The peasantry was divided into many categories: rural proletarians, poor peasants, middle peasants, and kulaks. Since there were no specific criteria for determining the category to which any one peasant belonged, arbitrariness became the rule. In the system created, the possession of one or two cattle or one or two horses determined one's position in society and the future of one's children. "Social status" became a permanent scar. The revolution forbade social mobility to those individuals whose social origins were undesirable. These could not be changed any more than could racial origins.
A concrete example of "disenfranchisement" was the decision by the Petrograd Commissariat of Food Supply in June 1918 to put into effect a "class-based rationing for the various groups of the working or nonworking population." Initially, four categories were created: (1) industrial workers performing heavy physical labor; (2) all other workers and salaried employees; (3) those in the liberal professions; and (4) nonworking elements.44 This decision stemmed from Lenin's orders of December 1917 on "the need to distribute food rations according to a class principle."45 On September 27, 1918, Pravda reported: "The Commissariat of Social Security has confirmed the necessity of stripping all kulaks and bourgeois elements, both rural and urban, of their rations. The surplus thus obtained will be used to increase the rations of the rural and urban poor." Having divided society into categories, the government assumed the right to sentence part of the population, the lower castes, to starvation, for the preservation of the upper castes.
An essential instrument of Lenin's policy was the Cheka, which functioned in fact as a special organ of the Bolshevik party, directly under Lenin's control. According to Krupskaya, what Lenin feared most of all from the very first days in power was the softness of his own comrades. He was infuriated by a resolution of the Second Congress of Soviets abolishing the death penalty, passed on October 25, 1917, on a motion by Kamenev. The February revolution had abolished the death penalty, and when Kerensky attempted to restore it to punish deserters, the Bolsheviks had strenuously objected. Now Lenin angrily repeated: "Nonsense. How can one make a revolution without firing squads?" According to Trotsky, Lenin insisted this was a big mistake, "a pacifist illusion." After the death penalty was abolished, the Bolshevik government, under pressure from Lenin, decided in spite of the decree to "have recourse to a firing squad when it becomes obvious that there is no other way."46
A network of "extraordinary commissions" (local Cheka units) covered the entire Soviet Republic. They were set up in major cities, county seats, and provincial capitals, on the railroads, in the ports, and in the army. Very soon the Cheka was granted unlimited power. It was, according to one of its leaders, "an organ that employs in its struggle the methods of investigating commissions, the courts, and the armed forces."47 The extraordinary commissions themselves made arrests, conducted investigations, held trials, handed down sentences, and carried them out.
On August 30, 1918, in Petrograd, the student Leonid Kanegisser assassinated Uritsky, the chairman of the Petrograd Cheka, and in Moscow, the Socialist Revolutionary Fanny Kaplan wounded Lenin. This day marked a turning point in the history of the Cheka. It was ordered to carry out a "merciless mass terror." The Sovnarkom published a decree on September 5 authorizing the Red Terror. That same day Fanny Kaplan was shot without trial by the Cheka.48 A wave of executions ensued. 'The number of executed," said Yakov Peters, deputy chairman of the Cheka, "has been greatly exaggerated. In no way does the total exceed 600. In Peters' view, this was not excessive, since it was in retaliation for the assassination attempt on the party's leader. Grigory Petrovsky, people's commissar of internal affairs, issued a special order expressing indignation "at the insignificant number of serious acts of repression and mass executions of White Guards and bourgeoisie" and requiring that "substantial numbers of hostages be taken."50 Dzerzhinsky, chairman of the Cheka, explained in a memorandum what a hostage was: "Hostages must be taken from among... people of high social position, large landowners, factory owners, prominent officials and academics, close relatives of people formerly in power, etc." This was because "nobody will intercede or give anything" for some "rural teacher, forester, miller, or small shopkeeper."51
The hostage system, unknown in pre revolutionary Russia, was supplemented by another instrument of repression new to the country—the concentration camp. The notoriety stemming from its use by Hitler should not obscure the fact that the Soviet state was the initiator of this institution. Trotsky had the honor of being first to use the term. In his order of June 4, 1918, he demanded that all Czechoslovaks who refused to lay down their arms be detained in concentration camps.52 On June 26 Trotsky sent a memorandum to the Sovnarkom proposing that all former officers who refused to join the Red Army be considered part of the bourgeoisie and placed in "concentration camps."53 On August 8 Trotsky substantially enlarged the category of those subject to detention and ordered camps established in Murom, Arzamas, and Sviyazhsk for holding "reactionary agitators, counterrevolutionary officers, saboteurs, parasites, and speculators."54 On August 9 Lenin, troubled by the extent of the peasant insurrection in Penza province, sent a telegraph to the Penza Executive Committee urging it to carry out "ruthless mass terror against the kulaks, priests, and White Guards; confine all suspicious elements in a concentration camp outside the city."55
The concentration camp became a universal instrument of terror against "suspicious elements." On September 5, 1918, after this method of repression had already been widely employed, it was legalized by a decree of the Sovnarkom: "It is necessary to protect the Soviet Republic from class enemies by isolating them in concentration camps." The next point in this decree states: "All persons implicated in the activities of White Guard organizations, conspiracies, or uprisings are subject to being shot."56
As a punitive measure the concentration camp was second in severity to the death penalty, which was restored officially on February 21, 1918, by a decree of the Sovnarkom granting the Cheka the "right to take immediate reprisals against active counterrevolutionaries."57 This category included "enemy agents, profiteers, marauders, hooligans, counterrevolutionary agitators, and German spies." All were to be "shot on the spot," in other words, without investigation or trial.58 The Cheka expanded this list, in its "proclamation" of February 22, to include "saboteurs and other parasites." On June 16 the People's Commissariat of Justice informed the revolutionary tribunals that they were not under any "constraints" in selecting "the methods of struggle against counterrevolution, sabotage, etc."59
The exact number of people shot during the first year of the revolution is unknown. According to Latsis, only twenty-two people were shot by the Cheka during the first half of 1918, but during the second half of that year "more than 6,000 were shot."60 Aside from the fact that Latsis's figures are open to question, the number of people shot by agencies other than the Cheka, such as the revolutionary tribunals and local soviets, is not known. It should suffice to note that the official announcement of the execution of "former Tsar Nicholas Romanov" states that on July 16, 1918, the sentence handed down by the Presidium of the Urals Regional Soviet was carried out. It added: 'The wife and son of Nicholas Romanov have been sent to a safe place."61 In fact, the tsar, his wife, son, and four daughters, a doctor, a cook, a footman, and a maidservant were all shot. If Latsis, the first historian of the Cheka, always counted one when eleven people were shot, his statistics can hardly be considered reliable.