Three days later the SNK issued an additional decree, entitled ‘On the Red Terror’.6 It ordered an increase in VCheKa staff (known from then on as the Chekisty) culled from the ranks of devoted Bolsheviks. Within a year the VCheKa became an organization with a headquarters in Moscow and branches throughout the whole country. The SNK decree also ordered ‘to isolate the class enemies in concentration camps; to shoot to death every person close to the organizations of White Guardists [members of the White armies], plots and revolts; to publish the names of the executed, as well as an explanation why they had been executed’. The Red Terror was in full swing, and during its first two months alone, at least 10,000–15,000 victims were executed.7 Very soon Dzerzhinsky, a brutal workaholic with an ascetic lifestyle, earned his nickname ‘Iron Felix’.8
The first decrees set up the objectives, rules, and even phraseology for the future Soviet security services. Any real or potential threat to Bolshevik power became a ‘counterrevolutionary crime’, and later, in Joseph Stalin’s Criminal Code of 1926, these ‘crimes’ comprised fourteen paragraphs (treason, espionage, subversion, assistance to the world bourgeoisie, etc.) of the infamous Article 58. The perpetrators of such crimes, soon called ‘enemies of the working people’, were found mostly among former bourgeoisie, nobles, and any professional or educated person. However, there were also numerous workers and peasants among the victims of the Red Terror. Relatives of persons sought for counterrevolutionary crimes were also often arrested. This practice was formalized in Stalin’s time, when legal convictions of relatives of ‘enemies of the people’ became a standard practice. It’s important to note that only the VCheKa and its successor organizations were allowed investigate ‘counterrevolutionary crimes’.
Already in these first decrees there was a category of enemies called ‘the hostile officers’, which was the beginning of Lenin’s and then Stalin’s suspicious attitude to the professional military. In fact, detachments of revolutionary soldiers and sailors (as the navy privates are called in Russia) played a critical role in the Bolshevik coup. Very few high army and navy officers joined these detachments or supported the Bolsheviks.
On January 28, 1918, the SNK declared the creation of the Red Army and by February 23, which was later announced as the Red Army’s birthday, some detachments of the new army had been formed.9 On December 19, 1918, the first military counterintelligence organization, the VO (Voennyi otdel or Military Department), was established within the VCheKa (Table 1-2).10 It included previous counterintelligence organizations that existed in the armies in the field.11 On January 1, 1919, the VO was renamed Osobyi otdel (Special Department) or the OO. This name was definitely reminiscent of the political police of the czarist time, when Osobyi otdel within Departament politsii or the Police Department investigated crimes against the state such as the activities of revolutionary parties, foreign espionage, and treason.12
The word ‘osobyi’ is translated as ‘special’, but the English definition does not give the full sense of its Russian usage. In the Soviet secret services, osobyi (the singular of osobye) was used to describe a department whose specific functions required concealment. However, in the Soviet security services the acronym ‘OO’ was never used for anything but military counterintelligence. In addition to the OO in the VCheKa headquarters in Moscow, there were OOs of fronts (as the army groups are called in Russia in wartime), OOs in the armies, and Special Sections in divisions. The regional VCheKa branches, the so-called GubCheKas, also had OOs.13
The task of the OOs was ‘fighting counterrevolution and espionage within the army and fleet’.14 In other words, the Bolsheviks were more concerned about finding enemies of the regime among its own military than about catching enemy agents. This attitude explains why, during the whole of the Soviet era, military counterintelligence was part of security services, and was within the armed forces only during SMERSH’s three-year existence and for one other very brief period, and then only formally.
During the Civil War (1918–22) that followed the October Revolution, the Bolsheviks had no choice but to draft czarist officers into the Red Army.15 Although the loyalty of these officers was obviously an issue, their military training and experience were critical during that war. But with the success of the Red Army in the war, the czarist officers became less dangerous to Stalin than the young Red Army commanders who adored his archenemy Leon Trotsky.
From 1918 till 1925, Trotsky was Commissar for Military (and Naval) Affairs; later this post was called the Defense Commissar. A talented orator (contrary to Stalin, who spoke Russian with a heavy Georgian accent; Stalin’s real last name was Dzhugashvili), Trotsky was extremely popular among the Red Army commanders. Taking into consideration that in November 1920, the Red Army and Navy had 5,430,000 servicemen, and even after a partial demobilization in January 1922 numbered 1,350,000, the number of enthusiastic Trotsky supporters was very high.16 Also, Stalin’s failure as a military commander during the Civil War made him especially jealous of Trotsky’s popularity.17
In the meantime, in 1922, due to Lenin’s illness (he suffered from a progressive paralysis), the Politburo, the Party’s governing group, elected Stalin General Secretary, i.e. leader of the Bolshevik Party.18 Trotsky formed an opposition group which resulted in a long struggle between Stalin and Trotsky. In 1927, Trotsky lost all his posts, and two years later he was expelled from the Soviet Union. Finally, on Stalin’s order, he was assassinated in 1940 by an NKVD (Narodnyi komissariat vnutrennikh del or People’s Internal Affairs Commissariat) killing squad.
Stalin never forgot Trotsky’s supporters, the ‘Trotskyists’, especially among the armed forces. They were constantly persecuted, even after World War II.19 Possibly, Stalin’s fear that the officers who served under Trotsky remained his secret supporters despite Trotsky’s political defeat was behind Stalin’s distrust of the military and his expectation that it would organize plots against him. In fact, there were no military plots; if alleged ‘plots’ were discovered by the OO, they were OO fabrications to please Stalin.
During the Civil War the OO was considered so important that from August 1919 to July 1920, Dzerzhinsky, chairman of the VCheKa, and from July 1920 to May 1922, his deputy Vyacheslav Menzhinsky, headed the OO in Moscow (Table 1-2).20 However, from the beginning, the special OO departments were involved in campaigns that were not strictly military. The first OO chief, Mikhail Kedrov, executed civilians, including children, who were suspected of counterrevolutionary activity during the civil war. Military counterintelligence also participated in the creation of phony anti-Soviet underground organizations aimed at misleading White Russians who were living abroad, often trapping emissaries sent to the Soviet Union by those Russian émigrés. In the late 1920s to early 1930s, it was also involved in rounding up and sending into exile independent farming families known as kulaks during the organization of the kolkhozy (collective farms).21