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bolsheviks in november 1918 left sr leader maria spiridonova while being in prison and awaiting trial condemned the red terror in her open letter to the central executive of the bolshevik party she wrote never in the most corrupt of parliaments never in the most venal papers of capitalist society has hatred of opponents reached such heights of cynicism as your hatred these nightly murders of fettered unarmed helpless people these secret shootings in the back the unceremonious burial on the spot of bodies robbed to the very shirt not always quite dead often still groaning in a mass grave what sort of terrorism is this this cannot be called terrorism in the course of russian revolutionary history the word terrorism did not merely connote revenge and intimidation which were the very last things in its mind no the foremost aims of terrorism were to protest against tyranny to awake a sense of value in the souls of the oppressed to rouse the conscience of those who kept silence in the face of this submission moreover the terrorist nearly always accompanied his deed by a voluntary sacrifice of his own liberty or life only in this way it seems to me could the terrorist acts of the revolutionaries be justified but where are these elements to be found in the cowardly cheka in the unbelievable moral poverty of its leaders so far the working classes have brought about the revolution under the unblemished red flag which was red with their own blood their moral authority and sanction lay in their sufferings for the highest ideal of humanity belief in socialism is at the same time a belief in a nobler future for humanity a belief in goodness truth and beauty in the abolition of the use of all kinds of force in the brotherhood of the world and now you have damaged this belief which had inflamed the souls of the people as never before at its very roots maria spiridonova open letter to the central executive of the bolshevik party november 1918 95 interpretations by historians edit bolsheviks intentions and external factors edit similarly to the debates around the such major problems as french revolution and the holocaust there are debates in historiography between the historians who believe that the red terror was a product of the bolsheviks intentions and their ideology and those who believe that the terror was determined by the external factors like the context the russian revolution took place in and the preceding russian history of political violence a middle position is that the historical conditions shaped not only the conditions external to the bolsheviks but that their ideology and intentions were also historically determined 96 historians such as stéphane courtois the black book of communism and richard pipes have argued that the bolsheviks needed to use terror to stay in power because they lacked popular support 14 97 pipes is a representative of neo traditionalist historians who follow the totalitarian or traditionalist approach which dominated during the cold war especially its early years and who assert that the revolution was something imposed from above by the revolutionaries with political guile and brute force as opposed to the revisionists who put an emphasis on the popular nature of the bolshevik revolution 83 although the bolsheviks dominated among workers soldiers and in their revolutionary soviets they won less than a quarter of the popular vote in elections for the constituent assembly held soon after the october revolution since they commanded much less support among the peasantry the constituent assembly elections predated the split between the right srs who had opposed the bolsheviks and the left srs who were their coalition partners consequentially many peasant votes intended for the latter went to the srs 98 99 100 massive strikes by russian workers were mercilessly suppressed during the red terror 98 according to pipes terror was inevitably justified by lenin s belief that human lives were expendable in the cause of building the new order of communism pipes has quoted marx s observation of the class struggles in 19th century france the present generation resembles the jews whom moses led through the wilderness it must not only conquer a new world it must also perish in order to make room for the people who are fit for a new world yet pipes noted that neither karl marx nor friedrich engels encouraged mass murder 97 101 leszek kołakowski wrote that while bolsheviks especially lenin were very much focused on the marxian concept of revolution and dictatorship of the proletariat long before the october revolution lenin s clearest definitions of dictatorship of proletariat were unlimited power based on force and not on law power that is absolutely unrestricted by any rules whatever and based directly on violence and directest form of coercion of the overthrown classes in 1918 lenin made a furious reply to his critics such as karl kautsky who argued that marxian notion of dictatorship of proletariat never meant the destruction of democracy but on the contrary that democratic institutions were a necessary condition of it in the proletarian revolution and the renegade kautsky 1918 accusing kautsky of talking of democracy irrespectively of its class content and arguing that the working class may rule only by force a direct theoretical and systematic argument in favor of organized terror in response to kautsky s reservations was written by trotsky in the defence of terrorism 1921 trotsky wrote that the revolutionary supremacy of the proletariat presupposes within the proletariat itself the political supremacy of the single party governing by a dictatorship and elimination of its opponents that to reject state terrorism meant to reject socialism since he who wills the end must end the means dismissed the principle of the rights of the individual as irrelevant nonsence and according to kolakowski implied that rightness of a historical movement or a state is determined by whether its use of violence is successful against its political enemies trotsky also introduced and provided ideological justification for many of the future features characterizing the bolshevik system such as militarization of labor and concentration camps 102 eric hobsbawm despite his sympathy for the october revolution and communist movements also recognized lenin s beliefs like his view of political struggle as a total war and a zero sum game as one of the reasons of the red terror and the mass violence carried out by the bolsheviks although he writes that it was not so much the belief that a great end justifies all the means necessary to achieve it or even the belief that the sacrifices imposed on the present generation however large are as nothing to the benefits which will be reaped by the endless generations of the future but the application of the principle of total war to all times leninism perhaps because of the powerful strain of voluntarism which made other marxists distrust lenin as a blanquist or jacobin thought essentially in military terms as his own admiration for clausewitz would indicate even if the entire vocabulary of bolshevik politics did not bear witness to it 103 orlando figes view was that red terror was implicit not so much in marxism itself but in the tumultuous violence of the russian revolution he noted that there were a number of bolsheviks led by lev kamenev nikolai bukharin and mikhail olminsky who criticized the actions and warned that thanks to lenin s violent seizure of power and his rejection of democracy the bolsheviks would be forced to turn increasingly to terror to silence their political critics and subjugate a society they could not control by other means 104 figes also asserts that the red terror erupted from below it was an integral element of the social revolution from the start the bolsheviks encouraged but did not create this mass terror the main institutions of the terror were all shaped at least in part in response to these pressures from below 105 the hungarian historian tamás krausz hu ru he supports the view that terror was rather a result of objective processes and notes that lenin as trotsky wrote earlier formed his more differentiated position regarding terror over a period of years in the period of the first russian revolution lenin objected terror as a means of expropriating private property since the revolutionary forces were not at war with individuals but with the system and viewed terror only as a secondary tool of countering state violence in the moments of revolutionary upheaval and in 1907 the bolsheviks accepted a resolution which denounced terror and rejected it as a method in advance krausz writes that terror was not something rooted in revolutionary theory but a result of a combination of russian traditions of political violence with the cult of violence brought by world war i and the escalation of struggle into a civil war in which both sides sought to annihilate each other and in which the white terror was emerging as a threat to the revolution prior to the red terror what was manifested in the order to the white troops to take no prisoners in the sphere of ideas the possible sources could be bakunin s idea of a collective razin embodied both in the popular rebellion and in the popular leader at the head of the masses a concept spread among russian revolutionaries and the marxist concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat lenin also drew the idea of a necessity of terror from his reading of the histories of the french revolution and american civil war krausz however notes that these sources of influence could have taken significance only in the historical conditions of the emergency situation 53 douglas greene notes that at first the bolsheviks hoped not to resort to terror to carry out the revolution citing lenin s words shortly after the takeover ours is not the french revolutionary terror which guillotined unarmed people and i hope we shall not go so far according to greene further self identification of the bolsheviks with the jacobins became prominent among them as they found themselves in the situation of a civil war foreign invasion peasant uprisings and economic collapse 106 james ryan claims that lenin never advocated for the physical extermination of the entire bourgeoisie as a class just the execution of those who were actively involved in opposing and undermining bolshevik rule 107 he did intend to bring about the overthrow and complete abolition of the bourgeoisie through non violent political and economic means but he also noted that in reality the period of transition from capitalism to communism is a period of unprecedentedly violent class struggle in unprecedentedly acute forms and consequently during this period the state must inevitably be a state that is democratic in a new way for the proletariat and propertyless in general and dictatorial in a new way against the bourgeoise 108 comparison of red and white terror edit a number of historians such as pipes and nicolas werth the black book of communism contrasted the red and white terrors claiming that while red terror was a political strategy and a revolutionary means of reconstructing the world ideological and instrumental the white terror was restorative arbitrary and a temporary measure mere repressive violence to re establish a previous status quo 103 96 robert conquest was convinced that unprecedented terror must seem necessary to ideologically motivated attempts to transform society massively and speedily against its natural possibilities 98 while werth wrote 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 and 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 109 such notion is refuted by peter holquist and joshua sanborn 103 holquist wrote that white violence may have been less centralized and systematic but it did not lack ideological underpinnings it is hard to imagine that the massacre of tens of thousands of jews by the anti soviet armies during the civil wars could have occurred without some form of ideology and particularly the virulent linkage drawn between jews and communists 96 according to sanborn the terror carried out by the russian imperial army and the whites was as revolutionary as their red counterpart 103 in the case of the jews we see not only the development of terror practices like hostage taking decimation mass retribution mass deportation rape robbery and sadistic spectacularly cruel violence but of the social intent most notably efforts on the part of ianushkevich s stavka to gather material on jewish behavior in the army stressed that commanders were to gather this to prove all the harm that jews posed to the army and to the nation given the tone and exclusionary fantasies of both prewar and wartime anti semitic discourse we see in the jewish terror a facet of white terror that cannot simply be seen as a method of military dictatorship a requirement of wartime emergency or even the most brutal of counter insurgency strategies these were processes that were justified by the war atmosphere but whose vision extended well into the post war period as a result the white terror like the imperial army s terror campaign from 1914 1917 was revolutionary in its terror against jews and who knows might have taken this kernel even further had they prevailed in the civil war historical significance edit a memorial cross in jelgava latvia marking the burial place of red terror victims killed in january february and march 1919 at jelgava prison memorial grave of the red terror victims in holy cross public cemetery kapuvár hungary memorial to the chekists in kropyvnytskyi ukraine the red terror was significant because it was the first of numerous communist terror campaigns which were waged in soviet russia and many other countries 110 page needed it also triggered the russian civil war according to historian pipes 97 menshevik julius martov wrote about the red terror the beast has licked hot human blood the man killing machine is brought into motion but blood breeds blood we witness the growth of the bitterness of the civil war the growing bestiality of men engaged in it 111 112 the term red terror was later used in reference to other campaig...