[6] Decreed after assassination attempts on Vladimir Lenin along with the successful assassinations of Petrograd Cheka leader Moisei Uritsky and party editor V. Volodarsky[7] in alleged retaliation for Bolshevik mass repressions, the Red Terror was modeled on the Reign of Terror of the French Revolution,[8] and sought to eliminate political dissent, opposition, and any other threat to Bolshevik power.

Shortly after the Bolshevik takeover of Rostov in November 1917, workers in Taganrog surrounded fifty officer cadets, who surrendered on the understanding that their lives were to be spared.

Anarchists harshly criticized Bolsheviks' centralization of political power by creating the Bolshevik-dominated Council of People's Commissars (Sovnarkom), nationalizing the land, subordinating the factory committees to the state-controlled network of trade unions, and creating the secret police organization Cheka; later, anarchists widely opposed the Declaration of the Rights of the Peoples of Russia and Treaty of Brest-Litovsk as betrayals of revolutionary internationalism and the stateless ideal.

Their suppression by the Bolsheviki began already in 1918, when – in the month of April of that year – the Communist Government attacked, without provocation or warning, the Anarchist Club of Moscow and by the use of machine guns and artillery "liquidated" the whole organisation.

[28] On 16 June 1918, more than two months prior to the events that would officially catalyze the Terror, a new decree re-established the death penalty as an ordinary jurisdictional measure by instructing the Revolutionary People's Courts to use it "as the only punishment for counter-revolutionary offences".

Russian historian Vladlen Loginov [ru] explains that while relatively peaceful resolutions of conflicts following Lenin's brutal declarations and "harsh words" and "orders" offering hard measures took place "not always and not everywhere", Lenin complained in his letters that[29] his bureaucratic "apparatus has already become gigantic — in some places excessively so — and under such conditions a “personal dictatorship” is entirely unrealizable and attempts to realize it would only be harmful.

[32] Leonid Kannegisser, a young military cadet of the Imperial Russian Army, assassinated Moisey Uritsky on August 17, 1918, outside the Petrograd Cheka headquarters in retaliation for the execution of his friend and other officers.

In 1958 the commander of the Kremlin, the former Baltic sailor Pavel Dmitriyevich Malkov (1887–1965)[35] revealed he had personally executed Kaplan on that date upon the specific orders of Yakov Sverdlov, chief secretary of the Bolshevik Central Committee.

"[9] On October 15, the leading Chekist Gleb Bokii, summing up the officially-ended Red Terror, reported that, in Petrograd, 800 alleged enemies had been shot and another 6,229 imprisoned.

A declaration About the Red Terror by the Sovnarkom on 5 September 1918 stated: ...that for empowering the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission in the fight with the counter-revolution, profiteering and corruption and making it more methodical, it is necessary to direct there possibly bigger number of the responsible party comrades, that it is necessary to secure the Soviet Republic from the class enemies by way of isolating them in concentration camps, that all people are to be executed by fire squad who are connected with the White Guard organizations, conspiracies and mutinies, that it is necessary to publicize the names of the executed as well as the reasons of applying to them that measure.As the Russian Civil War progressed, significant numbers of prisoners, suspects and hostages were executed because they belonged to the "possessing classes".

[46]In Crimea, Béla Kun and Rosalia Zemlyachka, with Vladimir Lenin's approval,[47] had 50,000 White prisoners of war and civilians summarily executed by shooting or hanging after the defeat of general Pyotr Wrangel at the end of 1920.

[50] According to social scientist, Nikolay Zayats, from the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus the large, “fantastic” estimates derived from eyewitness accounts and White army emigre press.

[12] One of the main organizers of the Red Terror for the Bolshevik government was 2nd-Grade Army Commissar Yan Karlovich Berzin (1889–1938), whose real name was Pēteris Ķuzis.

[52][page needed] Among the victims of the Red Terror were tsarists, liberals, non-Bolshevik socialists, anarchists, members of the clergy, ordinary criminals, counter-revolutionaries, and other political dissidents.

[53][20] The Internal Troops of the Cheka and the Red Army practiced the terror tactics of taking and executing numerous hostages, often in connection with desertions of forcefully mobilized peasants.

[56] During the rebellion, Mikhail Tukhachevsky (chief Red Army commander in the area) authorized Bolshevik military forces to use chemical weapons against villages with civilian population and rebels.

More than 184 were sentenced to death, including monarchists, and representatives of the Kadets, Left-Socialist Revolutionaries, repeat offenders, and persons shown to have links with British and American intelligence services.

At Odessa, the Cheka tied White officers to planks and slowly fed them into furnaces or tanks of boiling water; in Kharkiv, scalpings and hand-flayings were commonplace: the skin was peeled off victims' hands to produce "gloves";[69] the Voronezh Cheka rolled naked people around in barrels studded internally with nails; victims were crucified or stoned to death at Yekaterinoslav; the Cheka at Kremenchuk impaled members of the clergy and buried alive rebelling peasants; in Oryol, water was poured on naked prisoners bound in the winter streets until they became living ice statues; in Kiev, Chinese Cheka detachments placed rats in iron tubes sealed at one end with wire netting and the other placed against the body of a prisoner, with the tubes being heated until the rats gnawed through the victim's body in an effort to escape.

According to documents cited by Alexander Yakovlev, then head of the Presidential Committee for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repression, priests, monks and nuns were crucified, thrown into cauldrons of boiling tar, scalped, strangled, given Communion with melted lead and drowned in holes in the ice.

James Ryan writes that there were "at lowest estimates" "on average" 28,000 executions per year from December 1917 to February 1922.,[74] and that the number of people shot during the initial period of the Red Terror is at least 10,000.

[53] Estimates for the whole period range from of 50,000[75] executions to an upper of 140,000[75][76] to 200,000 people (plus an additional 400,000 killed in prisons or in suppressions of local rebellions[1] - the latter (highest) figures were presented by Robert Conquest.

[79] In 1924, Popular Socialist, Sergei Melgunov (1879–1956), published a detailed account on the Red Terror in Russia, where he cited Professor Charles Saroléa's counts of 1,766,188 executions.

[80][b] Other sources have also characterized the widely circulated claim of 1,700,000 deaths to be a "wild exaggeration" and placed estimations closer to 50,000 over the three year Civil War period.

He wanted to say that Red terror meant the forcible suppression of exploiters who attempted to restore their rule, but instead, he put it this way [on page 2 of the first issue of his magazine]: "Don't search [!!?]

But to refuse to use them in administration and construction would be the height of folly, fraught with untold harm to communism.The Red Terror was described succinctly from the Bolshevik point of view by Grigory Zinoviev in mid-September 1918: To overcome our enemies we must have our own socialist militarism.

[…] These nightly murders of fettered, unarmed, helpless people, these secret shootings in the back, the unceremonious burial on the spot of bodies, robbed to the very shirt, not always quite dead, often still groaning, in a mass grave – what sort of Terrorism is this?

And now you have damaged this belief, which had inflamed the souls of the people as never before, at its very roots.Historians such as Stéphane Courtois and Richard Pipes have argued that the Bolsheviks needed to use terror to stay in power because they lacked popular support;[12][91] Pipes is a representative of 'neo-traditionalist' historians who oppose 'revisionists', who put an emphasis on the 'popular' nature of the Bolshevik Revolution, and follow 'totalitarian' approach which continued the 'traditionalist' approach which dominated during the Cold War; for 'traditionalists' and 'neo-traditionalists', the Revolution was something imposed 'from above' by the revolutionaries with political guile and brute force.

[77] Although the Bolsheviks dominated among workers, soldiers and in their revolutionary soviets, they won less than a quarter of the popular vote in elections for the Constituent Assembly held soon after the October Revolution, since they commanded much less support among the peasantry.

[31] Leszek Kołakowski wrote that while Bolsheviks (especially Lenin) were very much focused on the Marxian concept of "violent revolution" and dictatorship of the proletariat long before the October Revolution, implementation of the dictatorship was clearly defined by Lenin as early as in 1906, when he argued it must involve "unlimited power based on force and not on law," power that is "absolutely unrestricted by any rules whatever and based directly on violence."

The Cheka and the Troops for the Internal Defense of the Republic were a structured and powerful instrument of repression of a completely different order, which had support at the highest level from the Bolshevik regime.