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Cheka
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The Cheka (?? - ???????????? ???????? Chrezvychaynaya Komissiya, Extraordinary Commission ) was the first of a succession of Soviet state security organizations. It was created by a decree issued on December 20, 1917, by Vladimir Lenin and subsequently led by an aristocrat turned communist Felix Dzerzhinsky.
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The Cheka (?? - ???????????? ???????? Chrezvychaynaya Komissiya, Extraordinary Commission ) was the first of a succession of Soviet state security organizations. It was created by a decree issued on December 20, 1917, by Vladimir Lenin and subsequently led by an aristocrat turned communist Felix Dzerzhinsky. After 1922, the Cheka underwent a series of reorganizations.
From its founding, the Cheka was an important military and security arm of the Bolshevik communist government. In 1921 the Troops for the Internal Defense of the Republic (a branch of the Cheka) numbered 200,000. These troops policed labor camps, ran the Gulag system, conducted requisitions of food, liquidated political opponents (on both the right and the left), put down peasant rebellions, riots by workers, and mutinies in the Red Army, which was plagued by desertions
Name
The full name of the agency was The All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage
(; Vserossijskaya Chrezvychajnaya Komissiya), but was commonly abbreviated to Cheka or VCheka. In 1918 its name was slightly altered, becoming All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution, Profiteering and Corruption.
A member of Cheka was called a chekist. Chekists of the post-October Revolution years wore leather jackets creating a fashion followed by Western communists; they are pictured in several films in this apparel. Despite name and organisational changes over time, Soviet secret policemen were commonly referred to as "Chekists" throughout the entire Soviet period. In The Gulag Archipelago, Alexander Solzhenitsyn recalls that zeks in the labor camps used "old Chekist" as "a mark of special esteem" for particularly experienced camp administrators. The term is still found in use in Russia today (for example, President Vladimir Putin has been referred to in the Russian media as a "chekist" due to his career in the KGB).
History
The Cheka was created in December 1917, over a month after the October Revolution and the formation of the Bolshevik government. Its immediate precursor was the "commission for the struggle with counter-revolution", established on , by the Milrevkom (the Military Revolutionary Committee of the Petrograd Soviet) on the proposal of Dzerzhinsky. Its members were the Bolsheviks Skrypnik, Flerovski, Blagonravov, Galkin, and Trifonov.
The Cheka was established on , by a decision of the Sovnarkom. It was subordinated to the Sovnarkom and its functions were, "to liquidate counter-revolution and sabotage, to hand over counter-revolutionaries and saboteurs to the revolutionary tribunals, and to apply such measures of repression as 'confiscation, deprivation of ration cards, publication of lists of enemies of the people etc.'". The original members of the Vecheka were Peters, Ksenofontov, Averin, Ordzhonikidze, Peterson, Evseev, and Trifonov, but the next day Averin, Ordzhonikidze, and Trifonov were replaced by Fomin, Shchukin, Ilyin, and Chernov. A circular published on , gave the address of Vecheka's first headquarters as "Petrograd, Gorokhovaya 2, 4th floor".
Originally, the members of the Cheka were exclusively Bolshevik; however, in January 1918, left SRs also joined the organization The Left SRs were expelled or arrested later in 1918 following an attempted assassination against Lenin.
In 1922, the Cheka was transformed into the State Political Administration or GPU, a section of the NKVD of the RSFSR.
Operations
Suppression of political Opposition
At the direction of Lenin, the Cheka performed mass arrests, imprisonments, and executions of "enemies of the people". In this, the Cheka said that they targeted "class enemies" such as the bourgeoisie, and members of the clergy; the first organized mass repression began against the libertarian Socialists of Petrograd in April 1918.
However, within a month the Cheka had extended its repression to all political opponents of the communist government, including anarchists and others on the left. On May 1, 1918, a pitched battle took place in Moscow between the anarchists and the police. ( P.Avrich. G Maximoff) In response, the Cheka orchestrated a massive retaliatory campaign of repression, executions, and arrests against all opponents of the Bolshevik government that came to be known as Red Terror. The Red Terror, implemented by Dzerzhinsky on September 5, 1918, was vividly described by the Red Army journal Krasnaya Gazeta:
In an attack on twenty-six anarchist political centres, forty anarchists were killed by Cheka forces, and 500 arrested and jailed. At the direction of Lenin and Trotsky, the Cheka and Red Army state security forces (later renamed the OGPU), shot, arrested, imprisoned, and executed thousands of persons, regardless of whether or not they had actually planned rebellion against the communist government. Most of the survivors were later deported to Siberian labor camps.
An early Bolshevik Victor Serge described in his book Memoirs of a Revolutionary:
The Cheka was also used against the armed anarchist Black Army of Nestor Makhno in Ukraine. After the Black Army had served its purpose in aiding the Red Army to stop the Whites under Denikin, the Soviet communist government decided it must eliminate the anarchist forces, which threatened to arouse rural peasant support against the dictatorship of the proletariat. In May 1919, two Cheka agents sent to assassinate Makhno were caught and executed.
Tracking down and punishing deserters and their families
It is believed that more than 3 million deserters escaped from Red Army in 1919 and 1920. Around 500,000 deserters were arrested in 1919 and close to 800,000 in 1920 by troops of the dreaded 'Special Punitive Department' of the Cheka created to punish desertions. This force was used to forcefully repatriate deserters back into the Red Army, taking and shooting hostages to force compliance or to set an example. Throughout the course of the civil war, several thousand deserters were shot - a number comparable to that of belligerents during WWI.
In September 1918, according to "The Black Book of Communism" in only twelve provinces of Russia, 48,735 deserters and 7,325 "bandits" were arrested, 1,826 were killed and 2,230 were executed. The exact identity of these individuals is confused by the fact that the Soviet Bolshevik government used the term 'bandit' to cover ordinary criminals as well as armed and unarmed political opponents, such as the anarchists.
The Cheka later played a major role in the putting down the Kronstadt Rebellion by Soviet sailors in 1921.
Number of victims
Estimates on Cheka executions vary widely. The lowest figures are provided by Dzerzhinsky’s lieutenant Martyn Latsis, limited to RSFSR over the period 1918–1920:
- For the period 1918-July 1919, covering only twenty provinces of central Russia:
1918: 6,300; 1919 (up to July): 2,089; Total: 8,389
- For the whole period 1918-19:
1918: 6,185; 1919: 3,456; Total: 9,641
- For the whole period 1918-20:
January-June 1918: 22; July-December 1918: more than 6,000; 1918-20: 12,733
Experts generally agree these semi-official figures are vastly understated. W. H. Chamberlin, for example, claims “it is simply impossible to believe that the Cheka only put to death 12,733 people in all of Russia up to the end of the civil war.” He provides the "reasonable and probably moderate" estimate of 50,000, while others provide estimates ranging up to 500,000. Several scholars put the number of executions at about 250,000. One difficulty is that the Cheka sometimes recorded the deaths of executed anarchists and other political dissidents as criminals, 'armed bandits', or 'armed gangsters'. Some believe it is possible more people were murdered by the Cheka than died in battle.
Lenin himself seemed unfazed by the killings. On 12 January 1920, while addressing trade union leaders, he said:
"We did not hesitate to shoot thousands of people, and we shall not hesitate, and we shall save the country."
On 14 May 1921, the Politburo, chaired by Lenin, passed a motion "broadening the rights of the [Cheka] in relation to the use of the [death penalty]."
Atrocities
The Cheka is reported to have practiced torture. Victims were reportedly skinned alive, scalped, "crowned" with barbed wire, impaled, crucified, hanged, stoned to death, tied to planks and pushed slowly into furnaces or tanks of boiling water, and rolled around naked in internally nail-studded barrels. Chekists reportedly poured water on naked prisoners in the winter-bound streets until they became living ice statues. Others reportedly beheaded their victims by twisting their necks until their heads could be torn off. The Chinese Cheka detachments stationed in Kiev reportedly would attach an iron tube to the torso of a bound victim and insert a rat into the other end which was then closed off with wire netting. The tube was then held over a flame until the rat began gnawing through the victim's guts in an effort to escape. Denikin’s investigation discovered corpses whose lungs, throats, and mouths had been packed with earth.
Women and children were also victims of Cheka terror. Women would sometimes be tortured and raped before being shot. Children between the ages of 8 and 16 were imprisoned and occasionally executed.
The Cheka in popular culture
See also
Sources
- Andrew, Christopher M. and Vasili Mitrokhin (1999) The Sword and the Shield : The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB. New York: Basic Books. ISBN 0465003125.
- Applebaum, Anne (2003) Gulag: A History. Doubleday. ISBN 0767900561
- Carr, E. H. (1958) The Origin and Status of the Cheka. Soviet Studies, vol. 10, no. 1, pp. 1–11.
- Chamberlin, W. H. (1935) The Russian Revolution 1917-1921, 2 vols. London and New York. The Macmillan Company.
- Dziak, John. (1988) Chekisty: A History of the KGB. Lexington, Mass. Lexington Books.
- Figes, Orlando (1997) A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891-1924. Penguin Books. ISBN 0670859168.
- Leggett, George (1986) The Cheka: Lenin's Political Police. Oxford University Press, New York. ISBN 0198228627
- Lincoln, Bruce W. (1999) Red Victory: A History of the Russian Civil War. Da Capo Press. ISBN 0306809095
- Melgounov, Sergey Petrovich (1925) The Red Terror in Russia. London & Toronto: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd.
- Overy, Richard (2004) The Dictators: Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Russia. W. W. Norton & Company; 1st American edition. ISBN 0393020304
- Rummel, Rudolph Joseph (1990) Lethal Politics: Soviet Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1917. Transaction Publishers. ISBN 1560008873
- Schapiro, Leonard B. (1984) The Russian Revolutions of 1917 : The Origins of Modern Communism. New York: Basic Books. ISBN 0465071546
- Volkogonov, Dmitri (1994) Lenin: A New Biography. Free Press. ISBN 0029334357
- Volkogonov, Dmitri (1998) Autopsy of an Empire: The Seven Leaders Who Built the Soviet Regime Free Press. ISBN 0684871122
External links
- - Spartacus Schoolnet collection of primary source extracts relating to the Cheka
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