Anyone who claims that an historical event was formative must necessarily assume that things would have turned out differently if that event had not occurred. Counterfactual suppositions like these are, by definition, hard to prove. Yet, seemingly undeterred, historians have taken on the formidable challenge of determining whether the Russian Civil War steered the Bolsheviks onto a course that they otherwise would not have pursued. The specific matter with which this paper is concerned is the extent to which the experience of internal conflict was responsible for bringing about a shift towards policies and practices of terror. Few would deny that a defining characteristic of early Soviet rule was its sustained dependence on an arsenal of state-sponsored violence that culminated in the notorious purges of the 1930s. But there is considerable disagreement as to how this came about. Some say it was accidental; others say it was encoded in communist ideology. Either way, the key to understanding the origins of this repressive system lies in Hannah Arendt’s definition of terror as a form of government that ‘comes into being violence, having destroyed all power, does not abdicate, but, on the contrary, remains in full control.’[1] That violence should become a permanent feature of life under the new regime had certainly not been the intention of the party’s leading ideologists. Nonetheless, contrary to their calculations, the emergence of a totalitarian regime predicated on terror was implicit in the very methods that propelled the Bolsheviks to a position of power in the first place. In this paper, I argue that the evolution of terror from an instrument of revolution to the cornerstone of Soviet power did not begin during the Russian Civil War but amidst the earlier round of revolutionary chaos that reached its peak between 1905 and 1907. The significance of the civil war lies primarily in the fact that it revived and accelerated a trend that had arisen over a decade before, when radical parties of all stripes resorted to indiscriminate acts of violence as a means of challenging and overturning the old order. As a starting point, I illustrate the need to examine Soviet terror as the product of an extended process in which ideas and circumstances interacted with one another in equal measure. I then trace its gradual development from the militant, conspiratorial spirit of the prerevolutionary underground through to the opening stages of internal conflict, when a confluence of factors drove the Bolsheviks to reanimate and intensify their earlier patterns of behaviour. Lastly, I suggest that the ferocious excesses of Stalinism were the likely, if not inevitable, outcome of this prolonged evolutionary process.
The dominant modes of thought surrounding the Russian Civil War in traditional western historiography are inadequate, because they lead historians either to inflate or underplay its formative influence. Past interpretations were heavily informed by the work of the totalitarian school, which posited that most, if not all, developments in the history of the Soviet state can be explained in terms of the ideology that gave birth to it.[2] In this reading, Joseph Stalin was not a megalomaniac outlier responsible for perverting the intended course of the revolution, but a faithful executioner of the will of his predecessors.[3] If this is indeed the case, it follows that the civil war did little to alter the regime’s initial trajectory, and that the atrocities of the Stalin era were a natural and inevitable consequence of the realisation of Bolshevism.[4] Beginning in the 1970s, a new group of historians, known as revisionists, launched a concerted challenge to the basic assumptions of the totalitarian school. Previous studies, they charged, had vastly exaggerated the importance of ideology whilst paying insufficient attention to the specific social conditions that shaped Bolshevik policies and practices.[5] In their efforts to explain the true origins of Stalinism, revisionists pointed to the unique circumstances of the civil war years, declaring that communist terror was an accidental phenomenon that stemmed from the exigencies of defending the revolution against forces that tried to undermine it.[6] In a word, the emphasis shifted from ideas and intent to contingency and context.
Revisionists had a point. It was commonplace for previous historians, guided by a fervent hostility to communism, to select evidence that confirmed their preordained conclusions and thus wilfully misinterpret the intentions of the Russian revolutionary movement.[7] Furthermore, prejudices aside, ideology should not be looked upon as a stable basis for collective action, since people’s behaviour is liable to change in accordance with new events and circumstances.[8]Ideas in themselves do not explain, for example, how the Bolsheviks had come to be so prepared for the use of violent, extra-legal measures by the time the civil war broke out. Lenin himself admitted that his party did not succeed on the back of ideology alone but capitalised on its extensive practical experience as part of the prerevolutionary underground, whose belligerent tactics readied them for the trials and tribulations that lay ahead.[9] Moreover, considering that much of the violence committed by the Reds over the course of the civil war happened without Lenin’s awareness, let alone consent, historians should be cautious about reading too much into what was said or not said by the party’s chief ideologists.[10] Nevertheless, revisionists went too far in the other direction. Some detractors have accused them of consciously disregarding the less romantic elements of the party’s agenda out of sympathy with the revolutionary cause.[11] Whatever their reasons, it was evidently not the case that terror was forced upon the Bolsheviks against their better judgement at a moment of weakness. Thirty years on from the fall of communism, with the benefit of hindsight and the availability of new material, it should now be possible for historians to evaluate the significance of ideology without bias in either direction.[12] Peter Holquist and James Ryan, among others, recommend that we view Soviet terror as part of a gradual evolutionary process, stretching from 1905 to 1922, in which ideas and circumstances collided to produce a climate of mass violence.[13] Historians have already made great strides in this vein: it is now increasingly common to situate the violence of the civil war in the context of broader sequences of events, like the First World War and the creation of modern state institutions.[14] This paper diverges from these other studies insofar as it places greater emphasis on the formative impact of the prerevolutionary underground.
A century of ideological ferment had created fertile ground for the spread of political violence across much of Europe.[15] Indeed, during the latter half of the nineteenth century, national liberation movements, as well as radical groups seeking far-reaching political and socioeconomic change, began carrying out terrorist attacks in several European countries.[16] In so doing, they built on a long tradition of revolutionary violence that originated in France, where the armées revolutionnaires – the lawless enforcers of the new Jacobin regime – had rampaged through the countryside leaving fear and chaos in their wake.[17] Terror was calculated to serve as a symbolic weapon that would both subdue sworn opponents and intimidate the ambivalent into going along with the aims of the revolution.[18] But whereas elsewhere, progressive parties were split between support for the extreme tactics of the French tradition and the more peaceable vision of liberal humanitarianism, members of the Russian intelligentsia were unanimous in their endorsement of terror as a route to political transformation.[19] Questions of how to establish legal order were submerged in a strain of doctrinaire extremism that stressed the immediacy of getting rid of the ruling elite.[20] The guiding principles of the revolutionary movement in Russia owed a great deal to the theories of philosophers like Nechaev and Tkachev, who promoted terrorism as a means of accelerating the countdown to mass social conflagration and thereby compensating for the absence of suitable socioeconomic conditions.[21] The Bolsheviks, for their part, believed from the earliest years of their existence that terrorism was practically inseparable from revolution.[22]
Terror undoubtedly had deep ideological roots in the Russian revolutionary movement. But the wave of violence that swept across the country in the late imperial period was at least as much due to specific circumstances. As a general rule, terrorism can be understood as an ‘expression of political impatience’.[23] The case of late nineteenth-century Russia was no exception. Legitimate feelings of frustration and helplessness among the intelligentsia had grown out of the tsars’ intransigence when confronted with the demands of modernity, as well as their own inability to bring about positive change through the performance of what they called small deeds, such as educating the peasantry and intervening to mitigate the effects of famine.[24] The lack of legal and institutional resources that might otherwise have given the country’s incipient political parties a stake in the existing system further compounded this sense of despair.[25] Naivety and inexperience played a part in the turn towards political extremism, but the real impetus was the belief that there were simply no other channels through which to bring about substantive change. Initial forays into terrorist activity were relatively restrained. People’s Will, for instance, made a point of targeting specific individuals with known connections to the imperial regime, and remained committed to the principle of ‘not one drop of superfluous blood’.[26] Over time, however, the government’s repressive and heavy-handed response to the spate of political assassinations tended only to drive their perpetrators to ever greater extremes. Amidst the spiralling chaos that accompanied a gradual breakdown in law and order, terrorism became increasingly indiscriminate as radicals lashed out against ‘depersonalised symbols of a hated reality’.[27]
A turning point in the evolution of terror arrived in 1905, when mass upheaval, together with unrelenting acts of revolutionary violence, threatened the foundations of the tsarist regime. The level of anarchy in the main epicentres of the Russian Empire reached new heights as bombings, shootings, abductions, and armed robberies became a daily occurrence.[28] Between 1905 and 1907, over 9,000 people fell victim to terrorist attacks, out of whom approximately 4,500 were state officials.[29] Historians have tended to concentrate on the outsized role of the Socialist Revolutionary Party during this period. Indeed, received wisdom would have it that the Bolsheviks played only a marginal part in the proliferation of armed violence. It is certainly true that, in theory, Lenin condemned individual terrorist acts on the basis that they interfered with the essential role of organised, grassroots movements.[30] However, in the crisis of 1905 to 1907, most radical parties recognised that such disagreements could not come in the way of the collective crusade against the tsarist authorities, and consequently diverged from their ideological principles.[31] From February 1905, negotiations were underway for a potential amalgamation of SD and SR combat groups for the purpose of combined terrorist operations. The result was a convergence in tactics across former political diving lines: just as individual Bolshevik fighters would commonly carry out assassinations of police and military officials, so too did members of the Socialist Revolutionary Party swing towards the more coordinated, guerrilla-style methods of their SD counterparts.[32] Terrorism ultimately became a rite of passage for radical factions of all colours and was widely thought of as the only realistic and effective means of waging war on the old regime.[33] The increasingly belligerent and conspiratorial stance of the Bolshevik party can be observed in the decision of its Moscow committee to launch a premature uprising in December 1905 on the mistaken belief that it would garner the support of the working classes.[34] Prior to the rebellion, the committee’s combat branch issued a manual with detailed instructions on how to engage in guerrilla street fighting.[35] In the end, it was this reckless militancy that lay behind the split in the Social Democratic Party, with the Mensheviks favouring the gradual development of trade unions over the organisation of armed guerrilla groups.[36]
The formative nature of this early period in the history of the Bolshevik party should not be underestimated. In conditions of modernity, where we are largely sheltered from the effects of mass violence, it can be difficult to grasp the sociopsychological frameworks that empowered the Bolsheviks and their contemporaries to kill with impunity.[37] To appreciate the profound impact of prerevolutionary terrorism on their later patterns of behaviour it has first to be accepted that political violence, as well having a strong appeal, leaves an indelible mark on the minds of those who employ it. Since it does not solicit our acquired capacity for reasoning so much as our innate and most elemental emotions, violence, especially when harnessed for political ends, can be intoxicating.[38] This is particularly true for young, socially marginalised individuals, like the raznochintsy of late imperial Russia, who feel that their lives lack agency, meaning, or excitement.[39] Violence is contagious, too. As Smith remarked, ‘once violence is at play, people have no choice but to use it or succumb to it.’[40] That violent times produce generations of violent men is a truism; but in the case of the Bolsheviks, historians have come to differing conclusions as to which events were the most formative in shaping their apparent predilection for terror.
The standard view is that the enormous scale of death and suffering unleashed across Europe after 1914 conditioned the Bolsheviks and their supporters to lose all sense of perspective and partake in unbridled acts of cruelty. Contemporary figures like Gorky and Berdiaev all highlighted the brutalising effects of total war on the Russian people.[41] However, this interpretation only holds if one accepts the dubious proposition that violence was driven from below.[42] It should have become evident from the preceding paragraphs that conditions prior to the revolution were not conducive to the development of an organic political system based on the power of the proletariat. Though popular vengeance against the country’s former elites was undoubtedly of great service to their cause, the conspiratorial tradition that pervaded the Bolshevik party’s structures precluded the possibility that the tools of state violence might fall into the hands of the people. As Peter Kenez has pointed out, the Bolsheviks had learned from their time in the prerevolutionary underground that, in times of chaos, ‘small groups of dedicated people can accomplish remarkable tasks’.[43] Besides the former tsarist officers who assumed leading roles in the administration of the Red Terror, most prominent Bolsheviks had had little to do with the First World War.[44] Indeed, a great many had been in prison or foreign exile for the duration of the conflict. Furthermore, much the same brutality was observable across the whole continent and yet, with the exception of Germany, it did not produce state terror on nearly the same scale as Russia.[45]
There is also an argument that the civil war itself triggered these violent proclivities. After all, it was between the years 1918 and 1922 that the majority of those who commanded the Stalinist purges reached maturity.[46] However, not only did the small cadre of prerevolutionary members retain a disproportionate influence over policymaking, but it seems highly improbable that the Bolsheviks could have prevailed in the tough conditions of the civil war had they entered the stage without prior combat experience.[47] Therefore, the main responsibility for this culture of violence must be attributed to an earlier generation who ‘drew their ideas of what constituted acceptable civic behaviour from their experience under the Romanovs’.[48] Contrary to Fitzpatrick’s assertion that the ‘old Bolshevik leaders had not led violent lives’, a considerable proportion of officials in the party’s internal organs had, in fact, gained first-hand experience of violence through their participation in the prerevolutionary underground.[49] Dzerzhinsky and Latsis, who were instrumental in the orchestration of the Red Terror, had previously achieved notoriety as professional terrorists, while Stalin himself is said to have been strongly influenced by his years as an insurgent in the Caucasus.[50] The years 1905 to 1907 had several important effects. The strand of martyrdom and self-sacrifice that permeated the Bolshevik consciousness can almost certainly be traced back to the struggle against tsardom, whose many injustices rendered sacred all acts of rebellion in the eyes of its adversaries. At the same time, the radicals’ total absorption in preparing and executing terrorist attacks caused them to lose sight of such moral justifications and treat violence as an end in itself.[51]Perhaps the most important contribution of the prerevolutionary underground was to give the Bolsheviks the dangerous and beguiling impression that terror pays off.[52]
The sacralisation of violence was further facilitated by the absence of a single force in Russian society that could have stood in the way of it. Not only did the bulk of the Russian population regard terrorists as freedom fighters, but even Russian liberals, who might otherwise have served as a bulwark against extremism, supported armed insurrection on the grounds that it undermined the tsarist authorities.[53] The heated debate between Leon Trotsky and Karl Kautsky over the legitimacy of revolutionary terror sheds light on the significance of this fact to the evolution of Bolshevism. Kautsky was a prominent representative of a broader movement of European socialists who opposed Bolshevik tactics.[54] In his 1919 pamphlet entitled Kommunizm i Terrorizm, he declared that there could be no justification for the use of terror, and roundly condemned the Bolsheviks for deviating from the true principles of Marxism.[55] Trotsky, who was at this point in charge of militarisation as Commissar of War, responded vituperatively.[56] He stated that ‘violent revolution has become a necessity precisely because the imminent requirements of history are helpless to find a road through the apparatus of parliamentary democracy’.[57] To a certain extent, the Bolsheviks were guided in this way of thinking by the alluring examples of the French Revolution and the Paris Commune of 1871. However, putting aside ideological factors, we must ask ourselves what specific conditions might have led the Bolsheviks to form such strong convictions regarding the need for terror. Kautsky provides a compelling answer when he writes, in the same tract, that the descent of the Soviet state into a regime of terror resulted from the fact that ‘under the absolutist regime all the elements who were striving upwards were denied all chance of insight, and still more all chance of participation in the administration of the State and the community.’[58] To put it differently, in the absence of institutions like the rule of law and a vibrant civil society, the Bolsheviks could not have been expected to lead the revolution along a democratic, peaceful course. Ultimately, the first round of revolutionary chaos laid the groundworks for the elevation of terror to a system of government. Nevertheless, some kind of seismic force was still necessary to complete this process.
The experience of civil war was crucial to the development of Soviet terror. In the immediate aftermath of the October revolution, state-sponsored violence was not yet a reality of life under the new regime.[59] Contemporary observers, like Bruce Lockhart, commented on the relative lenience with which the Bolsheviks treated their opponents, and there were even moves to abolish the death penalty.[60] Yet, by the summer of 1918, finding that their power hung in the balance, the Bolsheviks changed course dramatically. The strong and resilient counterrevolution presented a genuine danger to the stability of Bolshevik rule, and, at times, even seemed poised to supplant it.[61] The immediate trigger for the decision to launch the Red Terror was a string of successive uprisings, rebellions, and assassination attempts, including a near fatal one on Lenin outside a factory in Moscow.[62] It would be easy to conclude from this that the Bolsheviks’ turn towards terror was, as revisionists have argued, a pragmatic response to the existential challenges that befell them in the conflict’s early stages. However, while inauspicious circumstances may have necessitated the application of extreme measures, they do not account for the regime’s readiness to do so. The only reason the Bolsheviks were able to weather the storm and beat back their opponents was because they had already developed a violent approach to solving problems, and were, by conditioning, the side that was most adept at employing force.[63] Facing threats on all fronts, the Bolsheviks simply revived the coercive practices that they knew best.
The Red Terror was, in essence, a magnified version of the terrorism that was carried out during the late imperial period. Its purpose was to frighten the civilian population into submission, destroy any and all opposition, and terrorise groups deemed undesirable by virtue of their social class.[64] The secret police even went so far as issuing daily lists of executed individuals.[65] In a similar vein, prerevolutionary radicals had set out to bring chaos to the streets as a sure way of asserting their pretensions to power. Methods like taking and executing hostages, razing whole villages, and ordering public executions were in much the same spirit as the tactics of earlier revolutionaries. Furthermore, contrary to claims that the terror of the civil war years was purely ‘instrumental’ in the sense that it targeted ‘known enemies’, there was, in fact, a strong tendency towards indiscriminate killing of the sort that took place between 1905 and 1907.[66] It is no coincidence that the earliest casualties of the campaign – 512 hostages in Petrograd and scores of others in Moscow – were all former members of the ruling elite, many of them tsarist ministers.[67] Whether or not exterminating them would hasten the success of the revolution was beside the point: from the Bolshevik perspective, they were faceless representatives of the same ‘hated reality’ they had struck out against in their formative years.[68] This ruthless mindset was also reflected in the workings of the Chekist organs, which were notorious for issuing extreme sentences in no way proportionate to the defendant’s alleged crime.[69] Moreover, the same propensity to sacralise violence as a moral good, so long as it was done in the name of the people, came to the fore again during the civil war, when Cheka officials took great pains to differentiate their own extrajudicial killings from those of the Whites.[70] Trotsky was well aware of these parallels, noting that ‘Red terror cannot, in principle, be distinguished from armed insurrection, the direct continuation of which it represents.’[71] It is certainly true that a number of older Bolsheviks, including Mandelstam and Gorky, were appalled by the brutality of their comrades, and even worked with members of opposition parties to try and curtail the powers of the Cheka.[72] However, the conditions of the civil war were bound to guarantee the triumph of the majority that stood behind unbounded violence – not least because it appeared to be working. In the first days of the Red Terror, the army of the rival SRs retreated from Nizhniy Novgorod, and the Bolsheviks were at last able to capture Kazan from units of the Czech legion.[73] This comes back to the basic principle that political violence, as abhorrent as it may seem, tends to triumph over peaceful, institutional alternatives.[74]
Over the course of the conflict, terror evolved into a system of rule underpinned by new tools and institutions. Revolutionary tribunals, though there is evidence of their usage as far back as the Moscow Uprising of 1905, were one such innovation that emerged out of the carnage of war.[75] Their role was eventually handed over to local Chekas, which were responsible for meting out summary justice in the form of mass arrests, hostage-taking, and executions.[76]Institutions like these provided terror with a new basis in state machinery. Crucial to the development of mass violence were modern state practices that had evolved out of a prolonged process by which European governments invented new ways of mobilising, controlling, and, at times, cleansing their populations.[77] For instance, the large-scale deportations that took place under the Bolsheviks were a continuation of the tsarist government’s own experimentation with such methods during the First World War, when it expelled hundreds of thousands of enemy aliens.[78] In order to isolate opponents of the new regime, the Cheka also set up a network of concentration camps that were closely modelled on those established by European empires in their overseas colonies.[79] All these tools and institutions were repurposed for a new utopian mission of societal transformation and applied with an even greater level of ferocity, causing considerable suffering in the process.[80] It is said of Stalin that, though personally desensitised to violence long before 1918, he picked up new practices during the civil war that he carried with him into his own reign of terror.[81]
Complete dependence on methods and instruments of mass terror survived the civil war to become a permanent feature of the Soviet political system. By the end of the conflict the people in charge could barely conceive of a world where they did not have to impose their rule without recourse to the threat or use of violence.[82] Rosa Luxembourg, a staunch critic of Bolshevik policies, had warned at the time that even in ‘devilishly hard conditions…the danger begins when [revolutionaries] make a virtue of necessity and want to freeze into a complete theoretical system all the tactics forced upon them by these fatal circumstances.’[83] To be sure, the conditions in which the Bolsheviks rose to power were hardly conducive to the creation, by non-violent means, of a democratic government committed to the primacy of justice over terror. Yet the regime’s founding fathers had not intended for terror to become a ‘complete theoretical system’. Rather, they had promoted it solely as a means to an end: that of wresting control and dominating their opponents. In fact, terror was supposed to eradicate the very sources of violence.[84] It was thought that, by transforming the imperialist war into a class war, and thereby deposing the war-mongering bourgeoisie, the path would be laid for eternal peace and harmony under the dictatorship of the proletariat.[85] From the works of Trotsky and Lenin it is clear that they both endorsed terror only under certain conditions, with the latter writing that it was a ‘legitimate weapon of the revolution at definite stages of its development’.[86] An analogous process unfolded in revolutionary France, where the regime of terror – contrary to the intentions of those who initiated it – led to violence being ‘exalted to a political system’ and ‘at times becoming an end in itself’.[87] Only a handful of Bolshevik thinkers, notably Kamenev and Bukharin, had had the sagacity to predict that, unless kept firmly in check, terror would at some point begin to consume the party itself and lead to unimaginable tragedy.[88] Way back in 1902, in his speech at the second congress of the RSDLP, an obscure figure by the name of Ivan Yegorov declared that ‘if, somewhere in the programme, a door is opened for terrorism, then it will inevitably begin to take priority over everything else in the programme.’[89] His hypothesis turned out to be completely correct.
At least in theory, revolutionaries are prone to seeing terror as necessary at first and then disavowing it once it is no longer exigent.[90] In France, the bloodthirsty excesses of Jacobinism eventually caused people to reject and stigmatise terrorism as a criminal act, where previously it had been regarded as a noble virtue.[91] In Russia, on the other hand, the ruling elite continued to sacralise violence until well after the end of the civil war.[92] Police officials who had formerly been at the centre of the Red Terror went on to become leading figures in government institutions, adapting their coercive methods for use in civilian administration.[93] While the NEP is often thought of as a relatively sober interlude in early Soviet history, political violence continued almost unabated in the country’s peripheries, where military operations were conducted as a matter of routine in the face of popular rebellions.[94] What was extraordinary about the Stalinist terror was that it happened at a time when war was out of the picture and resistance to the regime was minimal.[95] Yet the intensity of state violence, far from waning, only gained momentum. The purges were a textbook example of how a state founded on terror will, in the end, begin to ‘devour its own children’.[96] Indeed, having mercilessly vanquished all external opposition, government institutions began to turn on themselves and target alleged enemies within.[97] There is, of course, a distinction between terror and terrorism: the former pertains to states, whereas the latter is the domain of non-state actors. But history provides numerous examples of cases where terrorists, upon seizing control, proceed to construct states on the foundations of their murderous toolkit. Hamas is one example; the Taliban is another. Ultimately, the Bolsheviks drew on their extensive history of combat readiness to build a regime of terror.
Therefore, to conclude, the Russian Civil War was not a formative experience in itself but completed a process by which terror evolved from a small-scale undertaking to a complete system of government buttressed by modern tools and institutions. Processes have starts and ends but they are not fixed. Terrorism, as it was practised by the Bolsheviks during their early years, did not predetermine the excesses of Stalinism. Rather, it provided a basis on which the party was able to conduct a fierce terroristic campaign under the pressures of total war. In other words, the experience of internal conflict was a necessary intermediate step that entrenched and intensified a much earlier trend towards using violence and coercion for political ends. The danger started when, in the turmoil of the early twentieth century, revolutionaries adopted extreme measures to destabilise a regime that they had come to despise for its repressiveness and incapacity for change. In so doing, they remained, as Naimark put it, ‘tragically blind to the dangers of justifying their objective by resorting to any means necessary.’[98] Indeed, it is somewhat ironic that, in their efforts to eradicate the tyranny of the tsars, radical terrorists inadvertently paved the way for the tyranny of Stalin. Crucially, the conditions of the civil war allowed the Bolsheviks to experiment with new tools and practices, many of which were innovations that had appeared across Europe in response to the demands of modernisation. Unable to contemplate another way of conducting politics, they became prisoners of a fixed mindset that elevated terror to a position of omnipotence.
Ally Allison is currently pursuing an MPhil in Russian and East European Studies at the University of Oxford (St. Anthony's College).
Notes:
[1] Hannah Arendt, On Violence (New York: Harvest Books, 1970), p. 55.
[2] Evan Mawdsley, The Russian Civil War (Edinburgh: Birlinn Limited, 2000), p. 288.
[3] Moshe Lewin, Lenin’s Last Struggle, 1st Ed. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), p. xvii.
[4] Stephen F. Cohen, “Bolshevism and Stalinism”, in Robert C. Tucker (ed.) Stalinism: Essays in Historical Interpretation (New York: N.W. Norton & Co., 1998), p. 7.
[5] Sheila Fitzpatrick, “The Civil War as a Formative Experience”, in Bolshevik Culture: Experiment and Order in the Russian Revolution., eds. by Abbott Gleason, Peter Kenez and Richard Stites (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), p. 57.
[6] D. Raleigh, “The Russian civil war, 1917–1922.” in Cambridge History of Russia., ed. by R. Suny (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 140.
[7] Peter Holquist, “The Russian Revolution as Continuum and Context and Yes - as Revolution: Reflections on Recent Anglophone Scholarship of the Russian Revolution”, Cahiers du Monde Russe (2017) 58/1-2, p. 80.
[8] Michael Addison, Violent Politics: Strategies of Internal Conflict (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), p. 16.
[9] V.I. Lenin, “Left-Wing” Communism: an Infantile Disorder., trans. by Julius Katzer (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1964), p. 26.
[10] James Ryan, Lenin's Terror: The Ideological Origins of Early Soviet State Violence (London: Taylor & Francis, 2012), p. 3.
[11] Vladimir Brovkin, Behind the Front Lines of the Civil War: Political Parties and Social Movements in Russia, 1918-1922 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994)
[12] S.A. Smith, “Writing the History of the Russian Revolution after the Fall of Communism,” Europe-Asia Studies 46, no. 4 (1994), p. 567.
[13] James Ryan, “The Sacralization of Violence: Bolshevik Justifications for Violence and Terror during the Civil War”, Slavic Review 74, no. 4 (2015), p. 809.
Peter Holquist, “Violent Russia, Deadly Marxism? Russia in the Epoch of Violence, 1905-21”, Kritika 4, no. 3 (2003), p. 628.
[14] See, for example, Peter Holquist, Making War, Forging Revolution: Russia's Continuum of Crisis, 1914-1921 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002).
[15] D. Raleigh, Experiencing Russia’s Civil War: Politics, Society, and Revolutionary Culture in Saratov, 1917-22 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), p. 410.
[16] Susan K. Morrissey, “Terrorism and Ressentiment in Revolutionary Russia”, Past & Present, Vol. 246, Issue 1 (Feb 2020), p. 191.
[17] Richard Cobb, The People’s Armies. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), p. 4.
[18] Ibid.
[19] E.H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917-1923., Volume 1 (London: Macmillan Press, 1950), p. 155.
[20] Boris Elkin “The Russian Intelligentsia on the Eve of the Revolution”, in The Russian Intelligentsia., ed. by Richard Pipes (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), p. 31.
[21] Claudia Verhoeven, “Time of Terror, Terror of Time On the Impatience of Russian Revolutionary Terrorism (Early 1860s – Early 1880s)”, Jahrbücher Für Geschichte Osteuropas 58, no. 2 (2010), p. 263.
[22] Karl Kautsky, Terrorism and Communism: A Contribution to the Natural History of Revolution, trans. by W.H. Kerridge (Berlin: The National Labour Press Ltd., 1919), p. 4.
[23] Verhoeven, “Time of Terror”, p. 254.
[24] Robert Service, The Bolshevik Party in Revolution: A Study in Organisational Change, 1917-1923 (London: Macmillan, 1979), p. 4.
[25] Holquist, “Violent Russia”, p. 632.
[26] Bruce Hoffman, Inside Terrorism. (Victor Gollancz, 1998), p. 6.
[27] Anna Geifman, Thou Shalt Kill: Revolutionary Terrorism in Russia, 1894-1917 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 250.
[28] Anna Geifman, Death Orders: The Vanguard of Modern Terrorism (Santa Barbara: Praeger Security International, 2010), p. 14.
[29] Geifman, Thou Shalt Kill, p. 21.
[30] E. Stepanova, “Terrorism in the Russian Empire: The Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries” in R. English (ed.), The Cambridge History of Terrorism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), p. 311.
[31] Geifman, Thou Shalt Kill, p. 188.
[32] Ryan, Lenin’s Terror, p. 39.
[33] Stepanova, “Terrorism in the Russian Empire”, p. 311.
[34] Abraham Ascher, The Revolution of 1905: Russia in Disarray, vol.1 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1981), p. 308.
[35] Ibid., p. 310.
[36] Elkin, “The Russian Intelligentsia”, p. 42.
[37] S. A. Smith, “The Historiography of the Russian Revolution 100 Years On”, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 16, no. 4 (2015), p. 749.
[38] Addison, Violent Politics, p. 58.
[39] Raleigh, Experiencing Russia’s Civil War, pp. 127-8.
[40] Smith, “The Historiography”, p. 739.
[41] E.G. Gimpel’son, Formirovanie sovetskoi politicheskoi sistemii. 1917-1923 gg (Moskva: Nauka, 1995), p. 131.
[42] See, for example, Orlando Figes, A People's Tragedy (London: Pimlico, 1996).
And Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, “Crime, Police, and Mob Justice in Petrograd During the Russian Revolutions of 1917”, in Revolutionary Russia: New Approaches to the Russian Revolution of 1917., ed. by Rex A. Wade (London: Taylor & Francis Group, 2004).
[43] Peter Kenez, Red Advance, White Defeat: Civil War in South Russia, 1919-1920 (Washington D.C.: New Academia Publishing, 2004), p. 11.
[44] David L. Hoffmann, Cultivating the Masses: Modern State Practices and Soviet Socialism, 1914-1939 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2016), p. 258.
[45] Ibid., p. 242.
[46] Moshe Lewin, The Making of the Soviet System: Essays in the Social History of Interwar Russia (London: Methuen, 1985), p. 23.
[47] Kenez, Red Advance, p. 14
[48] Raleigh, Experiencing Russia’s Civil War, p. 108.
[49] Fitzpatrick, “The Civil War”, p. 66.
Jörg Baberowski, Scorched Earth (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), p. 16.
[50] Anna Geifman, “The Origins of Soviet State Terrorism, 1917-21.” in Times of Trouble: Violence in Russian Literature and Culture. ed. by Marcus C. Levitt and Tatyana Novikov (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2007), p. 158.
[51] Geifman, Thou Shalt Kill, p. 250.
[52] Adam Ulam, The Bolsheviks: The Intellectual, Personal and Political History of the Triumph of Communism in Russia (New York: Collier Books, 1965), p. 422.
[53] Holquist, “Violent Russia”, p. 632.
[54] Ryan, Lenin’s Terror, p. 3.
[55] Kautsky, Terrorism and Communism, p. 105.
[56] The censure of so prominent a figure as Kautsky was of acute concern to the Bolsheviks, as they perceived that revolution in Russia could not succeed unless it managed to inspire revolution elsewhere in Europe.
[57] Leon Trotsky, Terrorism and Communism: A Reply to Karl Kautsky (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1961), p. 36.
[58] Kautsky, Terrorism and Communism, p. 95.
[59] Gimpel’son, Formirovanie, p. 126.
[60] Carr, The Russian Revolution, p. 153.
[61] Arno J. Mayer, The Furies: Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolutions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), p. 4.
[62] Scott B. Smith, Captives of Revolution: The Socialist Revolutionaries and the Bolshevik Dictatorship, 1918-1923 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011), p. 81.
[63] Baberowski, Scorched Earth, p. 38.
[64] Hoffmann, Cultivating the Masses, p. 260.
[65] Ryan, “The Sacralization of Violence”, p. 809.
[66] Hannah Arendt refers to instrumental violence in connection with the 1917 revolution in On Violence, p. 49.
Mayer, The Furies, p. 50.
[67] Sobranie uzakoneniii i rasporiazheniii pravitel'stva za 1917-1918 gg. Upravlenie delami Sovnarkoma SSSR M. 1942, no.65 St.710, p. 883.
[68] Richard Pipes, Russia under the Bolshevik Regime (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1993), p. 500.
[69] Gimpel’son, Formirovanie, p. 130.
[70] Mark D. Steinberg, The Russian Revolution 1905-1921 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), p. 322.
[71] Trotsky, Terrorism and Communism, p. 58.
[72] Brovkin, Behind the Front Lines, pp. 46-47.
[73] Ibid., p. 21.
[74] Addison, Violent Politics, p. 4.
[75] Ascher, The Revolution of 1905, p. 319.
[76] Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution (Oxford, 2008), p. 76.
[77] Yanni Kostonis, “Introduction: A Modern Paradox - Subject and Citizen in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Russia”, in Russian modernity: politics, knowledge, practices., ed. by David Hoffman (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press Ltd., 2000), pp. 6-8.
[78] Hoffmann, Cultivating the Masses, pp. 255-256.
[79] Ibid., p. 240.
[80] Peter Holquist, “Revolutionary State Practices and Politics”, in Russian modernity: politics, knowledge, practices., ed. by David Hoffman (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press Ltd., 2000), p. 91.
[81] Roger Pethybridge, The Social Prelude to Stalinism. (London: Macmillan, 1974), p. 123.
[82] Baberowski, Scorched Earth, p. 3.
[83] Rosa Luxembourg, Rosa Luxembourg Speaks., ed. by Mary-Alice Waters (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1970), pp. 394-95.
[84] Steinberg, The Russian Revolution, p. 322.
[85] V.I. Lenin, “The War and Russian Social Democracy”, in Collected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1964).
[86] V.I. Lenin, Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenii, iz. 5, tom. 37 (March 1919-July 1919), p. 89.
[87] Cobb, People’s Armies, p. 2.
[88] Ryan, “The Sacralization of Violence”, p. 815.
[89] “Sixth Congress”, in 1903: Second Congress of the Russian Social-democratic Labour Party., trans. by Brian Pearce (London: New Park Publications, 1978).
[90] Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution, p. 12.
[91] Hoffman, Inside Terrorism, p. 4.
[92] Orlando Figes, Revolutionary Russia, 1891-1991 (London: Pelican, 2014), p. 167.
[93] Robert C. Tucker, “Stalinism as Revolution from Above”, in Stalinism: Essays in Historical Interpretation., ed. by Robert C. Tucker (New York: N.W. Norton & Co., 1998), p. 92.
[94] Hoffmann, Cultivating the Masses, p. 264.
[95] Mayer, The Furies, p. 14.
[96] Arendt, On Violence, p. 55
[97] Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution, p. 12.
[98] Norman M. Naimark, “Terrorism and the Fall of Imperial Russia”, Terrorism and political violence 2, no. 2 (1990), p. 189.
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