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In December, 1917, Vladimir Lenin appointed Felix Dzerzhinsky as Commissar for Internal Affairs and head of the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage (Cheka). As Dzerzhinsky later commented: "In the October Revolution, I was a member of the Military Revolutionary Committee, and then I was entrusted with the task of organizing the Extraordinary Commission for the Struggle against Sabotage and Counterrevolution I was appointed its Chairman, holding at the same time the post of Commissar for Internal Affairs."

Dzerzhinsky explained in July 1918: "We stand for organized terror - this should be frankly admitted. Terror is an absolute necessity during times of revolution. Our aim is to fight against the enemies of the Soviet Government and of the new order of life. We judge quickly. In most cases only a day passes between the apprehension of the criminal and his sentence. When confronted with evidence criminals in almost every case confess; and what argument can have greater weight than a criminal's own confession."

Victor Serge argued: "I believe that the formation of the Chekas was one of the gravest and most impermissible errors that the Bolshevik leaders committed in 1918 when plots, blockades, and interventions made them lose their heads. All evidence indicates that revolutionary tribunals, functioning in the light of day and admitting the right of defence, would have attained the same efficiency with far less abuse and depravity. Was it necessary to revert to the procedures of the Inquisition?"

In September, 1918, Felix Dzerzhinsky instigated the Red Terror that followed the attempt by Dora Kaplan on the life of Lenin. Dzerzhinsky reported "Our enemies are now suppressed and are in the kingdom of the shadows." Lev Kamenev admitted: "Not a single measure of the Soviet government could have been put through without the help of the Cheka. It is the best example of communist discipline."

By 1921 the Kronstadt sailors had become disillusioned with the Bolshevik government. They were angry about the lack of democracy and the policy of War Communism. On 28th February, 1921, the crew of the battleship, Petropavlovsk, passed a resolution calling for a return of full political freedoms. Lenin denounced the protest as a plot instigated by the White Army and their European supporters. On 6th March, Leon Trotsky announced that he was going to order the Red Army to attack the Kronstadt sailors. However, it was not until the 17th March that government forces were able to take control of Kronstadt. An estimated 8,000 people (sailors and civilians) left Kronstadt and went to live in Finland.

The Cheka was also responsible for dealing with the sailors arrested during the Kronstadt Uprising. Official figures suggest that 527 people were killed and 4,127 were wounded. Historians who have studied the uprising believe that the total number of casualties was much higher than this. According to Victor Serge over 500 sailors at Kronstadt were executed for their part in the rebellion.

Dzerzhinsky was appointed as People's Commissar for Transport in 1921. However, he remained in control of Cheka and in 1922 Dzerzhinsky transformed it into the Government Political Administration (GPU). One Cheka official admitted in 1929: "We have executed some twenty or thirty thousand persons, perhaps fifty thousand. They were all spies, traitors, enemies within our ranks, a very small number in proportion to the persons of this kind then in Russia. We instituted the red terror at a time of war, when the enemy was marching upon us from without and the enemy within was preparing to help him. Scotland Yard executed spies and traitors also in war time."

George Seldes wrote in 1929: "Because of the Cheka, freedom has ceased to exist in Russia. There is no democracy. It is not wanted. Only American apologists for the Soviets have ever pretended there was democracy in Russia.... Freedom, liberty, justice as we know it, democracy, all the fundamental human rights for which the world has been fighting for civilized centuries, have been abolished in Russia in order that the communist experiment might be made. They have been kept suppressed by the Cheka. The Cheka is the instrument of militant Communism. It is a great success. The terror is in the mind and marrow of the present generation and nothing but generations of freedom and liberty will ever root it out."

During the early stages of the Spanish Civil War, the Cheka was in Spain. Edward Knoblaugh reported: "Cars labeled CHEKA and carrying red or red and black flags patrolled everywhere, loaded with armed men on the lookout for Quinta Columna suspects. Their work was simplified by the fact that Spanish law requires citizens to carry identification cards giving age, description of bearer and place of residence. These could be checked against the political credentials supplied to Leftists in good standing with their respective parties. The raiders entered cafes, some standing guard in the doorway while the rest passed from table to table demanding to see everyone's credentials. Even army officers in uniform were not exempt... One device the Cheka employed in an effort to ferret out conspirators was to seize any two persons walking together, separate them quickly out of earshot of each other, and demand to know what they were talking about at the moment they were separated. The replies then would be checked against each other and if they failed to tally, the pair was arrested. Sometimes the sheer fright of being so seized made the victims stutter and forget what they had been talking about."

In 1934 the Communist Secret Police became known as the Peoples Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD). Later that year the new head of the NKVD, Genrikh Yagoda, arrested Lev Kamenev, Gregory Zinoviev, Ivan Smirnov, and thirteen others and accused them of being involved with Leon Trotsky in a plot to murder Joseph Stalin and other party leaders. All of these men were found guilty and were executed on 25th August, 1936.

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(1) The Granat Encyclopaedia of the Russian Revolution was published by the Soviet government in 1924. The encyclopaedia included a collection of autobiographies and biographies of over two hundred people involved in the Russian Revolution. Felix Dzerzhinsky was one of those invited to write his autobiography.

The February Revolution freed me from the central Moscow prison. Until August 1917, I looked in Moscow, and then in that month I was one of the Moscow delegates to the RSDRP. In the October Revolution, I was a member of the Military Revolutionary Committee, and then I was entrusted with the task of organizing the Extraordinary Commission for the Struggle against Sabotage and Counterrevolution I was appointed its Chairman, holding at the same time the post of Commissar for Internal Affairs.

(2) Felix Dzerzhinsky, interviewed in Novaia Zhizn (14th July, 1918)

We stand for organized terror - this should be frankly admitted. Terror is an absolute necessity during times of revolution. Our aim is to fight against the enemies of the Soviet Government and of the new order of life. We judge quickly. In most cases only a day passes between the apprehension of the criminal and his sentence. When confronted with evidence criminals in almost every case confess; and what argument can have greater weight than a criminal's own confession.

(3) Victor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary (1945)

Since the first massacres of Red prisoners by the Whites, the murders of Volodarsky and Uritsky and the attempt against Lenin (in the summer of 1918), the custom of arresting and, often, executing hostages had become generalized and legal. Already Cheka, which made mass arrests of suspects, the was tending to settle their fate independently, under formal control of the Party, but in reality without anybody's knowledge.

The Party endeavoured to head it with incorruptible men like the former convict Dzerzhinsky, a sincere idealist, ruthless but chivalrous, with the emaciated profile of an Inquisitor: tall forehead, bony nose, untidy goatee, and an expression of weariness and austerity. But the Party had few men of this stamp and many Chekas.

I believe that the formation of the Chekas was one of the gravest and most impermissible errors that the Bolshevik leaders committed in 1918 when plots, blockades, and interventions made them lose their heads. All evidence indicates that revolutionary tribunals, functioning in the light of day and admitting the right of defence, would have attained the same efficiency with far less abuse and depravity. Was it necessary to revert to the procedures of the Inquisition?

By the beginning of 1919, the Chekas had little or no resistance against this psychological perversion and corruption. I know for a fact that Dzerzhinsky judged them to be "half-rotten", and saw no solution to the evil except in shooting the worst Chekists and abolishing the death-penalty as quickly as possible.

(4) George Seldes wrote about Cheka in his book You Can't Print That! (1929)

The Cheka (Chesvychaika), or GPU, is the instrument of the red terror, organized in 1918, through which the Soviet government, the Communist party and the Third International, Russia's indivisible trinity, maintains itself in dictatorial power to this very day. The years have brought a change in name, less activity, more secrecy.

The era of wanton murder has passed, it is true; public trials within fourteen days after arrest are now ordered by law and in most cases given. But the terror has entered into the souls of the Russian people.

Because of the Cheka, freedom has ceased to exist in Russia. There is no democracy. It is not wanted. Only American apologists for the Soviets have ever pretended there was democracy in Russia. " Democracy " says a communist axiom " is a delusion of the bourgeois mind." Justice in Russia is communist justice: the end justifies the means, and the end is Communism at all costs, including the lives of its opponents.

Freedom, liberty, justice as we know it, democracy, all the fundamental human rights for which the world has been fighting for civilized centuries, have been abolished in Russia in order that the communist experiment might be made. They have been kept suppressed by the Cheka.

The Cheka is the instrument of militant Communism. It is a great success. The terror is in the mind and marrow of the present generation and nothing but generations of freedom and liberty will ever root it out.

The victims of the Cheka are estimated anywhere from 50,000 to 500,000, with the truth probably mid-ways. But it is not a matter of numbers. The outstanding fact today is that by their tortures, wholesale arrests and wholesale murders of liberals suspected of not favouring the Bolshevik interpretation of Communism, the Cheka has terrorized a whole generation, the people of our time.

The victims are usually non-Bolshevik radicals, especially Socialists, social-revolutionaries and Mensheviks, who, incidentally, are more hated by the Bolsheviks than the capitalists, the nobility or the bourgeoisie.

(5) Maxim Gorky, letter to Alexei Rykov (3rd July, 1922)

If the trial of the Socialist Revolutionaries will end with a death sentence, then this will be a premeditated murder, a foul murder. I beg of you to inform Leon Trotsky and the others that this is my contention. I hope this will not surprise you since I had told the Soviet authorities a thousand times that it is a senseless and criminal to decimate the ranks of our intelligentsia in our illiterate and lacking of culture country. I am convinced, that if the SR's should be executed the crime will result in a moral blockade of Russia by all of socialist Europe.

(6) Cheka official quoted by an English journalist in 1929.

We have executed some twenty or thirty thousand persons, perhaps fifty thousand. They were all spies, traitors, enemies within our ranks, a very small number in proportion to the persons of this kind then in Russia. We instituted the red terror at a time of war, when the enemy was marching upon us from without and the enemy within was preparing to help him. Scotland Yard executed spies and traitors also in war time.

(7) In 1933 Victor Serge was taken to the headquarters of the Communist Secret Police (GPU).

It was a prison of noiseless, cell-divided secrecy, built barely into a block that had once been occupied by insurance company offices. Each floor formed a prison on its own, sealed off from the others, with its individual entrance and reception-kiosk; coloured electric light-signals operated on all landings and corridors to mark the various comings and goings, so that prisoners could never meet one another. A mysterious hotel-corridor, whose red carpet silenced the slight sound of footsteps; and then a cell, bare, with an inlaid floor, a passable bed, a table and a chair, all spick and span.

Here, in absolute secrecy, with no communication with any person whatsoever, with no reading-matter whatsoever, with no paper, not even one sheet, with no occupation of any kind, with no open-air exercise in the yard, I spent about eighty days. It was a severe test for the nerves, in which I acquitted myself pretty well. I was weary with my years of nervous tension, and felt an immense physical need for rest. I slept as much as I could, at least twelve hours a day. The rest of the time, I set myself to work assiduously. I gave myself courses in history, political economy - and even in natural science! I mentally wrote a play, short stories, poems.

(8) Rutkovsky was one of the members of the Communist Secret Police (GPU) who interviewed Victor Serge in 1933. He attempted to get Serge to sign a confession agreeing that he had worked with Anita Russakova against the Soviet government. Serge knew that once he signed a confession he would be executed.

I can see that you are an unwavering enemy. You are bent on destroying yourself. Years of jail are in store for you. You are the ringleader of the Trotskyite conspiracy. We know everything. I want to try and save you in spite of yourself. This is the last time that we try. So, I'm making one last attempt to save you.

I don't expect very much from you - I know you too well. I am going to acquaint you with the complete confessions that have been made by your sister-in-law and secretary, Anita Russakova. All you have to do it say, "I admit that it is true", and sign it. I won't ask you any more questions, the investigation will be closed, your whole position will be improved, and I shall make every effort to get the Collegium to be lenient to you.

(9) Edward Knoblaugh, Correspondent in Spain (1937)

Cars labeled CHEKA and carrying red or red and black flags patrolled everywhere, loaded with armed men on the lookout for Quinta Columna suspects. Their work was simplified by the fact that Spanish law requires citizens to carry identification cards giving age, description of bearer and place of residence. These could be checked against the political credentials supplied to Leftists in good standing with their respective parties. The raiders entered cafes, some standing guard in the doorway while the rest passed from table to table demanding to see everyone's credentials. Even army officers in uniform were not exempt. Sometimes these Cheka agents were tipsy and their handling of their weapons made us nervous as they examined our passes. Many of them, like the guards stationed on the highways every few kilometers apart, could not read the writing on the passes. Some of them looked at the cards upside down. Those Spaniards who could not show membership in one or other of the Front Parties were dragged off and generally were heard of no more. I still remember the screams of one lad, hardly fifteen, who was taken out of a line in front of a movie house: "Take me and kill me, but let me kiss my mother first."

One device the Cheka employed in an effort to ferret out conspirators was to seize any two persons walking together, separate them quickly out of earshot of each other, and demand to know what they were talking about at the moment they were separated. The replies then would be checked against each other and if they failed to tally, the pair was arrested. Sometimes the sheer fright of being so seized made the victims stutter and forget what they had been talking about. Folks quickly learned that it paid to agree on a "topic" of conversation before start- ing out for a walk, so that they would have their answers ready. Thus: "If we're stopped, we were discussing plans to go to the cinema tonight."