Wide open the gates of hell. How terror flooded Russia
100 years ago, 5 September 1918, was issued a decree of the Council of People's Commissars on the "red terror". F.E. Dzerzhinsky, the initiator and leader of the terror, defined the red terror as "intimidation, arrest and destruction of the enemies of the revolution according to the principle of their class affiliation".
The death penalty in Russia was abolished on October 26 on 1917 by the decision of the Second All-Russian Congress of Workers 'and Soldiers' Deputies. 22 On November 1917, the Council of People’s Commissars issued the Decree on Court No. 1. By this decree, workers 'and peasants' revolutionary tribunals were created to fight against the counter-revolutionary forces. December 7 The All-Russian Emergency Commission to Combat Counter-Revolution and Sabotage was established at the Council of People’s Commissars. With the beginning of the Civil War, the Cheka, the body of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” to protect the state security of the RSFSR, “the governing body of the struggle against counterrevolution throughout the country”, receives emergency powers and will become the main instrument for realizing the Red Terror. 1917 June 13, the decree on the restoration of the death penalty. From that moment on, the execution could be applied according to the verdicts of the revolutionary tribunals. 1918 June 21, the first convicted revolutionary tribunal to death was Admiral A. Schastny.
The Red Terror was declared 2 of September 1918 of the year by Y. Sverdlov in the address of the Central Executive Committee as a response to the attempt on Lenin's 30 of August, as well as the assassination on the same day of the chairman of the Petrograd Cheka Uritzky. September 3 Izvestia newspaper publishes the words of Dzerzhinsky: “Let the working class crush the counter-revolution hydra with mass terror! Let the enemies of the working class know that every detainee with weapons in the hands will be shot on the spot, that everyone who dares for the slightest propaganda against the Soviet power will be immediately arrested and imprisoned in a concentration camp! ”
On September 5, the Council of People’s Commissars issued a decree - Ordinance on the “Red Terror”. Its text stated: “It is necessary to ensure the Soviet Republic from class enemies by isolating them in concentration camps; all persons who are attached to the White Guard organizations, conspiracies and insurrections are subject to execution; it is necessary to publish the names of all those executed, as well as the reasons for applying this measure to them. ” The chief security officer, Felix Dzerzhinsky, greeted this decree with joy: “The laws of 3 and 5 of September finally gave us legal rights to what some party comrades objected so far to finish immediately, without asking anyone for permission , with counterrevolutionary bastard ". A major rally of red terror was the shooting in Petrograd of more than 500 representatives of the former "elite" (officials, including ministers, professors). Total official data Cheka, all in Petrograd during the Red Terror were shot about 800 people.
It is worth remembering that terror was not an invention of the Bolsheviks. This is a common policy tool during major shocks. Thus, terror was used during the revolution and the civil war in England, the revolution in France, and the American Civil War. Terror satellite of most wars in stories humanity up to the present day. In particular, during the modern war in Syria and Iraq, Sunnis, Shiites and other warring parties massively cut out opponents. Russia was not an exception in the years of the Civil War. Terror was used not only by the Bolsheviks (red), and their opponents, the whites, as well as various gangsters - “green”, nationalists, Muslim radicals - Basmachis, and invaders.
Terror was associated with three major factors. Firstly, during any great upheaval, war, revolution, unrest, a large amount of various human garbage is brought to the surface. In normal times, the renegades of the human race, gangsters, murderers, sadists, maniacs try to hide their brutal inclinations, are isolated from society in prisons and camps, ordinary people are protected by law enforcement agencies. In 1917, there was a geopolitical, state disaster. Old Russia died, the state was destroyed along with all the old punitive-repressive and law enforcement system. The criminals broke free. A real criminal revolution began, an ordinary satellite of any troubles and big war. In Soviet Russia, the formation of a new law enforcement system began. But the militia was in its infancy, did not have the previous databases (card files were destroyed), the staff did not have the relevant experience and skills.
In addition, part of the criminals, innate sadistic murderers infiltrated the police, the Cheka, the army. The same situation was with the whites. They received authority, power, and used it to satisfy their dark inclinations. At the same time, they could hide behind noble goals — the struggle against counterrevolution (or commissars).
Secondly, the red terror was extreme, forced, response measure to protect the socialist fatherland from white, green, nationalists, Basmachis, Western and Eastern invaders. It was impossible to restore the unity of Russia, to preserve it within the framework of the new Soviet project and to defeat internal and external enemies only with a “good word”; we also needed a “Colt”, that is, strength and determination to use it. Thus, the red terror was justified by the need to recreate the Russian (Soviet) civilization, the new development project and the new state. It was in the interests of the overwhelming majority of the population.
Third, you need to clearly and always remember that it was a terrible disaster, unrest. There was a collapse of the old development project, the Russian Romanovs. The end has come not only of the old state, but of the development project. Breakdown of Russian civilization. All hell seals were torn down. 1917 year led to the fact that all the accumulated over the centuries in Russia, the contradictions broke out. Chaos reigned, came the kingdom of horror and inferno. There was a psychocrash. Previously, quite peaceful people, peasants, workers, artisans, students, teachers took up arms and killed, destroyed not only armed opponents, but class enemies.
A funnel formed in the inferno (hell). And she swallowed up millions of people. Therefore, it is necessary to forget the tales of liberals and monarchists about the terrible and bloodthirsty red commissioners and the white, Christian knights who fought for “Great Russia”. Everything is much deeper. There were no innocents. Terror was used by all. It was agony, the disintegration of old Russia. Everybody was killed, hung up and robbed — the Red Guards, the White Guards, the Cossacks, the western “peacekeepers”, the nationalists, and the peasant detachments. Violence reigned over the vast expanses of Russia. The war of all against all, without rules, without mercy.
Therefore, in the expanses of Russia, such horrors occurred that they tried to hide in the USSR, and are still afraid to describe in cinema. It was hell. So, the American witness of the war, General Knox wrote:
During the Reds offensive in southern Russia: in Taganrog, Sievers’s people threw 50 cunkers and officers tied hand and foot into a hot blast furnace. In Yevpatoriya, several hundred officers, after tortures related, were thrown into the sea. Similar atrocities in a wave swept across Crimea: Sevastopol, Yalta, Alushta, Simferopol, etc. Terrible atrocities were happening on red navy. On the hydrocruiser "Romania" they tortured and shot. At Truvor, they brutally mocked the victims: they cut their ears, nose, lips, genitals, sometimes their hands, and then threw them into the water. The Almaz cruiser housed a naval military tribunal: officers were thrown into the oven, and in winter put naked on deck and watered with water until they turned into blocks of ice. This was not done by the fascists, but by ordinary Russian people. At the same time, sailors atrocities, for example, in the Baltic Sea, immediately after February, before the October Revolution.
But the opponents of the Reds were no better. The myth of the white knights, officer honor and nobility of the White Guards was created by “democratic” publicists. When seizing localities, whites also “cleaned” them of the reds, their supporters (or whom they recorded in those). Ataman Krasnov noted in his memoirs: “They (Kolchak's - Author.) Did not spread to the Bolsheviks, but at the same time the population, especially the“ lower working classes ”, the generally accepted legal norms and humanitarian customs. To kill or torture a Bolshevik was not considered a sin. Now it is impossible to establish how many massacres of civilians have forever gone into oblivion, leaving no documentary traces, because in an atmosphere of chaos and powerlessness, ordinary people had no one to ask for protection ... "
Admiral Kolchak himself wrote in one of the letters: “... You understand that it is impossible to get rid of it. Civil war must be merciless. I order the heads of the units to shoot all the captured communists. Or we shoot them, or they us. So it was in England in the time of the Scarlet and White Rose, so it must inevitably be with us ... "
It is not surprising that whites made such an “order” in their rear that the population howled, mass resistance began. In response, whites even more “screwed up the nuts”, punitive detachments hung, shot, floored entire villages, did not spare even pregnant women, and beat them to miscarriages. A real peasant war began, which was one of the most important reasons for the defeat of the White Army.
Here is a short sketch of this hell from the memories of the famous Russian monarchist V. Shulgin: “In one hut they hung up by the hands ... commission ... a fire was laid out under it. And they slowly roasted ... a person ... And around the drunken gang of "monarchists" ... howled "God Save the Tsar."
Again, this was done not by Hitlerite Sonderkommandos and not by brigades of red internationalists (Latvians, Hungarians or Chinese), but by “your nobility”. It seems to be Russian to the very roots. The lieutenants Golitsyn and cornets Obolensky. This is the nightmare of the fratricidal slaughter, the inferno world, which was established in Russia and which was succeeded in suppressing at the cost of very large blood. A mental epidemic of cruelty, bloodthirsty and destruction flooded Russia.
The common people were no better than politicized reds and whites. Thus, in the south of Russia, popular groups, whole bandit formations, armies, alternately fighting with the red, then with the white acted. They did not recognize any authority, they had no ideology. Therefore, when the Denikinists found theirs or the red ones that fell into the paws of the “green” ones, the picture was terrible: bodies with severed limbs, broken bones, burned and decapitated. The rebel peasants burned or frozen the captured Red Army or white prisoners. They organized demonstrative executions of the Bolsheviks — with hammering people, sawing or scraping the skin.
Denikin wrote: “... everything that has accumulated over the years, for centuries in embittered hearts against unloved power, against inequality of classes, against personal offenses and one's own broken life — someone has all poured out with infinite cruelty ... First of all - the vast hatred that is poured everywhere, both towards people and towards ideas. Hatred of everything that was socially or mentally above the crowd, which bore the slightest trace of wealth. Even to inanimate objects - signs of a certain culture, alien or inaccessible to the crowd. In this feeling one could hear the accumulated bitterness, the bitterness of the three years of war directly for centuries ... ”.
And the "glorious" Don Cossacks? In Denikin’s memoirs, they do not look like “soldiers of Holy Russia,” but as a gang of marauders. They declared themselves “separate people”, declared independence, and half of the population of the Don Region (Russians, but not Cossacks) deprived part of their civil rights. In the battles against the Reds, the Russians plundered Russian villages like the hordes of Mamai. They robbed even their “own” peasants on the Don. For them, the rest of Russia was a stranger. Not only robbed, but shot villages with guns, raped and killed. Interestingly, it is this passion for mining, greed was one of the reasons for the defeat of the White Army. While the whites were fighting and advancing, the Cossacks plundered. Like, do not let the Russians free themselves, we are "another people", we are on our own.
Terror staged and invaders. The British, who landed in Arkhangelsk and Murmansk, massed the captured Red Army soldiers into captivity, beat them with butts, threw them into prisons and concentration camps, overworking them, depleting them to death. Fed half starving, forced to join the Slavic-British counter-revolutionary corps. It was the British in August 1918 created the first concentration camp on the island of Mudyug in the White Sea ("island of death" - the death rate reached 30%). In the Far East, the Japanese committed atrocities. The terror was staged by the Ukrainian separatists.
Thus, we see confusion, civil slaughter. Psychocrash, the complete disintegration of the old Russian society. Hence the hell that prevailed in Russia. However, only the Bolsheviks were able to restore order, although at the cost of much blood. They offered people a new development project in the interests of the majority of the people, created a new statehood and restored order.
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