The Cheka and the

Institutionalization of Violence

The Bolsheviks came to power in Russia in October 1917, following a relatively bloodless overthrow of Kerensky's provisional government. Two months later, the Bolshevik Party formed the Cheka as a strictly temporary institution to investigate "counterrevolutionary" crimes.⁽¹⁾ However, "the Cheka soon acquired powers of summary justice and began a campaign of terror against the propertied classes and enemies of Bolshevism. Although many in the Bolshevik party viewed the Cheka with repugnance and spoke out against its excesses, they saw its continued existence as crucial to the survival of the new regime."⁽²⁾ As a bureaucracy created to implement violence, the Cheka (and its successors, the OGPU, NKVD, MGB and KGB)⁽³⁾ had an investment in continuing and expanding its role. The Cheka serves as an example of how bureaucracies, and particularly revolutionary bureaucracies created to implement violence, take on a life of their own by expanding their powers and mandate.

The Council of People's Commissars, or Sovnarkom, created the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage, known as the Cheka for its Russian initials, in early December 1917. By the decree of December 7 which created it, its objectives were threefold: "to punish and liquidate all attempts or actions connected with counter-revolution or sabotage, whatever their source, throughout Russia; to hand over for trial by a revolutionary tribunal all saboteurs and counter-revolutionaries, and to elaborate measures to combat them; and to carry out a preliminary investigation only in so far as was necessary for preventive purposes."⁽⁴⁾ Its priorities were to be, in order: the press, sabotage, the Kadets, the Right SRs, saboteurs and strikers. Its powers included "confiscation [of property], expulsion from domicile, deprivation of ration cards, publication of lists of enemies of the people, etc."⁽⁵⁾ Combined with the nebulous objectives assigned to the Cheka, this open-ended list of powers gave the Cheka "a virtual carte blanche to act as it pleased."⁽⁶⁾ Evidence even exists to suggest that the Cheka created or organized plots of its own to create an environment in which the Cheka could grow.⁽⁷⁾ The Sovnarkom did not make the resolution which created the Cheka public, allowing the Cheka to claim powers which they did not grant to it. The Cheka was supposed to turn over political prisoners to Revolutionary Tribunals for trial and punishment; instead, the Cheka built its own prisons and tried their own prisoners.⁽⁸⁾

Headed by Felix Dzerzhinsky, the Cheka took over duties from the Liquidation Commission of the Military Revolutionary Committee.⁽⁹⁾ Dzerzhinsky did not attempt to hide the methods he intended to employ; when speaking to a reporter from the newspaper Novaya Zhizn he said that "we represent organized terror--this must be said openly--a terror which is absolutely essential in the revolutionary period we are passing through."⁽¹⁰⁾ Given this, it is natural that the Cheka would expand beyond their original mandate. Believing that Dzerzhinsky intended to implement this "organized terror" with no more powers than a glorified landlord is difficult.

One of the main factors assisting Dzerzhinsky and the Cheka in the consolidation and expansion of their power was the relative lack of law in both tsarist and Communist Russia. The tsars ruled arbitrarily, and custom replaced statutes. The Bolshevik Party did not have the resources following their seizure of power in 1917 to set up a legal code. Instead, the Party Programme of March 1919 stated that "in cases of absence or incompleteness" in laws, judges were "to be guided by socialist conscience."⁽¹¹⁾ By abrogating the legal principles of nullum crimen sine lege and nulla poena sine lege-- no crime without a law and no punishment without a law-- Lenin provided the Cheka with the ability to declare anything it wished a crime, and punish the offender as it wished.

The Cheka attempted to work outside any restrictions from the moment of its inception. When reminded that the Commissar of Justice required warrants before making an arrest, Dzerzhinsky replied, "how can I be expected to crush counterrevolution with legal niceties of this character?"⁽¹²⁾ Lenin solved this problem by giving the Cheka the right to arrest whomever they wanted without a warrant, but requiring them to report these arrests to the Commissar for Justice after their execution.⁽¹³⁾ Dzerzhinski soon found himself in conflict with the Commissariat of Justice, who forbade the Cheka to deliver arrested citizens to either the Smolnyi or Revolutionary Tribunal without his prior permission. Dzerzhinski promptly ignored this resolution, and Lenin supported him. On January 31, 1918, the Sovnarkom declared that the Cheka had exclusively investigatory authority:

The Cheka concentrates in its hands the entire work of intelligence, suppression and prevention of crimes, but the entire subsequent conduct of the investigation and the presentation of the case to the court is entrusted to the Investigatory Commission of the [Revolutionary] Tribunal.⁽¹⁴⁾

Despite this, however, Dzerzhinski continued to make arrests, try those arrested and impose sentences on those arrested.

The Cheka was, in fact, highly successful in consolidating and increasing its power. By mid-March of 1918, the Cheka had only 120 employees.⁽¹⁵⁾ This was not to last long, however. The Cheka quickly grew into

a vast police machine employing hundreds of thousands, holding the entire country in a grip of iron, stationing its agents in every village, every city block, every apartment house, and relying in addition on the "voluntary services" of millions of informers. The GPU not only had its own building in every city but its own prisons, and in many cases its own cemeteries and torture laboratoriesits own military divisions, its own aircraft, its own tank troops, its own telegraph system and radio stations equipped with the latest devices. Its card-index files were housed in a vast building staffed with hundreds of clerks and containing a separate file on everyone who had ever been investigated or suspected.⁽¹⁶⁾

Following its creation, the Cheka found itself in the midst of other hastily-constructed revolutionary institutions and moved quickly to consolidate its power over them. According to Read, "spontaneously organized militias, Red Guards and politically active military units, began to be brought under the control of the Cheka."⁽¹⁷⁾ The Cheka passed these units on to the Red Army for them to reorganize or disband. "Reliable Bolshevik supporters" formed the base of any reconstituted units.⁽¹⁸⁾

The Cheka found great success in fulfilling its original mandate,⁽¹⁹⁾ and particularly favored the tactics of mass arrests and executions in doing so. In a telegraph to his subordinates in Tula regarding a strike at a military plant, Dzerzhinsky ordered them to "be decisive to the end. Do not enter into any agreements."⁽²⁰⁾ Following his orders, they threatened to fire anyone who did not return to work, and arrested 290 strikers. The Cheka also took other steps to break critical strikes:

Cheka agents and cadets from military schools, many of them Latvians and Chinese, occupied the plants. On several occasions these detachments opened fire at general meetings of workerspolice arrested hundreds of workers. At the Putilov plant, sixty-five workers were arrested, mostly Left SRs who disappeared without a trace in the cellars of the Cheka.⁽²¹⁾

The Cheka struck against the other groups mentioned in their mandate as well. Although the Cheka originally kept their activities limited at first for fear of provoking worker unrest, this situation did not last long. The Cheka was crucial in shutting down the presses of all right-wing, Menchevik, Left SR and anarchist presses, leaving only the Bolshevik presses running.⁽²²⁾ The Cheka also arrested, on a variety of pretexts, anyone who voted for Mensheviks.⁽²³⁾ The Cheka particularly excelled at counterespionage, and proved skilled at breaking up monarchist and other right-wing conspiracies. Its favored tactics in this realm were "tsarist police tactics of infiltration, double agents and setting up dummy political and economic organizations, the very tactics that, until 1917, had been used very effectively against revolutionary organizations including the Bolsheviks themselves."⁽²⁴⁾ The Cheka also concentrated on individuals, particularly workers, peasants and intellectuals. It was this success, in fact, which allowed the Cheka to expand beyond its original mandate without encountering serious resistance within the Bolshevik Party.

The Left SRs, coalition partners of the Bolshevik Party, were also a serious threat to Bolshevik rule. Lenin wanted to prevent power from shifting any further to the left, a threat which proved well-founded. On July 6, 1918, a group of Left SRs attempted a coup, which foundered badly. The Cheka thrived in the aftermath, arresting Left SR leaders and placing the party under increased surveillance and repression.⁽²⁵⁾ The Cheka was probably eager to do so: the Left SRs had a history of vetoing Cheka executions.⁽²⁶⁾ This internal unrest provided ample fuel for the Cheka's growth.

Although they did not mention the church in their mandate, organized religion is a natural enemy of most revolutionary parties,⁽²⁷⁾ and the Cheka quickly moved against it as well. The Cheka was invaluable in the Bolshevik Party's confiscation of church property and subsequent redistribution to museums, drawing up lists of moveable church property and seizing it throughout 1921 and 1922.⁽²⁸⁾ The Cheka also heavily influenced elections within the church hierarchy:

these officials practiced an arbitrary selection of candidates for the seminaries in order to further the infiltration of morally dubious persons into the ranks of the clergy. Fathers Echlimann and Yakunin concluded that this systematized interference had no other aim than the ultimate destruction of the church.⁽²⁹⁾

The Cheka also became involved in economic affairs, in part because the party defined class enemies in economic terms.⁽³⁰⁾

Peasant uprisings provided another opportunity for the Cheka to consolidate and expand its powers. Faced with a serious threat, the Bolshevik Party conferred onto the Cheka extraordinary authority. On June 20, 1919, the Bolshevik Party authorized the Cheka to execute "bandits" arbitrarily,⁽³¹⁾ and the next year authorized them to "convict without appeal anyone guilty of armed assault, robbery, and banditry."⁽³²⁾ In 1921, the Cheka uncovered eighty leaders of a peasant army and executed them.⁽³³⁾ The Cheka captured and executed their leader, A.S. Anatov, in June 1922. The Cheka surrounded the hut he was hiding in, set it on fire, and shot him when he emerged.⁽³⁴⁾ The Cheka's military role gave it a measure of additional power. As noted, the Cheka, through its reorganization of military units, acquired military units of its own and was placed at the head of others. The Cheka naturally took up the responsibility of watching the Red Army for disloyalty: "a dreaded institution in the Red Army was the Special Department, headed by agents of the Cheka, which dealt summarily with cases of real or suspected disloyalty."⁽³⁵⁾ These peasant rebellions thrust Cheka units onto the front lines, but also provided an opportunity for the Cheka to expand its size and power.

Another tool that the Cheka created for carrying out its duties was the Gulag, or Main Directorate for Corrective Labor Camps, created in 1919.⁽³⁶⁾ These labor camps continued under the Cheka's successor, the NKVD. The Cheka built these camps mostly in remote areas, particularly Siberia, and sent political prisoners as well as common criminals to them. These camps provide an early example of the Cheka's ability and willingness to work outside the rule of law. Conditions in the camp were harsh, including inadequate food rations, insufficient clothing, and physical abuse. This led to a high rate of death and disease in the camps.⁽³⁷⁾ A letter from three inmates to the Presidium of the Central Executive Committee of Party asked the Presidium to "improve the pathetic, tortured existence of those who are there who languish under the yoke of the OGPU's tyranny, violence, and complete lawlessness"⁽³⁸⁾ The letter describes "the arbitrary use of power and the violence that reign at the Solovetsky concentration campit is difficult for a human being even to imagine such terror, tyranny, violence, and lawlessness."⁽³⁹⁾ Again and again, the letter describes the OGPU's willingness to work outside its original mandate.

Although the Bolshevik Party official abolished capital punishment following the October Revolution, it rose again under the Cheka as the Red Terror. Begun in retribution to assassination attempts against Bolshevik leaders, including Lenin, the Cheka often carried out these death sentences even when the public courts did not order them.⁽⁴⁰⁾ The state itself aided the Cheka in gaining these powers. The state reserved for itself the right "to deal with any offence or class opponent directly, unhampered by a public trial,"⁽⁴¹⁾ and issued a provision stating that "enemy agents, speculators, burglars, hooligans, counterrevolutionary agitators, German spies, are to be executed on the spot."⁽⁴²⁾ The provisions did not define any of these crimes, nor did they mention trials or hearings for the accused. The state placed the Cheka in place to carry their policy of terror out, and the Cheka made full use of their situation.

According to Christopher Read, "hundreds of Cheka prisoners are thought to have been summarily executed in the heightened paranoia that followed the assassination attempt and the buildup of the White armies and their foreign backers."⁽⁴³⁾ Although exact figures are not available for the number of executions the Cheka ordered, one source estimates them at 1,860,000, including 28 bishops, 1,200 priests, 6,000 teachers and professors, 8,800 doctors, 54,000 officers, 260,000 private soldiers, 105,000 police officers, 48,000 policemen, 12,800 civil servants, 355,000 other intellectuals, 192,000 workmen and 815,000 peasants.⁽⁴⁴⁾ We must note that many of these were probably victims of the Russian Civil War.

The Bolsheviks abolished the death penalty again at the end of the Russian Civil War, but this had minimal, if any, effect on the Cheka. Created to implement violence, the Cheka had a vested interest in the continuation of the Red Terror. Isaac Steinberg, Lenin's Commissar of Justice, commented in 1920 that although the civil war had ended, the Red Terror continued because it was now an intrinsic feature of the regime. He described the Cheka's summary executions as only "the most glittering object in the somberly flickering firmament of terror that dominates the revolutionary earthits bloody pinnacle, its apotheosis."⁽⁴⁵⁾

Many lawyers, including Nikolai Krylenko, a well-known public prosecutor, tried and failed to wrest from the Cheka its quasi-judicial powers. By 1932 the Cheka, under the name OGPU, had gained plenary jurisdiction, and could make arrests or impose any penalty, up to and including the death penalty. The Cheka worked in secret, making public neither the charges against an individual, the results of an investigation, nor the reasons behind a sentence. The Cheka reported directly to the Bolshevik party leaders, placing them outside the normal procedure of rule of law.⁽⁴⁶⁾ In one case in which Krylenko was the public prosecutor, the Cheka raided a meeting, arrested all those in attendance, and interrogated them. The Cheka did not allow Krylenko to make a preliminary investigation or bring charges against those arrested, whom the Cheka continued to hold in prison. The Cheka only stayed their summary execution in the hopes of promoting a German Communist revolution.⁽⁴⁷⁾

Although the Bolshevik Party disbanded the Cheka in 1921 after the end of the Russian Civil War and the end of any immediate threat to the Bolshevik party, in 1922 the state transferred the Cheka's powers to the State Political Directorate, or GPU. Despite being born weaker than the original Cheka, the GPU took on new life under Stalin. "Under party leader Joseph Stalin, the secret police again acquired vast punitive powers and in 1934 was renamed the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs, or NKVD. No longer subject to party control or restricted by law, the NKVD became a direct instrument of Stalin for use against the party and the country during the Great Terror of the 1930s."⁽⁴⁸⁾ Despite being contrary to regulations until 1937, physical torture was common, although the NKVD took great care to make it appear to be the spontaneous work of individual jailers. Beatings with sandbags, broken-off chair legs or simply fists were preferred. Following Stalin's authorization in 1937 to use torture to obtain confessions, torture became a common practice. Confession to imaginary crimes was common; according to a Soviet general subjected to torture, "some had done this after physical coercion and others after having been terrified by accounts of the tortures used."⁽⁴⁹⁾ Besides its original duties, the NKVD was responsible for purging the Communist Party of anti-Stalinists, a task which allowed them nearly unlimited powers.⁽⁵⁰⁾

The Cheka's consolidation and expansion of power have wide-ranging implications for a general theory of revolution. Specifically, it supports the theory that an institution established for the prosecution of violence will consolidate and expand its power. Despite its modest size and powers at birth, the Cheka took advantage of vagaries in their charter and the uncertainness of the situation to expand their powers and mandate. Although the Bolshevik Party created the Cheka solely as a measure to allow the Bolshevik Party to consolidate its power in the chaotic situation following their seizure of power, the Cheka (or one of its descendants) existed, with strong but ill-defined powers, until the collapse of the Soviet Union.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abramovitch, Raphael R. The Soviet Revolution: 1917-1939. New York: International Universities Press, 1962.

Brinton, Crane. The Anatomy of Revolution. New York: Vintage Books, 1965.

Brovkin, Vladimir N. The Bolsheviks in Russian Society: The Revolution and the Civil Wars. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997.

Brovkin, Vladimir N. The Mensheviks After October: Socialist Opposition and the Rise of the Bolshevik Dictatorship. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987.

Brzezinski, Zbigniew K. The Permanent Purge: Politics in Soviet Totalitarianism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956.

Carr, Edward H. The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917-1923. New York: The MacMillan Company, 1951.

Chamberlain, William Henry. The Russian Revolution: 1917-1921. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1957.

Collectivization of Livestock: Letter to Bolshevik. The National Center for Supercomputing Applications, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Available on-line at .

Conquest, Robert. The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1968.

Dmytryshyn, Basil. U.S.S.R.: A Concise History. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1965.

Gaucher, Roland. Opposition in the U.S.S.R.: 1917-1967. New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1969.

The Gulag. The National Center for Supercomputing Applications, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Available on-line at .

Gurian, Waldemar. Bolshevism: Theory and Practice. New York: The MacMillan Company, 1932.

Keep, John L.H. The Russian Revolution: A Study in Mass Mobilization. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1976.

Kenez, Peter. Civil War in South Russia, 1919-1920. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977.

Liebich, André. From the Other Shore: Russian Social Democracy After 1921. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997.

McCauley, Martin. The Soviet Union, 1917-1991. New York: Longman Group UK Limited, 1993.

McClosky, Herbert, and John E. Turner. The Soviet Dictatorship. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company Inc., 1960.

Nettl, J.P. The Soviet Achievement. Great Britain: Jarrold and Sons Ltd. Norwich, 1967.

Pipes, Richard. Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993.

Pipes, Richard. The Russian Revolution. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990.

Pipes, Richard. The Formation of the Soviet Union: Communism and Nationalism, 1917-1923. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957.

Read, Christopher. From Tsar to Soviets: The Russian People and Their Revolution, 1917-21. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Secret Police. The National Center for Supercomputing Applications, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Available on-line at .

Thurston, Robert W. Life and Terror in Stalin's Russia, 1934-1941. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996.

Tolstoy, Nikolai. Stalin's Secret War. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1981.

Werth, Alexander. Russia: The Post-War Years. New York: Taplinger Publishing Company, 1971.

1. Secret Police. The National Center for Supercomputing Applications, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Available on-line at .

2. Ibid.

3. Raphael Abramovitch, The Soviet Revolution, 1917-1939 (New York: International Universities Press, 1962), 310.

4. John Keep, The Russian Revolution: A Study in Mass Mobilization (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1976), 352.

5. Ibid.

6. Ibid.

7. William Henry Chamberlain, The Russian Revolution: 1917-1921 (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1957), 69.

8. Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990), 801-802.

9. Christopher Read, From Tsar to Soviets: The Russian People and Their Revolution, 1917-21 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 202.

10. Abramovitch, 310.

11. Read, 204.

12. Roland Gaucher, Opposition in the U.S.S.R.: 1917-1967 (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1969), 10.

13. Ibid.

14. Pipes, The Russian Revolution, 803-804.

15. Read, 201-202.

16. Abramovitch, 311-312.

17. Read, 201.

18. Ibid., 201-202.

19. Ibid., 297.

20. Vladimir Brovkin, The Bolsheviks in Russian Society: The Revolution and the Civil Wars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 147.

21. Brovkin, The Bolsheviks in Russian Society, 146.

22. Read, 207.

23. Gaucher, 49.

24. Read, 205.

25. Ibid., 206.

26. Pipes, The Russian Revolution, 635.

27. Crane Brinton, The Anatomy of Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1965), 196.

28. Brovkin, The Bolsheviks in Russian Society, 239.

29. Gaucher, 482-483.

30. Read, 202.

31. Brovkin, The Bolsheviks in Russian Society, 168.

32. Ibid., 170.

33. Ibid., 173.

34. Ibid., 193.

35. Chamberlain, 33.

36. The Gulag. The National Center for Supercomputing Applications, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Available on-line at .

37. Ibid.

38. Collectivization of Livestock. The National Center for Supercomputing Applications, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Available on-line at .

39. Ibid.

40. Waldemar Gurian, Bolshevism: Theory and Practice (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1932), 79-80.

41. Ibid., 92.

42. Pipes, The Russian Revolution, 588.

43. Read, 206.

44. Ibid., 93-94.

45. Pipes, The Russian Revolution, 793.

46. Gurian, 92-93.

47. Abramovitch, 164-165.

48. Secret Police.

49. Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1968), 137-138.

50. Martin McCauley, The Soviet Union: 1917-1991 (New York: Longman, 1993), 103.