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Although large-scale military operations between the
Whites and Reds lasted little more than a year, from the end of 1918 to the beginning
of 1920, the greater part of what is normally termed the civil war was
actually a dirty war, an attempt by all the different authorities, Red and
White, civil and military, to stamp out all real or potential opponents in
the zones that often changed hands several times. In regions held by the
Bolsheviks it was the "class struggle" against the
"aristocrats," the bourgeoisie, and socially undesirable elements,
the hunt for all non-Bolshevik militants from opposing parties, and the
putting down of workers' strikes, of mutinies in the less secure elements of
the Red Army, and of peasant revolts. In the zones held by the Whites, it was
open season on anyone suspected of having possible
"Judeo-Bolshevik" sympathies.
The Bolsheviks certainly did not have a monopoly on terror. There was also a
White Terror, whose worst moment was the terrible wave of pogroms carried out
in Ukraine
in the summer and autumn of 1919 by Simon Petlyura's detachments, which
accounted for more than 150,000 victims. But as most historians of the Red
Terror and White Terror have already pointed out, the two types of terror
were not on the same plane. The Bolshevik policy of terror was more
systematic, better organized, and targeted at whole social classes. Moreover,
it had been thought out and put into practice before the outbreak of the
civil war. The White Terror was never systematized in such a fashion. It was
almost invariably the work of detachments that were out of control, taking
measures not officially authorized by the military command that was
attempting, without much success, to act as a government. If one discounts
the pogroms, which Denikin himself condemned, the White Terror most often was
a series of reprisals by the police acting as a sort of military
counterespionage force. The Cheka and the Troops for the Internal Defense of
the Republic were a structured and powerful instrument of repression of a
completely different order, which had support at the highest level from the
Bolshevik regime.
Red Terror as seen by Russian
artist
As in all civil wars, it is extremely difficult to derive a complete picture
of all the forms of terror employed by the two warring parties. The Bolshevik
Terror, with its clear methodology, its specificity, and its carefully chosen
aims, easily predated the civil war, which developed into a full-scale
conflict only at the end of the summer of 1918. The following list indicates
in chronological order the evolution of different types of terror and its
different targets from the early months of the regime:
- Non-Bolshevik
political militants, from anarchists to monarchists. Workers fighting
for the most basic rights, including bread, work, and a minimum of
liberty and dignity.
- Peasants—often
deserters implicated in any of the innumerable peasant revolts or Red
Army mutinies.
- Cossacks, who were deported en masse as a
social and ethnic group supposedly hostile to the Soviet regime.
"De-Cossackization" prefigured the massive deportations of the
1930s called "dekulakization" (another example of the
deportation of ethnic groups) and underlines the fundamental continuity
between the Leninist and Stalinist policies of political repression.
- "Socially
undesirable elements" and other "enemies of the people,"
"suspects," and "hostages" liquidated "as a
preventive measure," particularly when the Bolsheviks were
enforcing the evacuation of villages or when then took back territory or
towns that had been in the hands of the Whites.
The best-known repressions
are those that concerned political militants from the various parties opposed
to the Bolsheviks. Numerous statements were made by the main leaders of the
opposition parties, who were often imprisoned and exiled, but whose lives
were generally spared, unlike militant workers and peasants, who were shot
without trial or massacred during punitive Cheka operations.
One of the first acts of terror was the attack launched on
11 April 1918 against the Moscow
anarchists, dozens of whom were immediately executed. The struggle against
the anarchists intensified over the following years, although a certain
number did transfer their allegiance to the Bolshevik Party, even becoming
high-ranking Cheka officials, such as Aleksandr Goldberg, Mikhail Brener, and
Timofei Samsonov. The dilemma faced bN, most anarchists in their opposition
to both the new Bolshevik dictatorship and the return of the old regime is
well illustrated by the U-turns of the great peasant anarchist leader Nestor
Makhno, who for a while allied himself with the Red Army in the struggle
against the Whites, then turned against the Bolsheviks after the White threat
had been eliminated. Thousands of anonymous militant anarchists were
executed as bandits as part of the repression against the peasant army of Makhno and his
partisans. It would appear that these peasants constituted the immense
majority of anarchist victims, at least according to the figures presented by
the Russian anarchists in exile in Berlin
in 1922. These incomplete figures note 138 militant anarchists executed in
the years 19191921, 281 sent into exile, and 608 still in prison as of 1
January 1922.
The left Socialist Revolutionaries, who were allies of the
Bolsheviks until the summer of' 1918, were treated with relative leniency
until February 1919. As late as December 1918 their most famous leader, Maria
Spiridonova, presided over a party congress that was tolerated by the
Bolsheviks.
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