Red Terror

The Red Terror was a campaign of mass killings, torture, and systematic oppression conducted by the Bolsheviks after the beginning of the Russian Civil War in 1918. Soviet historiography describes the Red Terror as having been officially announced in September 1918 by Yakov Sverdlov and ending about October 1918. However, the term was frequently applied to political repression during the whole period of the Civil War (1918–1922). The Cheka (the Bolshevik secret police) conducted the mass repressions. Estimates for the total number of people killed in the Red Terror range from 10,000 to over one and a half million.

The original Red Terror was a wartime campaign against perceived counter-revolutionaries during the Russian Civil War of 1918–1921, targeting those who sided with the Whites. Leon Trotsky described the context in 1920:

The severity of the proletarian dictatorship in Russia, let us point out here, was conditioned by no less difficult circumstances [i.e. than the French Revolution]. There was one continuous front, on the north and south, in the east and west. Besides the Russian White Guard armies of Kolchak, Denikin and others, there are those attacking Soviet Russia, simultaneously or in turn: Germans, Austrians, Czecho-Slovaks, Serbs, Poles, Ukrainians, Roumanians, French, British, Americans, Japanese, Finns, Esthonians, Lithuanians ... In a country throttled by a blockade and strangled by hunger, there are conspiracies, risings, terrorist acts, and destruction of roads and bridges.

He then went on to contrast the terror with the revolution and provide the Bolshevik's justification for it:

The first conquest of power by the Soviets at the beginning of November 1917 (new style) was actually accomplished with insignificant sacrifices. The Russian bourgeoisie found itself to such a degree estranged from the masses of the people, so internally helpless, so compromised by the course and the result of the war, so demoralized by the regime of Kerensky, that it scarcely dared show any resistance. ... A revolutionary class which has conquered power with arms in its hands is bound to, and will, suppress, rifle in hand, all attempts to tear the power out of its hands. Where it has against it a hostile army, it will oppose to it its own army. Where it is confronted with armed conspiracy, attempt at murder, or rising, it will hurl at the heads of its enemies an unsparing penalty.

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