(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)
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.
(3)
George
Seldes wrote
about Cheka
in his book
You Can't Print That! (1929)
Addressing
an anniversary celebration of the troops of the GPU, the Government
Political Militia, which is the old Cheka except for name, Dzerdzinsky
said: "Our enemies
are now suppressed and are in the kingdom of the shadows."
In the speech following
his, I heard Kamenev say: "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."
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.
(4)
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.
(5)
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.
(6)
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.
(7)
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.
(8)
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."
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