us. Hence, from the first the Che-Ka has been seeking
but to impart wise direction to the chastening hand of the
revolutionary proletariat.
Well, let me demonstrate the true character of Dzherzhinsky’s “wise
direction” or “systematisation” of a State poorly provided with
punitive apparatus. As early as by December 7, 1917, his organisation
of an All-Russian Che-Ka based upon “historical research into
past epochs” stood worked out, and had been made to agree with
Bolshevist-deduced theories. And during the previous spring Lenin had
remarked that it would be quite easy to carry out a social revolution
in Russia, since all that would be necessary would be to exterminate
two or three hundred of the _bourgeoisie_. And we know Trotsky’s
reply to Kautsky’s _Terrorism and Communism_ wherein he, Trotsky,
proffered a metaphysical justification of terrorism which can be
reduced to the formula: “The enemy needs to be rendered harmless. And
in time of war that means that the enemy needs to be destroyed. To
which end the most potent weapon is terrorism. To deny its power is to
be a dissimulating hypocrite.” Naturally, Kautsky was at least entitled
to retort that Trotsky’s book had better have been entitled “A Hymn of
Praise to Inhumanity.” “For,” added Kautsky, “bloodthirsty appeals are
worthy only of the worst and lowest phases of revolution.”
Also, the Bolshevists so far flout facts as to maintain that they
resorted to terrorism only because early attempts had been made
upon the lives of “proletarian leaders,” and in 1918, when brazenly
extolling the Soviet Government’s “exceptional humanity,” Latzis, a
Lett, and a particularly ruthless member of the Che-Ka, declared that
“though thousands of our people have been murdered, we have never gone
beyond making arrests”; whilst Peters impudently asserted, as we have
seen, that up to the time of Uritsky’s assassination not a single case
of capital punishment had occurred in Petrograd.
Well, even if we grant that the Bolshevists did begin their rule by
abolishing (for propaganda purposes, of course) the capital penalty, it
was not long before that penalty came into its own again.[27] For as
early as January 8, 1918, we find the Soviet of People’s Commissaries
issuing an Order that battalions “for trench digging” should be formed,
and be composed of men and women members of the _bourgeoisie_, and
officered by Red Guards. And,” added the Soviet, “Any man or woman of
the _bourgeois_ class who shall resist this Order shall be shot,
even as ... all counter-revolutionary agitators are to be shot.”
Hence, for all intents and purposes, summary capital punishment,
execution without trial or inquiry, became reinstated.
A month later (for the Che-Ka needed to win its spurs) a second Order
notified that “all counter-revolutionary agitators, persons fleeing to
the Don country, and persons joining the Counter-Revolutionary Army
shall be shot without mercy by detachments empowered by the Che-Ka.”
And in time so broadcast did these threats come to be that they flowed
like water from the cornucopia of a fountain. “Sackmen (?) resisting
shall be shot”; “Persons posting up unauthorised proclamations shall be
shot.” There was no end to them.[28]
Once the Council of People’s Commissaries sent the following urgent
telegram along a line of railway--a telegram relating to a special
train which at the moment was _en route_ from Stavka to Petrograd:
“If the train which is now proceeding towards Petersburg shall
experience the smallest delay, the person or persons responsible for
that delay shall be executed out of hand.” And another notice said:
Any person found attempting to evade the heretofore laws of the
country concerning sales or purchases or acts of barter, or the
laws promulgated to the same end by the Soviet Power, shall be
punished with sequestration of property and shooting.
Hence Bolshevist threats of capital punishment were as many as they
were varied. Nor, be it remarked, was the right of pronouncing death
sentences confined to the central authorities alone, for local
revolutionary committees also could--or at all events did--pronounce
them, and in Kalouga Province we encounter a notice of the coming
execution of a well-to-do citizen for having failed to furnish his
contribution to a monetary levy; in Viatka, a case of a man being
executed for “leaving his home after eight o’clock at night”; and,
in Rybinsk, a case of a man being executed for “having, with others,
assembled in a public street”--not even a warning seeming to have been
thought necessary. Nor did threats of death involve shooting alone, for
we read that the Bolshevist committee of the town of Loniev intimated,
after fixing the rate of contribution to be paid by its local citizens,
that anyone who should refuse to pay it “will be drowned in the
Dniester with a stone about his neck.”
And still more brutally did Krylenko, the Bolshevists’
Commander-in-Chief, and subsequently Chief Government Advocate before
the Supreme Revolutionary Tribunal (and therefore the man who of all
others should have upheld law and order in Soviet Russia)--still more
brutally did this Krylenko announce on January 22: “I would suggest
that the peasantry of Mohilev Province be left to deal with their
oppressors as they may think fit.” Lastly, we find the Chief Commissary
of the Northern Region and Western Siberia proclaiming in a certain
instance that, “unless the offenders be handed over, every tenth
person, regardless of guilt or of innocence, shall be shot.”
Such were some of the orders, decrees, and announcements issued by
the Soviet Government on the subject of the capital penalty! They
mean that as early as 1918 capital punishment became re-established
on a scale which even the Tsarist _régime_ had never beheld, as
a first result of Dzherzhinsky’s “wise direction” of “a Revolutionary
Government’s punitive apparatus,” and of the Government’s showing
the way in disregarding human rights and morality by issuing a
manifesto which proclaimed, on February 21, 1918, when the German
forces were advancing, that “the (Soviet) Fatherland is in danger,
and therefore from now onwards the death penalty shall be applied
to all enemy agents, spies, looters, profiteers, hooligans, and
counter-revolutionary agents.”
But the most revolting incident of all was the trial of Captain
Stchasny before the Supreme Revolutionary Tribunal in May, 1918.
Earlier he had been the means of saving the remnant of the Russian
Baltic Fleet from surrender to the German Squadron, and bringing it
safely back to Kronstadt; yet no sooner had he done so than he was
arraigned for “treason”: the indictment against him said: “Although
he has accomplished what would seem to have been a heroic deed, his
object was none other than that he might thereby earn popularity for
subsequent use against the Soviet Government!” Trotsky acted as chief,
in fact, sole, witness for the prosecution, and the end was that on
May 22 Stchasny was shot for having saved his country’s warships in
the Baltic! At a stroke, also, the verdict created for the Bolshevists
the precedent for award of the death sentence by a legal tribunal
which they were needing. And thenceforth it was not in isolated cases
that capital punishment began to occur, whether in pursuance of a
legal verdict, or in execution of an “administrative order” (the
Che-Ka’s _ad hoc_ judicial weapon up to the September of 1918,
the date of the Red Terror’s official proclamation), for we can now
begin to count cases of capital punishment awarded by formal sentence
by the score and by the hundred. To which there should be added both
the executions consequent upon quellings of peasant risings, and the
results of military firings upon street demonstrations, and those many
governmental irregularities of which the slaughter of officers in
Finland and the Crimea during the October of 1917, and the shootings of
thousands of persons in localities where civil war broke out, and the
Che-Ka’s orders and decrees could be implemented in full, are examples.
In 1919, however, Latzis, statistician to the Government, did furnish
some official totals of executions, and they appeared in a series of
articles in the Kievan and Muscovite editions of the _Izvestia_
before being re-issued in book form under the title of _Two Years’
Fighting on the Home Front_. The articles stated that during the
first half of 1918 (which constituted the first six months of the
Che-Ka’s existence) the number of persons shot in Soviet Russia
(which as yet included only the old twenty provinces of the centre)
amounted to “22,” and that similar moderation would have continued
to be observed if the country had not “become swept with a wave of
conspiracies,” and if “the counter-revolutionary _bourgeoisie_
had not resorted to a White Terror.”[29] A statement of the kind could
have been made only in a land whence all normal sources of social
information for the statement’s contradiction had been swept away.
But it happened that at that period (1918) I too was making shift to
keep a record of executions: and though usually I could avail myself
of figures published by the Bolshevists themselves, this applied,
for the most part, to the centre of the country alone, and only in
a slighter degree to the provinces, where my sole resource was (1)
returns published at irregular and uncertain intervals in one or
another local journal, and (2) such information from other sources as
stood subject to subsequent verification. Yet even these casual data
provided me with a card-index library of 884 items. Hence I am as well
aware as was Latzis himself that, though the All-Russian Che-Ka was
not _officially_ established until December 7, Che-Ka activity
began long before that date, since at the taking of the Winter Palace
the Bolshevists had thrown Prince Toumanov, ex-Assistant Minister
of War, into the Neva, and on the day after the fall of Gatchina
Mouraviev had issued an official order for the lynching of recalcitrant
Tsarist officers, and the Bolshevists had brought about Doukhonin’s
and Shingarev’s and Kokoshkin’s deaths, and Lenin had caused two
student brothers named Ganglez (?) to be shot for the crime of being
found to be wearing epaulets on their shoulders, and frequently the
Military-Revolutionary Tribunal (the forerunner of the All-Russian
Che-Ka) had made use of “extraordinary decrees” for the extermination
of its opponents.
So who shall credit Latzis’ statement that “those executed up to the
middle of 1918 belonged mostly to the criminal underworld,” or his
further statement that they numbered only “22”?
Besides, the Latzian statistics overlooked statements made by the
Che-Ka itself: they overlooked the fact that already the Che-Ka’s own
organ, the _Weekly_, had admitted that the Che-Ka of the Urals
alone had shot 35 persons during the period above specified. Besides,
were his statements meant to convey the impression that no executions
at all had taken place during the _second_ half of the year named?
For, if so, how are we to reconcile such forbearance of slaughter with
an interview which, on June 8, 1918, the two chiefs of the All-Russian
Che-Ka, Dzherzhinsky and Zachs, accorded to a representative of Gorky’s
journal _Novaya Zhizn_?[30] For during that interview the two
chiefs informed the journalist that “mercy towards our enemies does not
come within our purview,” and spoke of executions as “carried out by
unanimous decree of our Che-Ka Committee.”
At all events we know that on August 28, 1918, the Muscovite
_Izvestia_ issued official intimation that 43 persons had been
shot in six provincial towns, and that inasmuch as, in October of the
same year, Bokia, Uritsky’s successor on the Che-Ka of Petrograd,
reported at a conference of Che-Kas of the Northern Commune that up to
the previous March 12, when the seat of the All-Russian Che-Ka had been
transferred from Petrograd to Moscow, 800 persons had been arrested,
and the number of hostages estimated to be alive during September had
amounted only to 500, at least 300 must have been shot between March
and September.[31]
Moreover, are we to discredit an entry in Margoulies’ diary which says:
“I have just been told by Peters (Secretary to the Danish Legation)
that Uritsky goes about boasting of having signed twenty-three death
warrants in a day”?[32] And Uritsky, be it remembered, was one of those
who affected to be “regularising” the Terror!
At least it may be said with safety that the only difference between
the first half and the second half of 1918 lay in the fact that
during the second half propaganda on behalf of a Red Terror became
open and universal propaganda, and that immediately upon the attempt
upon Lenin’s life the Terror was announced _urbi et orbi_. Yet
at a meeting of “workers’ soviets” held as late as December 7, 1918,
Lounacharsky had the hypocrisy to say: “We do not wish for a Red
Terror, but are as opposed as ever to capital punishment, to the
scaffold.” To public capital punishment, to the public scaffold, yes:
but not to slaughter in hidden torture-chambers. Radek alone seems to
have thought that there was no sense in concealing his predilection for
public, rather than for secret, executions, for he wrote in an article
entitled “The Red Terror”[33]:
When we shot five _bourgeois_ hostages in accordance with a
plenary decree of the local soviet, the execution of these men
in the presence of, and with the approval of, several thousands
of workers instilled mass intimidation more effectively than
could have been accomplished even by _five hundred_
executions carried out apart from working-class participation.
Nor could the Commissary of Justice’s[34] one-time insistence upon the
“magnanimity” which he declared to be inspiring Bolshevist tribunals
save him from having later to admit that “the period between March,
1918 and the end of August was a veritable (though unofficial) reign of
terror.”
So sanguinary, such an orgy of slaughter, did that reign become as at
first even to disgust more than one convinced Communist. And the first
protestant of the kind was the sailor Dybenko who later achieved “fame”
in connection with the Stchasny affair. On July 31 he sent to the
journal _Anarchism_ a letter as follows:
Does there not exist a Communist honest enough vocally to
protest against this re-establishment of capital punishment? Or
are all of you cowards, and afraid to lift your voices? However,
if even a single honest Communist does exist, let him now do
his duty by denouncing the extreme punitive measure before the
world’s proletariat. More. Seeing that _we_ are not to
blame for this scandalous restoration of the death penalty,
let us express our disgust by leaving the ruling party, and
raising such an outcry as shall force our Communist authorities
themselves to lead us, and all other opponents of the death
penalty, to the scaffold, and there themselves act as our
executioners.
However, it is only fair to state that eventually Dybenko got over
what Lounacharsky called his “sentimentality”; for three years later,
after the failure of the Kronstadt rising, he is seen taking an
active part in the slaughter of his comrades there. “There must be no
shilly-shallying with the villains.” During the first day alone of the
shootings 300 “villains” were executed.
Other voices too were raised in protest, but soon fell as silent as
Dybenko’s, and left the perpetrators of the Terror free to continue
their course of action unchecked--a course as impossible of moral as of
metaphysical justification.
The only Bolshevist hardy enough really to oppose inclusion of capital
punishment in the criminal code which the Bolshevists evolved in 1922
was Riazanov. Incidentally, he had, at the time of the Lenin attempt,
visited the Butyrka Prison, and told the Socialists confined there
that “I and the other leaders of the proletariat are experiencing
great difficulty in controlling our followers, since the recent assault
upon Lenin has rendered them eager to break into the Prison, and wreak
popular vengeance upon you Socialist traitors.” And Dzherzhinsky told
me the same thing when I was brought before him in September. And so
did other Communists. As for the string pullers in Petrograd, they
worked for the desired impression by causing the local press to publish
references to certain “demands for terrorism which are reaching us
from political groups.” But the end was that excessive use of the one
stage effect deceived nobody: rather, it came to be looked upon as a
stereotyped propagandist detail of the demagogy by which Bolshevism had
been created and was being upheld.
However, as though to the swing of a conductor’s baton, identical sets
of spurious and belated resolutions (“belated” because the Red Terror
had long been openly proclaimed) continued to be passed at meetings,
and suitable battle cries to be given out at the meetings, and on wall
posters, and in the press.[35] All that was necessary was that the
original resolutions should be passed, and caused everywhere to be
locally repeated, and then have suitable catch phrases for slaughter
evolved for them--such catch phrases as “Death to the capitalists!”
and “Death to the _bourgeoisie_!” But at Uritsky’s funeral the catch
phrases increased in pungency. “A thousand lives for the life of each
leader!” was largely used there, and so were “A bullet for every
workers’ foe!” and “Death to all hirelings of Anglo-French capital!”
Moreover, from every page of every Bolshevist journal there began to
arise the reek of blood-thirst. Cried the Petrograd _Krasnaya Gazeta_,
the “Red Gazette,” of August 31, _à propos_ of Uritsky’s assassination:
Our enemies must pay in thousands for the hero’s death, and
namby-pambyism come to an end, and the _bourgeoisie_ be
taught a bloody lesson by having its surviving members treated
with terrorism until “Death to the _bourgeoisie_!” becomes
our regular pass-word.
And on the Lenin attempt being made, the journal fairly shrieked. Its
words were:
Let our enemies be killed by the hundred! Nay, those hundreds
must be made thousands! Let the rascals be drowned in their own
blood! Only rivers of their blood can atone for the blood of
Lenin and of Uritsky! Blood! Blood! As much blood as possible!
And the _Izvestia_, for its part, screamed: “The proletariat
must respond to Lenin’s wound in a way that shall make the
_bourgeoisie_ shrink and tremble!” And in an article which Radek,
the Bolshevists’ star press-man, contributed to the _Izvestia_,
_à propos_ of a current symposium on Red terrorism, he cried:
If a Red Terror ensues, its primary cause will have been the
White terrorism exercised by our foes. For whereas punishment
of individual _bourgeois_ who have never really taken an
active part in the White Guard movement is valuable enough in so
far as it may intimidate the rest, the sequel to the death of a
Communist worker (let alone of a revolutionary leader) ought to
be a taking of _bourgeois_ lives _by the dozen_.
Whence, adding to it Lenin’s winged words, “Even if ninety per cent. of
the people perish, what matter if the other ten per cent. live to see
revolution become universal?” we gain a fairly clear idea of what Red
terrorism may mean to the Communist mentality. The _Pravda_, for
its part, wrote: “Henceforth the hymn of the working-classes should be
solely a pæan of hatred and revenge”; whilst a proclamation issued by
the “Muscovite Provincial Military Commissariat” on September 3 stated
that
The working-classes of Soviet Russia have risen, and will draw
for every drop of proletarian blood a riverful of the blood of
opponents of the Revolution, and for every drop of blood of our
leaders of the Soviet and the proletariat again a riverful, and
for the loss of every proletarian life the blood of hundreds of
White Guards and sons of the _bourgeoisie_. Wherefore, as
representing the working-classes, we, the Provincial Military
Commissariat, do inform all foes of those classes that every
case of White terrorism will have opposed to it merciless
proletarian terrorism.
And, finally, the All-Russian Central Executive Committee led the way
by convening a meeting for September 2 whereat it was resolved
That the Central Executive Committee do solemnly warn all
hirelings of the Russian and foreign _bourgeoisie_ that
responsibility for any attempt upon the life of a leader of the
Soviet Power, or of a person in any way engaged in furthering
the ideals of the Social Revolution, will be laid solely
upon the counter-revolutionary parties and those engaged in
encouraging those parties’ doings, and that any act of White
Terrorism directed against the Peasants’ and Workers’ Power
will be responded to by the peasants and workers with a Red
Terror directed primarily against the _bourgeoisie_ and the
_bourgeoisie’s_ agents.
In harmony with this decree was a resolution which the Soviet of
People’s Commissaries adopted in support of the Che-Ka’s policy. It
ended with the words: “Be it resolved also that any person found to be
connected with a White Guard organisation, or conspiracy, or rebellion,
be shot.” And at about the same period Petrovsky, People’s Commissary
of the Interior, issued a telegram which, for its bizarre terminology,
even as for its sweeping sanction of illegality, deserves to become
historic. Later the telegram was published in No. 1 of the Central
Che-Ka’s _Weekly_. Entitled “An Order relating to Hostages,” it
ran:
The murders of Volodarsky and Uritsky; the wounding of
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, Director of the Soviet of People’s
Commissaries; the execution of tens of thousands of our comrades
in Finland, the Ukraine, the Don region, and Checho-Slovakia;
the ceaseless discoveries of conspiracies behind our armies;
the detection of the participation of Social Revolutionaries
of the Right and other counter-revolutionary rabble in those
conspiracies,--all these things, added to the strikingly small
number of serious repressions and mass shootings of White
Guards and _bourgeois_ by the Soviet Power, show us that,
despite the endless speeches about employment of wholesale
terrorism against the Social Revolutionaries and White Guards
and _bourgeoisie_, no Terror at all has come into being.
Well, that indecision, those methods of vacillation, must be
ended at once, and all Social Revolutionaries of the Right
whose names may happen to be known to the local soviets
arrested, and adequate numbers of hostages taken from amongst
the _bourgeoisie_ and the ex-officers, and, should White
Guard circles make the least attempt to resist, or the smallest
White Guard activity show itself, mass shootings carried out
unhesitatingly--the local and provincial executive committees
to display all possible initiative in the matter. Also must
the Government Departments use the militia and the Che-Kas
wherever required, and see to the detention and the arrest of
persons adopting false names and surnames, and unconditionally
shoot anyone found to have a direct connection with White
Guard activity. Likewise, all these measures must be fulfilled
immediately. Let those charged with them advise the Department
of the Interior whenever local soviets are seen to be acting
weakly. For thus alone will it become possible to clear the
rear of our armies of White Guards and other such infamous
conspirators against the rule of the working-classes and poorer
peasants. Let there be no hesitation. Everywhere must mass
terrorism be employed. Acknowledge receipt of this telegram, and
forward it to all soviets within your district.
In the same issue of the _Weekly_ (for the _Weekly_ was a
journal specially designed to inculcate and popularise the Che-Ka’s
ideas and policy) there appeared an article entitled “The Question of
Capital Punishment.” The article said:
Let an end be put to these long and fruitless and useless
discussions about Red Terrorism. Deeds, not words, are required.
It is high time that a ruthless, absolutely efficient Mass
Terror were organised.
This, with the notorious Order issued by Petrovsky, obviates any
stressing of the moral of the idea that the working-classes should
be their leaders’ avengers, or any enlarging upon Dzherzhinsky’s
“humane principles” in his work of Che-Ka organisation. Lack of
journalistic conscience alone could have enabled Radek to assert in
the _Izvestia_ of September 6 that, “but for the faith of the
working-classes that their Government can adequately retaliate for the
blow, we should now be finding ourselves confronted with massacres of
the _bourgeoisie_ on a wholesale scale.”
And what are we to think of a resolution passed by Communists in the
province of Vitebsk which called for a thousand victims whenever a
soviet worker should be assassinated, or of a request from a Communist
nucleus of employees of a small tramway company that any assassination
of a Communist should be followed with shootings of a hundred hostages,
and any assassination of a Red soldier with slaughterings of a thousand
Whites, or of a resolution of September 13, passed by a Communist
nucleus of the Che-Ka of the Western District, that “infamous murderers
[of soviet officials] should be wiped from the face of the earth,”
or of a resolution of Red Guard employees of the Ostrogorod Che-Ka
that “for the death of each Communist our foes must be slain by the
hundred, and, for each attempt upon the life of a leader, by the
thousand, and by the ten thousand, as though we were exterminating
parasites”? In passing, be it observed how, the further we go from the
centre, the more bloodthirsty becomes the local unit, until “by the
hundred” has swelled to “by the ten thousand.” The cause of this is
that catch phrases uttered by, in the first instance (to judge from
official reports), employees of the Central Che-Ka underwent repetition
until they became stereotyped arguments, and, thus robed in hackneyed,
_outré_ terms, spread to one locality after another in proportion
as the Bolshevists wrested further territory from their opponents,
and Latzis, head of the All-Russian Che-Ka, further extended his
jurisdiction.
In Kiev the local Che-Ka’s sheet, the _Krasny Mech_ (“Red Sword”),
served a purpose identical with the purpose served in Moscow by the
_Weekly_. Its opening issue contained an interesting article from
the pen of the editor himself--Lev Krasny, who said, amongst other
things:
Let the fangs of the _bourgeois_ snake be extracted by the
roots, its greedy jaws rent asunder, its fat belly gutted. Let
the mask also be torn both from the face of sabotage-working,
treacherous, mendacious, hypocritically complacent profiteering
_intelligentsia_ and from the face of our cunning,
non-socially classified speculators. For the tenets of
“humanity” and “morality” invented by the _bourgeois_ for
the better oppression and exploitation of the lower classes have
no existence for us, nor ever have had.
This a writer named Schwartz capped with:
Let the recently proclaimed Red Terror be carried out in true
proletarian fashion, even if, for the better reinforcement of
the proletarian dictatorship, it becomes necessary to destroy
the last slave of Tsarism and Capitalism. Indeed, let nothing
deter us, but rather spur us on to more and more scrupulous
fulfilment of the task which the Revolution has laid upon our
shoulders.
On December 31 Kamenev stated: “The Terror has been forced upon
us. The working-classes created it, and not the Che-Ka.” Lenin,
for his part, said to the Seventh Congress of Soviets, earlier in
the year: “The Entente rendered the Terror necessary.” And as he
spoke he lied, for the Terror was created by the Che-Ka, and by the
Che-Ka alone, through the method of covering Russia with a network
of subordinate Che-Kas and “extraordinary commissions for combating
counter-revolution and sabotage and speculation,” until not a town or
a village lacked its branch of the omnipotent Che-Ka of the centre,
and the latter could act as the Government’s all-connecting nerve
until the last remnant of social right had become absorbed. And on
October 18 even the _Pravda_, the official organ of the Central
Committee, admitted[36] that by that time the catch phrase “All power
to the Soviet!” had given place to the catch phrase “All power to
the Che-Ka!” For by degrees, district, provincial, urban, cantonal,
village, and factory Che-Kas; railway, transport, and “battle front”
Che-Kas; “special branches of the Central Che-Ka for military affairs”;
“headquarters courts-martial”; “military-revolutionary headquarters”;
“extraordinary headquarters”; and punitive expeditions all became
combined into a single main instrument for carrying on the Red Terror,
so that Nilostonsky, author of _Der Blutrausch des Bolschewismus_
(“The Blood Lust of Bolshevism”), estimated that Kiev possessed sixteen
Che-Kas to its own cheek, and that all of them could pass death
sentences, and all perpetrate mass executions in slaughter-houses
identifiable only by ciphers.