From the very first days of the regime, dictatorship was for Lenin a panacea for all problems, be they political, economic, or social. In 1902, in his notes on Plekhanov's draft program for the RSDRP, Lenin wrote that if the peasants did not adopt the proletarian standpoint, "We will say, under the 'dictatorship': there is no point in wasting words when the use of power is required." After reading this remark, Vera Zasulich wrote in the margin, "Against millions! That's easily said." For Zasulich, a terrorist who had been willing to shoot an official of the autocracy, a dictatorship imposed on millions seemed unthinkable. For Lenin, who was against individual acts of terrorism, mass terror was an indispensable method for building a socialist society. This meant mass terror against the peasants. (A resolution of the Council of Workers' and Peasants' Defense of February 15, 1919, said, "hostages must be taken among the peasantry, so that if the snow is not cleared away, they will be shot."62) It meant mass terror against the workers. (All workers discontented with the new government were declared "nonworkers," not "pure proletarians"; they had been contaminated by the petit bourgeois mentality; meanwhile, the concentration camps were baptized "schools of labor. And it meant mass terror against all other classes as well.
In September 1918 all the regional Chekas received the following order from Dzerzhinsky: "In its activities, the Cheka is completely independent; it carries out searches, arrests, and executions, and reports afterward to the Sovnarkom and the Central Executive Committee."64 Besides these unlimited powers, the Cheka was granted "infallibility." Criticism was forbidden of "this organ, whose work proceeds under extremely difficult circumstances.
During the first months following the revolution a new state was born, a totalitarian state. It was not so much the severity of its laws as their complete arbitrariness that became their distinguishing feature. The constitution had deprived a substantial section of the population of its rights and placed it outside the law. But this was not unique to the Soviet system. In Old Russia certain categories had had limited rights. Even after the reform of 1861 this was true of the peasantry. Jews were also denied many civil rights. But these limitations were defined by law, which also allowed for the possibility of passage from a more restricted "social estate" to another that enjoyed all rights. After the revolution, even the categories that, according to the constitution, had all rights were in fact deprived of them.
In 1922 Lenin demanded that an article be included in the penal code giving heavy sentences to those who "objectively aid or might aid" the world bourgeoisie. This concept of "objective" (or "unintentional") aid meant that the state, in the person of its leaders, could define or choose whomever it wished as an opponent. And the Cheka would take appropriate measures, against which there was no appeal.
Former tsarist officers became one category of active or potential enemies, but when military specialists were needed to help organize the Red Army, they were transferred to the category of "useful citizens." During the summer of 1918, when the civil war was brought to the countryside through the formation of poor peasants9 committees, the only useful peasant was the poor one or the agricultural laborer. When evidence showed that this policy tended to unite all the peasantry against Soviet power, the "middle peasant" was added to the category of "useful," and by the end of 1918 the poor peasants9 committee were phased out.
In the preface to the Red Book of the Cheka, the situation in postrevo- lutionary Russia was defined in a precise and vivid manner: "The new dictator who had replaced the landowners and the bourgeoisie found himself in splendid isolation as he undertook to build anew."66 But this "splendid isolation" had been chosen by the dictator himself.
The isolation of Lenin's party became complete with the resignation of the Left SRs in March 1918. Later, in July, the Left SRs carried out a number of armed actions and were charged with attempting to overthrow the Bolshevik government. "In leaving the government," said the closing argument of the Bolshevik prosecutor, "the Left SR party freed the government from a useless burden that was restraining its activities, but it did not pass immediately into the enemy camp."67 The Left SRs had walked out of the government to protest the signing of the Brest-Litovsk treaty, but they had remained in the Central Executive Committee and other Soviet institutions, including the Cheka. On July 6, 1918, two Left SRs, Blymkin and Andreev, assassinated German Ambassador Mirbach. Soviet historians interpret that act as a signal for a general Left SR uprising. However, a resolution of the Left SR Central Committee stated that the action was "directed against the current policy of the Sovnarkom and not at all against the Bolsheviks."68
The armed "demonstration of discontent" against Bolshevik policy that the Left SRs organized showed that Lenin's power rested on very fragile foundations. A handful of Black Sea sailors who were part of a Cheka detachment commanded by Popov nearly toppled the government. Joachim Vatsetis, a former tsarist army colonel who had crossed over to the Soviet side and who commanded a division of Latvian fusiliers, became the man on whom Lenin's power depended. The situation in Moscow on July 6 closely resembled that in Petrograd on October 25, 1917. Most of the garrison remained neutral, and the outcome was decided by a few armed units. The Latvian rifles (2,750 soldiers) and some students at a military academy (eighty of them) were the only forces that defended Lenin's government against the Left SRs, who were not seeking to take power in the first place. The rebellious Popov detachment did not have more than 600 people and had only two batteries.69 Vatsetis was instructed to crush the "uprising," whose leaders had gone to the Fifth Congress of Soviets, then in session, to explain their aims. Four commissars were sent to "supervise" Vatsetis, who commanded the only unit capable of fighting. At the Kremlin, where he was to receive instructions, the commander of the Latvian division found a disturbed and frightened Lenin: "He came over to me with short, rapid strides and asked me very quietly: 'Comrade, can we hold out until tomorrow?'"70 Lenin understood very well that the "rebel" action was directed against him personally.
A few rounds of artillery directed against the Cheka building, where Popov's men had positioned themselves, were enough to discourage the Left SRs, who were only protesting against the treaty with Germany (and against Lenin, who insisted on the treaty). In all other matters they agreed with the Bolsheviks. Blymkin, who later gave himself up to the Cheka in the Ukraine, stressed in his testimony that there had not been an insurrection and that shots had been fired only as "acts of self-defense by revolutionaries."71 The verdict of the revolutionary tribunal was a confirmation of Blymkin's words: twelve men from the Popov detachment were shot by a firing squad, along with Aleksandrovich, a Left SR who had been Dzerzhinsky's deputy and had attempted to use the Cheka to serve his
party's interests. Left SR leaders Maria Spiridonova, Boris Kamkov, Vladimir Karelin, and Yuri Sablin were given symbolic prison sentences and later set free. Blumkin was pardoned and given a job with the Cheka.
The events of July 1918 allowed the Bolsheviks to rid themselves of a "burden" (the Left SRs in the government) and showed once more that the Cheka and loyal military units were the key to retaining power. The Left SRs, erstwhile friends and comrades-in-arms of the Bolsheviks, suddenly found themselves tagged with a label that was to become standard practice: "agents of the Russian bourgeoisie and of Anglo-French imperialism."72