From the first day of the revolution, Lenin saw the intelligentsia as the main enemy, a force that would not submit "without lengthy discussions" to the "authority of one man" (as he had said in reference to Sverdlov). There was no need to explain action against members of the intelligentsia who opposed the Soviet government. What needed explanation was persecution of the neutral strata, which were dangerous because of their instinctive kindness, their humane impulses, their compassion for all who were persecuted. In reply to a letter from Gorky objecting to mass arrests in Petrograd, Lenin set forth his credo on November 15, 1919: "In general the arrest of the Cadet public (and those sympathetic to them) is correct and necessary. ... You have spoken unjust and angry words to me. About what? About the fact that a few dozen (or maybe a few hundred) Cadet gentlemen and Cadet sympathizers have to sit in prison for a few days in order to head off conspiracies."79 Three days after his letter to Gorky, Lenin repeated his argument almost word for word—after all it was such a good argument—in a letter to Maria Andreeva, Gorky's one-time companion: "In order to head off conspiracies it is impossible not to arrest the entire Cadet and Cadet-sympathetic public. This entire crowd is capable of helping the conspirators. It would be criminal not to arrest them."80 In this case Lenin had recourse to the terminology of the Slavophiles, who distinguished between the "people" and the "public," that is, the intelligentsia.
Lenin's term Cadet sympathizer made it possible to disregard the party membership of those who were arrested. The entire Russian intelligentsia as such was subject to accusation. The fact that many of the arrested intellectuals had helped the Bolsheviks before the revolution only compounded their guilt. If they had been so kind-hearted before, who could guarantee they would not be again—toward the Bolsheviks' enemies? Lenin came up with a very significant innovation: it was necessary to arrest not only conspirators but those "capable of helping" conspirators. In his view, the entire intelligentsia fell into that category.
One more in a series of blows against the intelligentsia fell in August 1922. On August 28 Izvestia simultaneously published a decree of the Central Executive Committee dissolving the All-Russia Famine Relief Committee and several sensational reports about the discovery of a plot by the so-called Petrograd Military Organization (PMO). "More than 200 people" were arrested in this case.81 The Cheka lumped together a group of Kronstadt sailors, a group of naval officers, and a group of professors. There is every reason to believe that the PMO affair was fabricated from beginning to end. Even Soviet historians have been unable to reach a consensus on the exact "crimes" of the accused.82 Lenin personally directed the preparations for the trial and the trial itself. A large number of Russian scientists and cultural figures were arrested, including the geography professor Tagantsev and the poet Nikolai Gumilev. A number of geologists, together with the Russian Physics and Chemistry Society, petitioned for the release of the detainees. Among those shot in the case, in addition to the "leaders of the conspiracy" and "the most dangerous conspirators," were the chemistry professor M. Tikhvinsky and Gumilev. Appeals to Lenin in behalf of these two were especially strong, because Tikhvinsky, a particularly outstanding chemist, had been a Bolshevik before the revolution, and Gumilev was one of Russia's greatest poets.
After the two were executed certain legends grew up about Lenin's alleged attempt to intercede in their behalf, that his orders to spare them arrived too late, that the Cheka agents had acted on their own. Liberman reports that Leonid Krasin was horrified when he learned that Tikhvinsky had been shot: "They killed him in spite of Lenin's promise,' Krasin exclaimed. 'It can't be. Or maybe he knew everything.... Maybe it's that the revolution has its own inalterable laws. But if that is it, where will it all end? Because, you know, Vladimir Ilyich was very fond of Tikhvinsky, was on a first-name basis with him.'"83 Krasin, who knew Lenin very well, suspected him of knowing everything. Lenin's posthumously published letters include his "resolution" on the Tikhvinsky case: 'Tikhvinsky wasn't arrested by accident. Chemistry and counterrevolution are not mutually exclusive."84 When someone approached Dzerzhinsky to ask that Gumilev be pardoned ("Were we entitled to shoot one of Russia's two or three poets of the first order?"), the head of the Cheka replied: "Are we entitled to make an exception of a poet and still shoot the others?"85 Chemistry and counterrevolution were not mutually exclusive; neither were poetry and counterrevolution. In fact, both chemistry and poetry seemed counterrevolutionary in and of themselves. Science, poetry, the intelligentsia—all added up to counterrevolution.
The trial of the PMO was the last major trial organized by the Cheka. A decree of February 6, 1922, dissolved the Cheka and transferred its functions to the State Political Administration, better known by its Russian initials GPU. This organization was made part of the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD) of Soviet Russia. After the formation of the Soviet Union, the GPU became the Unified State Political Administration— OGPU. In one of his novels Ilya Ehrenburg described what two Russian letters pronounced "che" and "ka" had meant:
For any citizen who lived during the revolution, these two syllables which children learned before they learned the word "Mama"—because they were used to frighten children even in the cradle, the way the word bogeyman had once been—two syllables that accompanied the unlucky to their death and even after, to the mass grave; two simple little letters that no one could ever forget.86
The two letters pronounced "che-ka" were replaced by three pronounced "gay-pay-oo." Soon these three letters would inspire no less fear than the first two. The appointment of the Cheka head Dzerzhinsky to be head of the GPU and later of the OGPU stressed the unchanging nature and role of the "organs" of repression.
The first big show trial organized by the GPU was the trial of the SRs, which began in June 1922. To Gorky, then living in the West, the trial of the SRs was an act of war against the intelligentsia. Gorky, in a letter to Rykov, which Lenin was to call "Gorky's disgusting letter," described the trial as one in a series aimed at "exterminating the intelligentsia in our illiterate country." The SR trial began just at the time when the verdict in the case of the "concealment of church treasures" was upheld. All of the charges against the SRs had to do with their activities before 1919, for which an amnesty had been declared on February 27, 1919. Twelve of the defendants were sentenced to death, but the sentences were "suspended."
Political trials were only one aspect of the war against the intelligentsia, a battle that was increasing in fury. The Central Committee announced: "In the first months of 1922 a revival of activity has become evident on the part of the former bourgeois intelligentsia. "87 The reactivation of "bourgeois ideology" could be seen in the founding of a number of privately owned publishing houses, as permitted by Soviet law, and the reappearance of such magazines as Byloe (The past), Golos minuvshego (Voice of bygone times), Ekonomist, and Pravo i zhizn (Law and life).