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The Sacralization of Violence: Bolshevik Justifications for Violence and Terror during the Civil War

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

James Ryan
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Abstract

This article explores some of the principal themes in the intellectual history of early Soviet state violence. I argue that political religions theory, as applied principally to understanding fascism, is especially useful for understanding Leninism and Bolshevik justifications of violence during the civil war. In addition to its principal focus on the relationship between violence and the Bolshevik conception of the sacred, the article examines the significance of Bolshevik punitive discourse more generally and the alternative currents in the approaches to violence and repression. In comparing the approaches of the Chekas and the Soviet Justice Commissariat to repression, it becomes apparent that distinctly more reformatory and more repressive strands of thought coexisted in the early Soviet state. Yet these distinctions were fluid, and the overtly medicalized nature of Bolshevik punitive discourse ensured a certain harmonization of these strands.

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Articles
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Slavic Review , Volume 74 , Issue 4 , Winter 2015 , pp. 808 - 831
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Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2015

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References

I would like to thank Geoffrey Roberts, Christopher Read, Harriet Murav, Mark D. Steinberg, Susan Grant, and the anonymous readers for Slavic Review for their suggestions on earlier drafts of this article and their encouragement. I would also like to thank the Irish Research Council for funding this research. The epigraph is from V. Vinogradov and N. Peremyshlennikova, comps., Arkhiv VChK: Sbornik dokumentov (Moscow, 2007), 145.

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25 See Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (GARF), f. A.353, op. 2, d. 23, 1.38ob (Report of the People's Commissariat of Justice to the Eighth All-Russian Commissariat of Soviets, 1919).

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33 Smith, Captives of Revolution, 86.

34 See, e.g., Ryan, Lenin's Terror, 136.

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36 Rat'kovskii, Krasnyi terror, 199; Werth, Nicolas, “A State against Its People: Violence, Repression, and Terror in the Soviet Union,” in Courtois, Stéphane, Werth, Nicolas, Panné, Jean-Louis, Paczkowski, Andrzej, Bartošek, Karel, and Margolin, Jean-Louis, eds., The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, trans. Murphy, Jonathan and Kramer, Mark (Cambridge, Mass., 1999), 78 Google Scholar.

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40 Krasnyi mech, August 18,1918, in Iu. G. Fel'shtinskii, ed., VChK-GPU: Dokumenty i materialy (Moscow, 1995), 74.

41 Krasnyi terror, November 1,1918, 276. Lenin's response, which was not published at the time, is in Lenin, , “A Little Picture in Illustration of Big Problems,” Collected Works, 4th ed., ed. Daglish, Robert, trans. Dutt, Clemens, vol. 28 (Moscow, 1972)Google Scholar, at http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1919/jan/x02.htm (last accessed August 15, 2015).

42 Grigorii Zaks, “Chistka,” Ezhenedel'nik VChK, no. 4, in Vinogradov, ed., VChK upolnomochena soobshchit', 168.

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45 See Rat'kovskii, Krasnyi terror, 219-33.

46 Raleigh, Experiencing Russia's Civil War, 53.

47 See especially Melancon, Michael, “Revolutionary Culture in the Early Soviet Republic: Communist Executive Committees versus the Cheka, Fall 1918,” Jahrbucher fur Geschichte Osteuropas 57, no. 1 (2009): 1–22 Google Scholar.

48 G. Petrovskii, “K besede s Tov. Petersom,” Izvestiia VTsIK, September 22,1918.

49 Gerson, Lennard D., The Secret Police in Lenin's Russia (Philadelphia, 1976), 203 Google Scholar.

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52 M. Ol'minskii, “Tov. Peters i chrezvychainye komissii,” Pravda, October 26, 1918,1.

53 Osinskii, “'Ognennaia pech’ proletariat,” 2.

54 Melancon, “Revolutionary Culture,” 8,13.

55 GARF, f. 393, op. 3, d. 293,1. 231, quoted in ibid., 9.

56 “Krasnyi terror. (Beseda s tov. Petersom),” Izvestiia VTsIK, September 29,1918.

57 “Nash otvet,” Izvestiia VTsIK, October 22,1918.

58 NKVD statistics published in January 1919 indicate that district-level Soviets throughout Soviet territory were controlled by party members (without mentioning when they had joined), though there were several places where this was not the case. See Vlast' sovetov, no. 2, January 30,1919,4-5.

59 “K voprosu o Chrezvychainykh Komissiiakh,” Pravda, October 23,1918,1.

60 G. Shklovskii, “K voprosu o podchinenii Chrez. Komissii,” Ezhenedel'nik VChK, no. 3, in Vinogradov, ed., VChK upolnomochena soobshchit', 130.

61 Adibekova et al., comps., V. L. Lenin i VChK, no. 86, 87.

62 Ibid., no. 91,91.

63 See Rat'kovskii, Krasnyi terror, 207.

64 Lenin, V. I., “Speech at a Rally and Concert for the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission Staff, November 7, 1918,” Collected Works, trans. Riordan, Jim, vol. 28 (Moscow, 1974)Google Scholar, at http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/nov/07b.htm (last accessed August 15, 2015).

65 Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv sotsial'no-politicheskoi istorii (RGASPI), f. 17, op. 2, d. 7,1.5 (Plenum of the Central Committee, December 19,1918).

66 See Ehret, Ulrike, “Understanding the Popular Appeal of Fascism, National Socialism and Soviet Communism: The Revival of Totalitarianism Theory and Political Religion,“ History Compass 5, no. 4 (August 2007): 1248 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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69 Gentile, “Political Religion,” 29-30.

70 Stowers, Stanley, “The Concepts of ‘Religion,’ ‘Political Religions’ and the Study of Nazism,” Journal of Contemporary History 42, no. 1 (January 2007): 9–24 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Behrens, Mathias, “'Political Religion'—a Religion? Some Remarks on the Concept of Religion,” in Maier, Hans and Schafer, Michael, eds., Totalitarianism and Political Religions: Concepts for the Comparison of Dictatorships, trans. Bruhn, Jodi, vol. 2 (Abingdon, 2007), 225–45Google Scholar.

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73 The editors of a recent volume on twentieth-century European political violence write that religion did not play a “major role” in such violence generally. See Bloxham, Donald and Gerwarth, Robert, eds., Political Violence in Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge, Eng., 2011), 2 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

74 Steinberg, Mark D., Proletarian Imagination: Self, Modernity, and the Sacred in Russia, 1910-1925 (Ithaca, 2002), 9 Google Scholar.

75 Steinberg, “Sacred Vision in the Revolution,” chap. 7 in ibid. See also Steinberg, Mark D. and Coleman, Heather J., eds., Sacred Stories: Religion and Spirituality in Modern Russia (Bloomington, 2007)Google Scholar; and Kolonitskii, Boris I., “Antibourgeois Propaganda and Anti-'Burzhui’ Consciousness in 1917,” Russian Review 53, no. 2 (April 1994): 193–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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77 Schmitt, Carl, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. Schwab, George (Cambridge, Mass., 1985), 36 Google Scholar.

78 Berdyaev, Nicolas, The Russian Idea, trans. French, R. M. (London, 1947), 250 Google Scholar. See also Duncan, Peter J. S., Russian Messianism: Third Rome, Revolution, Communism and After (Abingdon, 2000), 52 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Igal Halfin has been the most influential recent advocate of the concept of political religion in the Soviet case, though he refers to a “secularized eschatology“ rather than a “political religion.” For an example of a critical response to Halfin's work, see Etkind, Alexander, “Soviet Subjectivity: Torture for the Sake of Salvation?,” Kritika 6, no. 1 (February 2005): 181–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Etkind suggests that the Bolsheviks were merely “unconsciously” eschatological, but there appears to be ample evidence to the contrary.

79 Klinghoffer, Arthur Jay, Red Apocalypse: The Religious Evolution of Soviet Communism (Lanham, 1996), 1, 44 Google Scholar. Soviet propaganda generally made use of “familiar forms,” including Christian tropes, to communicate with the populace. See, for example, Bonnell, Victoria E., Iconography of Power: Soviet Political Posters under Lenin and Stalin (Berkeley, 1997), 7 Google Scholar.

80 See the article “Kommunist” on page 5 of the newspaper in RGASPI, f. 17, op. 60 (Agitprop), d. 12,1.44ob (Concerning agitprop work in the countryside and political education of the party).

81 Quoted in Shabanov, N. I. and Makarov, N. A., eds., Gubcheka: Sbornik dokumentov i materialov iz istorii Saratovskoi gubernskoi chrezvychainoi komissii 1917-1921 gg. (Saratov, 1980), no. 81, 94–95 Google Scholar.

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86 See Griffin, Roger, “Introduction: The Evolutions and Convolutions of Political Religion,“ in Griffin, , Mallett, , and Tortorice, , eds., The Sacred in Twentieth-Century Politics, 13 Google Scholar; and Petrone, Karen, The Great War in Russian Memory (Bloomington, 2011), 55–58 Google Scholar.

87 Ezhenedel'nik VChK, no. 1, in Vinogradov, ed., VChK upolnomochena soobshchit', 58. See also Krasnoarmeets, no. 1 (1919): 12.

88 See Ezhenedel'nik VChK, no. 1, in Vinogradov, ed., VChK upolnomochena soobshchit', 63, 78-79. Berdiaev criticized Bolsheviks for being “gripped by hatred,” possessed by a “preponderance of hate over love,” and he asserted that “only love turns a man towards the future.” Berdyaev, Nicolas, The Origin of Russian Communism, trans. French, R. M. (Ann Arbor, 1969), 184 Google Scholar. My understanding of the importance of emotional development to the Bolshevik revolutionary project has been informed by Anna Toropova, “The Education of Feeling: Cinema and the Emotional Community of Stalinism” (paper, British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies, April 2014). Cited with the kind permission of Dr. Toropova.

89 See Fritzsche, Peter and Hellbeck, Jochen, “The New Man in Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany,” in Geyer, Michael and Fitzpatrick, Sheila, eds., Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared (Cambridge, Eng., 2009), 302–45Google Scholar.

90 RGASPI, f. 17, op. 4 (CC Secretariat), d. 53,1. 32 (Protocol of the 5th Uezd Party Conference of Bogolovskogo uezd, November 19,1918).

91 Petrone, The Great War in Russian Memory, 35-36.

92 Berdyaev, The Origin of Russian Communism, 170.

93 Girard, René, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Gregory, Patrick (Baltimore, 1979; London, 2008), 28 Google Scholar.

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95 Ezhenedel'nik VChK, no. 1, in Vinogradov, ed., VChK upolnomochena soobshchit', 55-56; see also Ryan, Lenin's Terror, 115. It is interesting to compare such reasoning with Walter Benjamin's similar reflections in his 1921 essay on violence. For Benjamin, “the proposition that existence stands higher than a just existence is false and ignominious, if existence is to mean nothing other than mere life,” and he reasoned that however sacred life within man may be, “there is no sacredness in his condition, in his bodily life vulnerable to injury by his fellow men.” Benjamin's apparent advocacy of violence is of that “outside the law,” or involving the “suspension of law,” as “revolutionary violence” that leads to “the abolition of state power.” Lenin wrote, rather similarly, of how dictatorship does not rest on law for its legitimacy, and, ultimately, Bolsheviks aimed at the abolition of all “mythic” violence, the law, and the state. However, Benjamin's opposition of a “divine violence” to the “mythic violence” and fantasy associated with humanity's attempts to appropriate divine power through “law-making” and “law-preserving” violence appears difficult to reconcile with Bolshevik attempts to claim purity for their violent means as state violence, albeit with the ultimate purpose of state abolition. Benjamin's “divine“ violence is truly divine as well as human, with “the expiatory power of violence… invisible to men.” See Benjamin, Walter, “Critique of Violence,” in Selected Writings, ed. Bullock, Marcus and Jennings, Michael W., vol. 1, 1913-1926 (Cambridge, Mass., 1996), 251–52Google Scholar; and Martel, James R., Divine Violence: Walter Benjamin and the Eschatology of Sovereignty (Abingdon, 2012)Google Scholar.

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98 On the complexities of literary treatments of war and violence in the early Soviet period, see Petrone, “Violence, Morality, and the Conscience of the Warrior,” chap. 4 in The Great War in Russian Memory.

99 Ezhenedel'nik VChK, no. 2, in Vinogradov, ed., VChK upolnomochena soobshchit, 100.

100 “Mirovaia voina i krasnyi terror,” Izvestiia VTsIK, September 18,1918,1.

101 See Halfin, Stalinist Confessions, 2.

102 V. Bystrianskii, “Mirovye krizisy i nravstvennaia otsenka,” Petrogradskaia pravda, January 3, 1919, 1.

103 Borisova, L. et al., comps., Sovetskaia derevnia glazami VChK-OGPU-NKVD: Dokumenty i materialy, vol. 1 (Moscow, 1998), no. 66, 111 Google Scholar. See also Gavrilov, “Rol’ chekistov,“ 61.

104 See Ezhenedel'nik VChK, no. 2, in Vinogradov, ed., VChK upolnomochena soobshchit', 92-93; and “Kto pobedit?,” Severnaia kommuna, September 26,1918 (evening edition), 1. See also Fedor, Russia and the Cult of State Security, 17-21.

105 Bystrianskii, “Mirovye krizisy i nravstvennaia otsenka,” Petrogradskaia pravda, January 3,1919,1.

106 Morrissey, Susan K., “The ‘Apparel of Innocence': Toward a Moral Economy of Terrorism in Late Imperial Russia,” Journal of Modern History 84, no. 3 (September 2012): 607–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. 611.

107 See ibid., 611.

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109 Ezhenedel'nik VChK, no. 6, in Vinogradov, ed., VChK upolnomochena soobshchit', 243.

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111 See James McMillan, “War,” in Bloxham and Gerwarth, eds., Political Violence, 52-55.

112 See again Gentile, Politics as Religion.

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118 Material)/ Narodnogo komissariata iustitsii 1 (Moscow, 1918), 60.

119 See Vinogradov and Peremyshlennikova, comps., Arkhiv VChK, 144-46.

120 See Burbank, Jane, “Lenin and the Law in Revolutionary Russia,” Slavic Review 54, no. 1 (Spring 1995): 40–44 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See further Huskey, Eugene, “A Framework for the Analysis of Soviet Law,” Russian Review 50, no. 1 (January 1991): 53–70 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

121 See Ryan, Lenin's Terror, 168. Emphasis in the original.

122 Krasnyi mech, August 18,1919, in Fel'shtinskii, comp., VChK-GPU, 74.

123 Ezhenedel'nik VChK, no. 1, in Vinogradov, ed., VChK upolnomochena soobshchit', 79.

124 “Stranichka iz psikhologii okhrannika,” Ezhenedel'nik VChK, no. 3, in ibid., 136.

125 Stuchka, “Proletarskaia revoliutsiia i sud,” 8.

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130 L. Savrasov, “Prestuplenie i nakazanie v tekushchii perekhodnyi period,” Proletarskaia revoliutsiia ipravo, nos. 5-6 (October 1-15,1918): 24; Savrasov, L., “K voprosu ob organizatsii obshchikh mest zakliucheniia,” Proletarskaia revoliutsiia i ipravo, no. 7 (November 1918): 40–42 Google Scholar. See also Berman, La., “K voprosu ob Ugolovnom kodekse sotsialisticheskogo gosudarstva,” Proletarskaia revoliutsiia ipravo, no. 11 (1919): 44 Google Scholar.

131 GARF, f. A353, op. 2, d. 618,1.73 (Situation concerning educational work in places of confinement, 1918-1920).

132 “Vserossiiskii s'ezd rabotnikov penitentsiarnogo dela,” Ezhenedel'nik sovetskoi iustitsii, no. 41 (1923): 949.

133 See Hagenloh, Stalin's Police; and Shearer, Policing Stalin's Socialism.

134 On this question through the 1930s, see Barnes, Steven A., Death and Redemption: The Gulag and the Shaping of Soviet Society (Princeton, 2011), esp. 67 Google Scholar.

135 See here Latsis, Dva goda bor'by, 15.

136 Savrasov, “Prestuplenie i nakazanie,” 24-26.

137 See GARF, f. A353, op. 1, d. 3,11. 228, 233, 313, and 319 (Information on convicts, 1917-19).

138 Hagenloh, Stalin's Police, 81.

139 See, for example, Vinogradov and Peremyshlennikova, comps., Arkhiv VChK, 87-88, 225, 233.

140 Berman, La., “Nakazanie ili ispravlenie?,” Proletarskaia revoliutsiia ipravo, nos. 8-10 (1918): 46–51 Google Scholar.

141 Savrasov, “Prestuplenie i nakazanie,” 26; Savrasov, “K voprosu o nakazanii,“ Proletarskaia revoliutsiia ipravo, no. 11 (1919): 75,79.

142 Eagleton, Terry, Holy Terror (Oxford, 2005), 16–17 Google Scholar.

143 Morrissey, “The ‘Apparel of Innocence,'” 624.

144 Ryan, Lenin's Terror, 15; see also Hewlett, Nick, “Marx, Engels, and the Ethics of Violence in Revolt,” European Legacy 17, no. 7 (December 2012): 889 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

145 See Tolczyk, See No Evil, 279.

146 See Melancon, “Revolutionary Culture,” 7.