Red Terror
The
Red Terror was a campaign of mass arrests and deportations targeted against
counterrevolutionaries in
Russia during the
Russian Civil War. It was initiated and conducted by the
Bolsheviks as retribution for the simultaneous successful assassination of
Petrograd Cheka leader
Moisei Uritsky, and attempted assassination of Communist leader
Vladimir Lenin by
Fanya Kaplan on
August 30,
1918.
The fact that these two assassination attempts happened at the same time strongly suggested that they had been coordinated by some larger counterrevolutionary organization, perhaps affiliated with the
White movement, which was fighting against the
Red Army in the civil war. As such, the Bolsheviks began to fear that more assassination attempts - and perhaps various acts of sabotage - were soon to follow. Therefore, they decided to respond with overwhelming force, both as retribution for the events of
August 30 and as a deterrent for any similar future attempts. The first official announcement, published in
Izvestiya, "Appeal to the Working Class" in
September 3 1918 called for the workers to "crush the hydra of counterrevolution with massive terror". This was followed by the decree
"On Red Terror", issued
September 5 1918 by the
Cheka. Casualties in the fall of 1918 exceeded 10,000.
This campaign marked the beginning of the
Gulag, with 70,000 imprisoned by September, 1921.
The Bolsheviks' enemies, the White movement, adopted similar measures at roughly the same time. These are known as the "
White Terror".
By extension, the term
Red Terror came to refer to any acts of violence carried out by communist or communist-affiliated groups during a period of civil war or other armed conflict. Often, such acts were carried out in response to (and/or followed by) similar measures taken by the anti-communist side in the conflict. See
White Terror.
Examples of these other "Red Terrors" include the executions of 590 people accused of involvement in the counterrevolutionary
coup against the
Hungarian Soviet Republic on
June 24,
1919, as well as many acts of violence during the
Cultural Revolution in
China. The bloody campaign that claimed tens of thousands of lives in
Ethiopia during the rule of the
Derg is also known as the Red Terror in that country.
* Nicolas Werth, Karel Bartosek, Jean-Louis Panne, Jean-Louis Margolin, Andrzej Paczkowski, Stephane Courtois,
Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression,
Harvard University Press, 1999, hardcover, 858 pages, ISBN 0674076087. Chapter 4:
The Red Terror*
Terrorism or Communism book by
Leon Trotsky on the use of Red Terror.
