Red Terror - Interpretations By Historians

Interpretations By Historians

Some anti-communist historians such as Stephane Courtois and Richard Pipes have argued that the Bolsheviks needed to use terror to stay in power because they lacked popular support. Although the Bolsheviks dominated among the workers and soldiers and in their revolutionary soviets, they won less than a quarter of the popular vote in elections for the Constituent Assembly held soon after the October Revolution since they commanded much less support among the peasantry (though the Constituent Assembly ballots predated the split between the Right SRs, who opposed the Bolsheviks, and the Left SRs, who were the Bolsheviks' coalition partners, with the result that many peasant votes intended for the latter went to the former). Massive strikes by Russian workers were "mercilessly" suppressed during the Red Terror.

According to Richard Pipes, violence was implicit in Marxism itself. He argued that terror inevitably resulted from what he saw as a Marxist belief that human lives are expendable in the cause of building Communism. He quoted Marx: "The present generation resembles the Jews whom Moses led through the wilderness. It must not only conquer a new world, it must also perish in order to make a room for the people who are fit for a new world". Edvard Radzinsky noted that Joseph Stalin wrote a nota bene: "Terror is the quickest way to new society" beside the following passage in a book by Marx: "There is only one way to shorten and ease the convulsions of the old society and the bloody birth pangs of the new —revolutionary terror."

Robert Conquest argued that "unprecedented terror must seem necessary to ideologically motivated attempts to transform society massively and speedily, against its natural possibilities."

However Orlando Figes argued that the Red Terror was implicit, not so much in Marxism itself, as in the violent conditions of the Russian Revolution. He noted that there were a number of Bolsheviks, led by Lev Kamenev, Nikolai Bukharin and M. S. Olminsky, who criticised the Terror and warned that thanks to "Lenin's violent seizure of power and his rejection of democracy... he Bolsheviks forced to turn increasingly to terror to silence their political critics and subjugate a society they could not control by other means.". According to Figes, "The Terror erupted from below. It was an integral element of the social revolution from the start. The Bolsheviks encouraged but did not create this mass terror."

The German Marxist Karl Kautsky argued that the Red Terror was a form of terrorism, because it was indiscriminate, intended to frighten the civilian population, and included taking and executing hostages. He said: "Among the phenomena for which Bolshevism has been responsible, terrorism, which begins with the abolition of every form of freedom of the Press, and ends in a system of wholesale execution, is certainly the most striking and the most repellent of all".

In The Black Book of Communism, Nicolas Werth contrasts the Red and White terrors, noting the former was the official policy of the Bolshevik government:

The Bolshevik policy of terror was more systematic, better organized, and targeted at whole social classes. Moreover, it had been thought out and put into practice before the outbreak of the civil war. The White Terror was never systematized in such a fashion. It was almost invariably the work of detachments that were out of control, and taking measures not officially authorized by the military command that was attempting, without much success, to act as a government. If one discounts the pogroms, which Denikin himself condemned, the White Terror most often was a series of reprisals by the police acting as a sort of military counterespionage force. The Cheka and the Troops for the Internal Defense of the Republic were a structured and powerful instrument of repression of a completely different order, which had support at the highest level from the Bolshevik regime.