Donald Parkinson dives into the historiography of the Russian Revolution and argues that the Red Terror was not an ideological outgrowth of communist ideals. Rather, the red terror must be understood through a materialist lens that sees its roots in social environment rather than ideology. 

Guards at the grave of Moisei Uritsky. Petrograd. Translation of the banner: “Death to the bourgeois and their helpers. Long live the Red Terror.”

Introduction

A sort of ‘common sense’ has slipped into the public consciousness regarding revolutions and their dangers. Revolutions, the cynics say, will always lead to atrocity and despotism. This is because they aim for a goal of total human emancipation, and with a goal this noble any kind of mass murder and bloodshed becomes acceptable to win. This thesis, which I hope to weaken the validity of, is best summed up by Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt:

To confiscate the word humanity, to invoke and monopolize such a term probably has certain incalculable effects such as denying the enemy the quality of being human and declaring him to be an enemy of humanity; and a war can thereby be driven to the most extreme inhumanity.¹

In other words, no struggle is more prone to becoming oppressive than the struggle to emancipate humanity. Has the violence of democratic and communist revolutions been a product of these ideologies’ very ideals and content? Modern ‘common sense’ seems to be very skeptical of revolution as having any potential progressive impact. The fact that these ideas have become a sort of neo-liberal ‘common sense’ is reflected in historians of revolution, who see the ideology of human emancipation as impossible to achieve and inherently leading to mass terror. This tendency to reduce revolutionary terror as a symptom of ideology is reflected in the highly regarded work of Richard Pipes on the Bolshevik Revolution, and acts as an explanatory narrative for why the revolution led to the infamous red terror. Similar claims are made about the French Revolution, enlightenment ideology, and the Reign of Terror by other historians like Francois Furet and Simon Schama. For this essay the focus will be the Russian Revolution, looking at how historians have contextualized and understood as the causes of the terror and ruthless violence that occurred in the Civil War that raged from approximately 1918 to 1922. Rather than focusing on the terror itself, the focus will be on the historical narratives that developed regarding the terror.

After the Bolsheviks seizure of power in 1917, a series of events would throw Russia into a Civil War where political terrorism became rampant. While many historians argue the Bolshevik Revolution was a coup, it is more accurate to view it as an alliance of the Bolsheviks and Left-SRs winning a political victory in the Soviets (mass democratic workers councils) to form a government. Yet the actual revolution had only begun; it needed to be consolidated against counter-revolution and establish Soviet and eventually Bolshevik Party authority around the whole country. This process happened through the Civil War, which eventually consolidated into the New Economic Policy after the economically difficult times of “War Communism”.

In the actual Civil War, the Bolsheviks fought not only against the reactionary Whites, who were funded by imperialist powers determined to crush the Bolsheviks, but also spontaneous peasant revolts, which historians like Brovkin have labeled the Green movement. At this time, where food conditions were scarce and much of the state’s energy was dedicated to simply keep people in the cities fed and production going, War Communism was a time of austerity for all, as well as a grim atmosphere of generalized political terror, both systematic and spontaneous.

Historians of Bolshevism have tried to grapple with the realities of the political terrorism that was used by all sides in the Russian Civil War, Red, White, and Green, aiming to explain to the excessive use of political terrorism that marked Bolshevik Rule in the period from 1918-1922. In this period the Bolsheviks endured massive opposition from all elements of society and battled to hold onto power against all odds. This even meant mass opposition from the working class itself, leading the Bolshevik regime to use political terror against other socialists in some cases. What emerged was an incredibly complex conflict simplified for the purposes of myth-making. While historians like Vladimir Brovkin have focused on the role the Civil War played in building the mythology of the Soviet State, the legacy and historical understandings of the red terror have also been simplified in a way that serves the needs of the US state and its free-market ideology that it hopes to extend worldwide.²For the officials of the US state-department and their allies, the story of the revolution was one of red terror, inspired by the murderous ideology of communism. This is found in much of the scholarship regarding the Russian Civil War, as we shall see, whose approach puts the ideology of the Bolsheviks as the motor force of the revolution much in the way revisionist historian Francois Furet put the Enlightenment ideology of the Jacobins as the motor force behind the Reign of Terror.

We should call this story for what it is: an idealistic and politically charged historical narrative used to completely squash the hope of human emancipation and blackmail supporters of a better world. One simply can bring to mind the barbarism of the Russian Revolution to dismiss hopes that social revolution can be beneficial, making a myopic focus on the terror.  It corresponds with the needs of capitalist ideology to maintain the illusion of capitalism as a permanent system. Yet it cannot merely be questioned on ideological grounds, and one must show the flaws in the bourgeois historical narratives that go beyond their basic intentions by providing historical counterfactuals.

By looking at the historiography of the red terror in the Russian Revolution and the Russian Civil War in general I will trace out two competing historiographical narratives regarding the red terror, an ‘orthodox’ and a ‘heterodox’ school. Then we shall see how the claims of the ‘orthodox’ school stand up to the ‘heterodox’ school. In the ‘orthodox’ narrative the excesses of Red Terror are interpreted as a product of a certain ideological zealotry that intellectuals with utopian fantasies imposed on the masses to rebuild society in their image, or as a product of the base instincts of the masses being unleashed. Also raised are questions related to the equivocations of Lenin and Stalin. These interpretations of history are used as the ultimate example against any kind of social revolution, where a new boss simply comes into power who is worse than the old and despotically oppresses the people in the name of freedom. In this essay, I aim to look at the historians who make these claims and put them against competing narratives from other historians.

Arno Mayer in his work The Furies, a comparative study of terror in the French and Russian revolutions, traces out two main historical approaches to revolutionary terror: a genetic approach and environmental approach. The genetic approach focuses on the role of ideology, with Mayer noting that it is usually an approach to terror accompanied a “turn of mind predisposed to unqualified condemnation.”³ On the other hand is the environmental approach, which gives primacy to social factors outside the control of individual actors. For Mayer the environmental approach to the terror tends to be willing to consider revolutionary terror as a “legitimate child of extreme necessity”.⁴The debate can be summed up in terms of how much weight historians and social theorists give to ideology vs. environmental factors.

For the purposes of debate regarding the Russian Revolution, one can say that the “genetic approach” has become the basis of the ‘orthodoxy’, seeing the Revolution as a product of Lenin’s particularly violent understanding of Marxist ideology. A key historiographical question regarding the terror that invariably pops up is whether the terror of Lenin and Stalin are to be equivocated; a question that runs through the works of everyone from Solzhenitsyn to Stephen Cohen. For the ‘orthodox approach or what Mayer calls the “genetic school”, the answer is that a common undeniable thread connects the two, with Stalin merely continuing and then intensifying the policies that Lenin pursued. By highlighting the commonalities between Lenin and Stalin, one would have the ability to make a stronger case that the main force in creating the dynamics of terror was ideology, as both actors were self-described partisans of Marxist ideology.

Another claim made by ‘orthodox’ historians that reflects the genetic school’s reliance on idealism is that Bolshevik policy regarding grain requisitions was inspired by a mere hatred of the peasantry and ideological zealotry, hence making red terror necessary to suppress the peasants and requisition grain. The actual grain crisis facing the population and what means the Bolsheviks had to solve it are not taken into account; there is an assumption that the Marxist ideology of the Bolsheviks drove them into unnecessary conflict with the peasants that created the crisis situation the terror was a response to. There is also the notion of a ‘monolithic’ Bolshevism where the party lacked any opposition or debate due to its very design, leading it to use terror to enforce an ideological uniformity. When faced with historical counterfactuals these claims lose explanatory power, hence weakening the ‘orthodoxy’. Heterodox historians have all helped shed light on how seriously one can take these claims

Pipes’ Orthodoxy

Richard Pipes is certainly a political partisan, a raging Cold Warrior who aimed to use his history as an instrument of the US intelligence service. However, this as such isn’t a reason to discredit his work. Rather than for ideological presumptions that we agree with, materialists should seek in historians what actual explanatory value their narratives have in giving causality to historical events and their dynamics. The problem with Pipes is that he doesn’t provide a historical narrative that looks at the complex interplay between social factor ofs, instead looking at history as a matter of people coming into situations of power and trying to put their ideas into practice. To the extent there are environmental factors for Pipes’ they come down to a sort of national essentialism, focusing on the despotic nature of Russia over history. For Pipes all that changes with the Russian Revolution is the ideology behind the despotism, in this case, an ideology that due its very nature leads to unhinged levels of despotism. This approach is inherently idealistic, but before dismissing it on these grounds it must be unpacked.

Pipes in fact blames the tyranny of the red terror partially on the ‘patrimonial tradition’ in the Russian state, which gave state bureaucrats an autocratic control over their spheres of authority. The Russian state according to Pipes has in it ingrained a fear of popular participation in the activities of the state. One is reminded of theories of “asiatic despotism”, and as far Pipes goes in exploring environmental factors this is all he seems to take into account. What happened in the October revolution, which he describes as merely a coup, was that a certain strain of extremist socialist intelligentsia were able to take over the state and impose their ideas on society using the autocratic traditions of the patrimonial state, becoming Red Czars of sorts. In Pipe’s vision of history, the craving of power within the intelligentsia are the motor force in history, at least when it comes to revolution. The Russian Revolution, and the red terror that followed, are explained by an ideological tradition that goes all the way back to the Enlightenment for Pipes:

“Communism failed because it proceeded from the erroneous doctrine of the Enlightenment, perhaps the most pernicious idea in the history of thought, that man is merely a material compound, devoid of either soul or innate ideas, and as such a passive product of an infinitely malleable social environment. This doctrine made it possible for people with personal frustrations to project them onto society and attempt to resolve them there rather than in themselves.”⁵

This theory essentially sums up why Pipes sees the terror as an inevitable product of revolution and contained within it the genetic structure of its accompanying ideologies. Terror was a product of revolution because it aimed to achieve the enlightenment goal of creating a more perfect humanity, with revolution inherently leading to a dictatorship of intellectual overlords who will use force and terror to mold humanity into their ideal. Class struggle is simply reduced to “under-achievers” who are tricked into the idealistic philosophies of declasse intellectuals, to become their dupes in a utopian vision to improve humanity.

This interpretation is used to absurd degrees. For example, when explaining why the system of War Communism developed, Pipes essentially blames the influence of communist intellectuals who were attracted to the “sophisticated nonsense” of Marx because they were “radical intellectuals who neither had money nor knew how to earn it, but craved the power and pleasure it affords”.⁶In another instance Pipes claims that the brutality of the Cheka was due to Dzerzhinsky’s Polish nationalist resentment against Russia, hence why Lenin chose him to punish and terrorize Russians.⁷ Yet anyone with a knowledge of Dzerzhinsky’s political history would know that he was no fan of Polish nationalism. Pipes essentially draws a narrative where an old regime, incapable of modernizing, comes into the hands of dangerous intellectuals with inherently destructive ideas. The narrative, while giving some level of causality to environment in the form of a national essentialism of sorts, is perfectly representative of what Arno Mayer critiques as the genealogical narrative of terror that is prone to treating ideas as a motor force in history. In the narrative created by Pipes, the source of these ideas is in the Enlightenment project itself, a product of a flawed notion that a fallible humanity could improve itself and become a master of its own conditions. For Pipes, the red terror is essentially an expression of the total development of the ideas of the Enlightenment, which tragically have become the ruling ideology of those who hold state power.

The problem with this narrative is not necessarily that it is politically loaded, but gives extraordinary historical causality to the power of ideas and leaders, a theoretically flawed approach for this reason alone. As I will later demonstrate, it is a narrative that is proven overly simplistic when presented with historical counterfactuals. Pipes’ analysis also gives a sort of all-powerful role to the intelligentsia, ignoring the complexities of bureaucracy in how state policies are determined and executed. The dubious assertion that Lenin apparently had a “genocidal hatred of the bourgeoisie equivalent to Hitler’s hatred of Jews”, does not explain the brutality of on the ground actions by Red army leaders, soldiers, and Cheka agents.⁸ This vision presents a characterization of the Bolshevik party as a purely monolithic party, where debate and discussion on policy never opposed the dictates of the central committee. This model shows power and policy purely coming from the top-down, not something that is mediated and determined through complex social factors as political institutions react to new challenges and unexpected developments in global politics. This claim, that the Bolshevik Party was from its onset authoritarian, would be backed up by historians like Pipes using a specific interpretation of ‘What Is To Be Done?’ as containing the seeds of a new authoritarian Bolshevik ideology.

Other Orthodox Works

This orthodoxy, best represented by Pipes, would find its tropes repeated through other histories of the Civil War. In W. Bruce Lincoln’s Red Victory, while more willing to give currency to environmental factors and willing to recognize the realities of the White terror, still puts the primary impetus that led to the Bolsheviks pursuing a course of terror in their “instinctive hatred of privilege” and desire for a just world. For this they “killed willingly and justified their cruelest acts animated by a belief that any amount of brutality could be justified in the name of the masses.” As in the narratives of Pipes the terror flows directly from the ideology of the Bolsheviks being put into practice, which presents a narrative where red terror is the natural end result of any attempt to secure a more equal humanity. While doing much to document the brutality of the terror, with an emphasis on Bolshevik brutality, W. Bruce Lincoln offers little in explaining the terror beyond the simple “genealogical narrative” promoted by Pipes.⁹

Orlando Figes takes a slightly more nuanced perspective on the social origins of the red terror, admitting that it did have a populist aspect. For Figes a traditional Russian hatred of the elite within the nation made many common Russians more than willing to join Lenin’s war to “expropriate the expropriators” and exact revenge on their former exploiters. The “plebian war on privilege” was merely being put into practice by the Bolsheviks, and the results as to be expected were an exterminatory attitude to the bourgeoisie.¹⁰

While this approach does admit that the terror of the Bolsheviks was fueled to some degree by popular support as well peasant tradition, it also blames the excesses of the terror on the attempt of the unwashed masses to apply socialist doctrines to their country. Figes’ narrative is essentially elitist, seeing the masses as a resentful mob that must be kept down and policed to prevent them from seeking revenge against their exploiters. The Russian masses, in particular, can never be allowed close to political power. The terror of course was fueled by a desire for revanchism among the masses, but these desires for revenge were often based on reactions to the enemies own crimes in the process of different forces battling in civil war; war intensified people’s willingness to commit atrocities. For example, white terror against workers such as massacres of entire towns led to a desire for reds to have revenge and murder prisoners of war, creating a dialectic of violence.

In fact, Figes goes as far to admit that “the terror erupted from below” and that the “Bolsheviks did encourage but did not create” this mass terror.¹¹ While not departing from an ideological “genetic view” of the terror, Figes departs from Pipes in that he sees the terror as a result of the ‘plebeian masses’ absorbing certain ideas with approval from the state rather than something enforced by the state purely from the top down. Figes also points out that the Cheka, before the late summer of 1918, was an “extremely decentralized” institution, meaning that local populations were able to exercise control over who Cheka offices would choose to target. For Figes, one could summarize his narrative on the red terror as follows: The Bolshevik revolution’s ideals of class warfare were picked up by the mass populace to then be systematized by Bolshevik authority as forms of ensuring rule while  consolidating authority. While Pipes puts more blame on individual leaders, Figes sees how it was possible that policies of terror would be taken up as popular policies by certain sections of society. However, one cannot say this approach necessarily departs from the genealogical approach, as it sees the terror flowing from the masses taking up a Marxist class struggle oriented ideology as opposed to simply just the Bolshevik Party. Marxist ideology gave permission to what Figes sees as barbarous practices of the peasantry to express themselves fully.

For the purposes of critical revolutionary theory, the genealogical approach to terror serves as a general orthodoxy in the historiography of the Bolshevik Revolution that needs to challenged by a heterodoxy. This is partially because of political motivations from historians and partially due to the simplicity of the explanation that bad ideas led to a bad situation. It is quite easy to find quotes from Lenin and Trotsky justifying revolutionary terror, and it is indeed hard to see large scale social conflict not ensuing after a Marxist party seizes power. What is being questioned is not whether Lenin and the Bolsheviks embarked on a policy of terror, but to what extent this policy of terror was simply driven by the ideological precepts of Bolshevism. For these reasons in popular discourse the orthodox interpretation best represented by Pipes has become commonly accepted.

Challenges to Orthodoxy

While Pipes’ genetic, ideas-driven approach stands as an orthodoxy, many historians have poked holes in this narrative and provided feasible challenges to it, without minimizing the extent to which Bolshevik terror reached unnecessary excesses. A variety of historians who approach the issue of the terror from often completely different perspective all looked to find alternatives to the simplistic narratives of Pipes and similar historians, looking at Environmental factors and the nature of the Bolshevik Party before 1917. Some of these key historians, who have attempted to go beyond the ‘orthodoxy’ include the aforementioned Arno Mayer, Stephen Cohen, Lars T. Lih, and Marcel Liebman. What unites all these historians is that their works provide a way to escape simplistic narratives of the terror that gives proper due to social factors and historical contingency. From their work, I will extract various counter-claims to the claims the ‘orthodoxy’ stands on.

An important counter-claim to the notion that Bolshevik terror was ideologically fueled can be found in Marcel Liebman’s Leninism Under Lenin which is an early attempt at a counter to prevailing orthodoxy underlying the Bolshevik revolution. This work can be seen as an attempt to reevaluate the Bolshevik experience from the perspective of Anti-Stalinist Marxism.  Liebman devotes a whole section of his book regarding the terror, pointing out that the initial response of the Bolsheviks to their opposition was not to launch campaigns of extermination as Pipes would have you believe. According to Liebman “it would be wrong, however, to suppose that, starting from a theoretical opinion about the role of force in history….the Bolsheviks proceeded to impose immediately upon coming to power, a reign of terror direct against the old order. On the contrary, the period in which the revolution experienced its ‘honeymoon’ was also a period of relative but genuine moderation in the repression of counter-revolutionary elements.”¹²

For Liebman the period following the revolution was not an immediate outburst of Bolshevik fueled violence, providing examples of repression being dealt with in far more humane ways. One example that Liebman uses is the treatment of officer cadets who had previously been hostile combatants during the initial seizure of the Winter Palace. According to Liebman, “A few days later the same bodies of Cadets organized an armed rising in the capital” overcome by the Bolsheviks who would once again release them as prisoners. Liebman also cites the fact that in the initial three months after the revolution death sentences were not released by the state. While this, of course, ignores the reality of extra-judicial killings “from below” it does show that the Bolsheviks were not committed to a course of excessive revolutionary violence from day one. Rather, for Liebman, the resort of the Bolshevik government to terror amplified as counter-revolution and foreign intervention amplified. For Liebman, inspired by EH. Carr, September 1918 represents a turning point in the terror, which was primarily fueled by reprisals by the Whites and an attempted murder on Lenin by the SRs, their left wing now going on a campaign of terror against the Bolsheviks instead of serving as their coalition partners.¹³In Liebman’s interpretation, qualitative differences exist between the terrors of Stalin and Lenin, and that it was more “environmental” rather than “genetic” factors that led the Bolsheviks to embark on a course of terror.

Stephen Cohen also would argue a qualitative difference between the terrors of Lenin and Stalin, most clearly in his essay “Bolshevism and Stalinism”. ¹⁴ Cohen argues that the red terror in the Civil War period was qualitatively different than the purges and show trials of the Stalin Years (1928-53). Cohen explains how the equivocation of Bolshevism with Stalinism ignores the surrounding conditions that informed them and that this was essentially an unquestioned axiom in the historical sciences. For Cohen, this “continuity thesis” is one which “rests on a series of dubious formulations” that has prevented historians from “studying Stalinism as a distinct phenomenon with its own history.”¹⁵ While Cohen does not deny the “seeds” of Stalinism can be found in Bolshevism, and that elements of continuity exist, these observations verge on the painfully obvious. For Cohen such generalizations say nothing about the actual historical forces that drive events, and that the break from wartime terror to terror in an ostensible peacetime situation is a qualitative break in policy. In his own words, “Stalinism was excess, extraordinary extremism in each. It was not, for example, merely coercive peasant policies, but a virtual civil war against the peasantry, not merely police repression, or even a civil-war style terror, but a holocaust of terror that victimized tens of millions of people.”¹⁶ These policies were imposed on the population from above, not exigencies to survive in a Civil War. For Cohen, saying that there are continuities is merely stating the obvious; continuities exist throughout history, yet the goal of historians is not to merely point them out but show where changes in continuities lie.

One aspect that Cohen points out as a falsehood is the notion of the Bolshevik parties as a monolithic organization without internal democracy, which he argues it became by the ascendance of Stalinism. Adherence to the ‘orthodox’ perspective would have it that the Bolshevik party was a monolithic and overly centralized party from the beginning, this truth being revealed in Lenin’s What Is To Be Done?. ¹⁷ The argument of a monolithic and dogmatic political party coming to power fueled by an anti-democratic Marxist ideology is greatly disputed by Lih’s work. The scholarship of Lih not only addresses the internal regime of the Bolshevik Party (in Lenin Rediscovered and Bread and Authority in Russia: 1914-1921). Lih in Lenin Rediscovered is primarily focused on debunking the notion that within What Is To Be Done? The recipes for Leninist authoritarian and red terror are laid out. For Lih, What Is To Be Done? is to be put into the context of trying to apply the orthodox Marxism of the SPD to Russian conditions. Lih consistently demonstrates that Lenin’s prime concern in this era is with political freedom and that in no way did his existing ideology as such reject political freedom. Rather, Lih works to present Lenin as a partisan of political freedom in Russia and dedicated to fighting for it to the maximum degree possible. He also dispels the myth of the Bolshevik party as a monolithic entity that lacked internal debate, following a bureaucratic centralist model from the very beginning.

The Food Supply Dictatorship

In Bread and Authority in Russia, 1914-1921 Lars T. Lih traces out a broader thesis that a “wrecked Russia” was what produced Bolshevism rather than the other way around. The conditions that led to economic collapse at the regime of war communism were already essentially in motion due to the difficulty of securing the food supply using state authority. For Lih, the year 1917 saw a breakdown in the food supply and therefore a crisis of authority as such. The actions of the Bolsheviks during the Civil War years were based around a) reconstituting the food supply and b) reconstituting central authority.  The war years are years of extreme difficulty and brutality because the Bolsheviks are struggling to reestablish the food supply and reconstitute political authority, with the solution to the food supply problem ultimately being found in the NEP. Under these circumstances it is understandable why Lenin would call for the hoarders of grain to be shot; his motivation was not to terrorize so much as to feed the country. For Lih, the “destructive force” that the Bolsheviks played in the Civil War Years and Red Terror ultimately was a “reconstitutive force” leading up to the workable solution of the NEP.¹⁸ 

Lih does make the mistake of ignoring peasant resistance to Bolshevik authority during the “reconstitutive period”, which can be seen as a driving force for what made the Bolshevik Government both resort to terror and take up the NEP. Lih almost writes off the problem of peasant resistance, saying that “the primary incentive for the peasant producer who remained was continued survival for himself and his family. Insofar as the Bolsheviks stuck to their promise of taking only the surplus above the amount needed for personal consumption and continued production, this primary incentive was not damaged” while also admitting than even Lenin said more than this amount was taken in certain situations.¹⁹ While Lih does a good job at showing the challenges the Bolsheviks had in procuring food supply and how this drove their policy into certain directions, the dynamic created by peasant rebellions against Bolshevik grain policies is largely ignored. This dynamic is well documented by Vladimir N. Brovkin in his work Behind the Front Lines of the Civil War which documents the massive peasant discontent in many regions throughout Russia as well the massive “Green” movement of peasants aligned with neither the Whites or Reds.²⁰ While Lih presents the “food-supply dictatorship” established by the Bolsheviks between May and June 1918 as an almost logical response from new authorities to secure order, the extent to which these policies were unpopular with the peasantry and the role this played in driving the Bolsheviks to terror isn’t fleshed out, merely admitting it created a ‘partisan challenge’.²¹

Yet by placing the Russian Civil War and Red Terror in terms of the challenges of securing food supply, Lars T. Lih offers a substantial challenge to those who would put genetic over environmental factors in explaining the dynamics of terror. Peter Holquist, in Making War, Forging Revolutions: Russia’s Continuum of Crisis 1914-1921 examines how Bolshevik authority was influenced by the general problems posed by World War 1. Holquist is neither a pure “environmentalist” or “geneticist”, taking influence from both schools by claiming “Bolshevik Russia was a product neither of pure ideology nor simply of the circumstances of 1914-1921”.²²Yet Holquist offers many important insights into the structural factors that led the Bolsheviks to terror, noting that the general situation and crisis of WWI was a major factor in driving Bolshevik Policy. His work focuses in particular on the Don Region, which saw a severe lack of popularity for the Bolsheviks. For Holquist the Bolsheviks were tasked with re-ordering a society ravaged by WWI, a task that won them support from non-Bolshevik technocrats but was still structured by their Marxist ideology.²³ What distinguished Revolutionary Russia was that these military-style institutions to rebuild society would become the basis of a new state. The Don region is chosen for focus simply because of its utter lack of popularity for the Bolsheviks. The “environmental factors” that played a role in forming the state are the crisis situations created by WWI, which different regimes tried to answer.

The strongest argument for this explanation comes from the claim that Bolshevik grain procurement policy was in fact planned to be put into operation by the Provisional Government, but was possible until “under the Soviet Power” where “the moment of compulsion increased by a unprecedented degree.” ²⁴ If one wishes to blame Bolshevik ideology entirely on the course of events (land policies leading to peasant resistance hence terror) one would have to admit that these policies were not unique to the Bolshevik Party and in fact, were designed before they came to power to some extent. This lends credibility to the argument of Lih that grain requisitions were essentially a policy pursued for pragmatic ends rather than a product of “communist mania”. However, Holquist sees the dogmatism of the Bolsheviks and their hostility to the peasants as a key factor in determining how these policies would be executed. Yet as far as the actual policies were defined, they existed in continuity with the needs of Wartime Russia, with no fundamental break in policy. What did change were the political authorities and how they aimed to solve the crisis. As a result, the violence and destruction of the Russian Civil War can be seen not in isolation from the devastation that began in 1914 Europe but as a continuation of it.

Conclusion

The historiography the Russian Civil War is understandably ridden with controversy, considering the political nature of the questions at stake. With historians such as Pipes, the red terror is evidence of the enlightenment’s destructive ideas when put into practice and evidence to throw them out altogether. On the other hands, historians like Liebman and Lih are asking for a reconsideration of Bolshevism as a progressive force in history. Posing a heterodoxy to the orthodoxy of Pipes, historians offered counterfactuals to the notion of a monolithic Bolshevik party and the idea that terror was an immediate solution to the opposition in the Bolsheviks. They also theorized that environmental factors essentially drove a Bolshevik Party initially committed to democracy onto an anti-democratic road of ruling through terror, such the need to reconstitute political authority and re-establish the food supply while fighting a civil war in the ruins of World War I. With an orthodoxy that emphasized “genetic” factors and a heterodoxy that emphasized “environmental” factors the heterodoxy is the field which actually leaves room for interesting historical questions while still containing its own flaws.

The heterodoxy, of course, leaves the historian with a more interesting set of questions, but a proper narrative regarding the red terror must take into account a factor that neither group of historians really touch on: the role of violence in political change as such, explored in the works of Franz Fanon and Arno Mayer. While Fanon was theorizing decolonial revolution rather than socialist revolution, he theorized the violence played a role for the colonized subject that allowed them to reclaim their humanity after years of oppression. Years of Czarist oppression, especially for those under the yoke of landlords and oppressed nationalities under Russian domination, gave the masses a true desire to seek violent retribution on those oppressors who for so long used violence to deny them their humanity. For Fanon a revolution was a “war of liberation” that allowed the oppressed masses to form a collective identity, cause, and destiny and create a sense of historical purpose after being denied their humanity by colonial masters.²⁵

While not all the workers and peasants that participated in the revolution were a colonial subject like the Algerians who inspired Fanon, Russia was itself a “prisonhouse of nations” with many oppressed nationalities and widespread anti-semitism. Because of this, his theory of revolutionary violence seems to explain in part why the red terror was so bloody. Both Bolsheviks and opponents of the Bolsheviks that favored a different form of socialism saw the revolution as an attempt to reclaim their humanity after years of Czarist oppression. Violence against class enemies, which was essentially anyone opposed to the revolution, as tragic and excessive as it was, was the long-repressed rage of the masses against everything that oppressed them. This violence would extend to the Bolsheviks themselves at many times, who were seen as betraying the true cause of Soviet Power. This was not the result of a “class war” ideology imposed on the masses as Figes suggests, but the end result of years of Czarist oppression. Real experiences of exploitation and oppression were dehumanizing for a vast majority of Russians, so one can only imagine the desire of the masses for revenge against anything they saw as replicating the old regime, even the Bolsheviks themselves.

The problem with Fanon’s defense of revolutionary violence as rooted in a need for psychological self-liberation for the dehumanized is that this is more a description of something than a moral justification for the mass violence committed by revolutionaries. It is quite possible to posit that the psychological need to liberate the mind from an embedded repressive authority could be channeled in other ways that are more constructive towards building a socialist society. Thus it is important to not fall into a fetishization of violence and terror as virtues with inherent value and a necessary means of liberation. This leads to the kind of metaphysics of violence that one finds in MLM groups who glorify Sendero Luminoso.

Arno Mayer, on the other hand, sees the red terror as a sort of “dialectic of violence” where the Reds and Whites competed to claim hegemony over political authority. For Mayer:

Violence is inseparable from revolution and counter-revolution as these are from each other. Violence has of course many faces and purposes. Certainly not all violence in Revolution is ideological and, by that token, excessive and boundless. Although violence is inherent to revolution, it is not unique to it. Nor is it as rare as revolution itself. Violence is basic to society and polity, especially to their foundation and consolidation. At the creation there is often recourse to war, which, like revolution, “is inconceivable outside the domain of violence.²⁶

This approach sees violence and terror as inevitable parts of a revolution matched by a counter-revolution, which is both ideologically inspired and outgrows from revanchism from the oppressed classes (and revanchism against the revolution itself). Violence is basic to political order, and the crisis of 1917 saw two poles form opposing political authorities: The Red and the Whites. Ultimately the two would contest for legitimacy and find terror a tool in this contest. The Bolsheviks were certainly ideologues and armed with an ideology that made no qualms about using political terror. While initially committed to democracy in theory, the Bolsheviks had no doubt they would have to command state repression in order to consolidate rule. The turn to terror became a weapon against the counter-revolution, but excesses alienated potential supporters from the regime at the same time. Yet in the end, in periods of intense crisis, social order sometimes is only weakly held together through blunt repression.

Yet the excesses of the terror cannot simply be based on the fact that the Bolsheviks came to terms with this ideologically – there is no evidence that the Bolsheviks initially planned to use terror to legitimate their rule to the extent that they did. Rather, it is clear that Bolshevik intellectuals like Trotsky’s polemic in favor of red terror, Terrorism and Communism, tended to intellectually justify terror after the fact. To understand how the situation of Bolshevik rule resting upon mass terror developed, taking into consideration environmental factors is a necessity. So is an understanding of the core role of violence in revolutionary upheavals and state-building, as pointed out by the likes of Fanon and Mayer. Violence outpours in revolutionary times not because of the proclamations of ideologues, but rather from a reaction to the class divisions and marginalization that the exploited and oppressed people experience. Crises in state legitimacy caused at their root by economic issues destabilize states and strip them of legitimacy, creating voids in political authority. These voids lead to mass terror and violence then attempts by new competing authorities to channel and control this violence against enemies and challenges to their authority. While both sides battle in a dialectic of terror eventually one is able to secure a relative monopoly on the use of legitimate force and proclaim itself the sovereign authority. Terror was a political weapon in a war for political dominance between the Reds and Whites, with terror from both sides fueling one another. Reds would massacre White political prisoners in response to a town of workers being massacred by the Whites; the terrors of one side led to those of the other.

The fanaticism of the masses cited by the likes of Figes is a real thing, but it grew out of the desperate struggle to defend the revolution and gave individual red army soldiers and Cheka members a sense of duty to defend their society from the barbarism of the whites. The fear of white terror was real because it had touched much of the working class. There are the infamous stories of Chekist being handed a list of prisoners to be released but instead shot them out of fear of releasing “enemies of the revolution”. Yet this fear wasn’t based on paranoid fantasy, but the massive pogroms and massacre of the most barbaric nature that were occurring all through the Soviet Republic. It is a classic tactic of anti-Communists to ignore the crimes of the Whites or even downplay them, yet even an American anti-communist American General William S. Graves who travelled to Russia to fight with the the Whites made the observation that the Whites were more savage and inhumane than the reds: “I am well on the side of safety when I say that the anti-Bolsheviks killed one hundred people in Eastern Siberia to every one killed by the Bolsheviks.” Any history that downplays the history of the Whites and the utter devastation brought upon the communities of the working class, Jews and other oppressed nationalities in the Russian Civil War cannot possibly understand why the Bolsheviks would embrace mass terror against their enemy.

Yet is it inevitable that this battle between revolution and counter-revolution lead to the excesses of the red terror in Russia? Obviously, there is no way to guarantee that there will not be mass revanchism from the masses against those they define as their enemy, especially if there is a crisis of state authority. Yet one could say that the massive excesses in the Russian terror were partially due to the difficulty of getting peasants to co-operate in maintaining a food supply during conditions of social breakdown. The reality of the peasantry being an unreliable ally to the working class was most dramatically exposed in the red terror which took on its most cruel and excessive proportions in the countryside when Reds fought against Greens. Today the need for such a worker-peasant alliances doesn’t exist today in most countries. This doesn’t mean that mass revolutionary violence is no longer a possibility, but to use its existence to decry the very project of human emancipation as Pipes or Figes does is to imagine an ideal world where Czarism could’ve gradually transformed into a liberal democracy, and instead was averted from this “natural course” by bloodthirsty revolutionaries and then make. Then one would take this specific historical experience and make a universal law of society that revolution is purely destructive. The truth is that WWI was already an expression of the mass terror of the bourgeoisie and one that dwarfed the red terror in size and scale. If life was cheap to the Bolshevik worker, it was because the world bourgeoisie had cheapened their life by turning them into cannon fodder for imperialism. It was in the ruins of WWI that something like the Red Terror happened. The red terror was brought about by the terror of the existing system more than anything else. To quote Mark Twain:

THERE were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.

Unfortunately, the Soviet State would descend into another kind of terror, more similar to the “long terror” Mark Twain describes. It was one not related to fighting enemies in a civil war but to purify the state apparatus under the rule of Joseph Stalin. The ‘Great Terror’ and its surrounding years are hard to even rationally understand, especially when one takes into account that popular participation was a factor. Mass conspiracy theories fueled all layers of Soviet society to turn on each other and create a paranoid mass phenomena that even Stalin had to prevent from getting out of hand. While the Red Terror in the years of Lenin could be comparable to the Jacobin terror, Stalin’s purges seem something almost completely unique in history.

To decry the Red Terror, while minimizing the White Terror and the years of oppression it sought to restore, is simply irresponsible. In a Civil War where Jews faced ethnic cleansing and barbarous armies of counter-revolution murdered off workers, the Red Terror was a means to an end of weakening the enemy opponent who would have turned Eastern Europe into a gigantic pogrom. Yes, the Bolsheviks held to power through brute force in the Civil War, but the alternative was a brutal reactionary rampage that would have quite plainly turned Eastern Europe into a reactionary hellhole. Pipes and Figes take an obsession with the violence of the Bolshevik worker, but not with the pogromist white guard. This is not a call to glorify revolutionary terror, but rather to understand it as a product of certain historical circumstances and carve out the social forces that drive revolutions into something like the “red terror”.

Liked it? Take a second to support Cosmonaut on Patreon! At Cosmonaut Magazine we strive to create a culture of open debate and discussion. Please write to us at CosmonautMagazine@gmail.com if you have any criticism or commentary you would like to have published in our letters section.

1. see Carl Schmiddt’s Concept of the Political, 1932
2. Vladimir N. Brovkin, Behind the Front Lines of the Civil War. (New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1994), pg 3.
3. Arno Mayer, The Furies. (New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 200),  pg 98.
4. Arno Mayers, Furies, pg 97.
5. Richard Pipes, A Concise History of the Russian Revolution. (Alfred A. Kopf: New York, 1995), 389.
6. Richard Pipes, A Concise History of the Russian Revolution, 388.
7. Richard Pipes, A Concise History of the Russian Revolution, 405.
8. Richard Pipes, A Concise History of the Russian Revolution, 195.
9. W. Bruce Lincoln, Red Victory: A History of the Russian Civil War: 1918-1921. (United States: Da Capo Press, 1999), 49.
10. Orlando Figes A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891-19224. (New York: Penguin Books, 1996)
11. Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy, 252.
12. Marcel Liebman, Leninism Under Lenin. (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016, first published by in French in 1973), 311.
13. Liebman, Leninism Under Lenin, 312-13.
14. Stephen F. Cohen, “Bolshevism and Stalinism,” in Rethiking the Soviet Experiment (New York: Osford University Press, 1985), 38-71.
15. Cohen, “Bolshevism and Stalinism”, pg 39-40.
16. Cohen, 40.
17. See Lars T. Lih, Lenin Rediscovered: What Is To Be Done in Contrast (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2008) which outlines the everyday practice of Russian Social-Democracy, which produced the Bolshevik party.
18. Lars T. Lih, Bread and Authority in Russian, 1914-1921 (Berkley: University of California Press, 1990), 236.
19. Lars T. Lih, Bread and Authority in Russian, 1914-1921 (Berkley: University of California Press, 1990), 238.
20. Vladimir N. Brovkin, Behind the Front Lines of the Civil War. (New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1994), see chapter 4 for information on the Green movement on widespread peasant discontent.
21. Lars T. Lih, Bread and Authority in Russian, 1914-1921 (Berkley: University of California Press, 1990), 153.
22. Peter Holquist, Making War, Forging Revolution: Russia’s Continuum of Crisis, 1914-1921. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 283.
23. Peter Holquist, Making War, Forging Revolution: Russia’s Continuum of Crisis, 1914-1921, 285.
24. Peter Holquist, Making War, Forging Revolution: Russia’s Continuum of Crisis, 1914-1921, 109.
25. Fanon, Wretched of the Earth. (New York: Grove Press, 1963), pg. 51.
26. Arno Mayer, The Furies. (New Jersey: Princeton, 2000), pg. 93.