Russian Secret Police Part 3: The Cheka

Lenin's brutal secret police

Welcome to Secret Police!

Secret Police explores the history and methods of the world’s most brutal secret police forces. Today, we’ll discuss the first Soviet secret police, the Cheka.

From 1917 to 1922, the Cheka terrorized the Russian people into submission to the Soviet state. Old institutions were destroyed, people were targeted based on their socio-economic status, and farmers were forced into collectives. Those who disobeyed were often shot; the most unfortunate were subjected to sadistic torture that rivals the methods of the Oprichniki.

Under the leadership of Vladimir Ilych Lenin, the Bolsheviks initially seemed to bring real, much-needed change to Russia. They even abolished the institution of secret police at first, as many revolutionaries had been hunted by the dreaded Okhrana. But it didn’t take long for Lenin’s true intentions to become clear: a dictatorship of the proletariat with himself at the helm.

Lenin had many similarities to those he later deemed political enemies. While unwavering in his faith in Marxism, he tweaked Marx’s original writings into Leninism, both in theory and practice, believing Leninism could only be achieved through the Red Terror unleashed by the Cheka.

In this third act of our series on Russian secret police, we’ll explore Lenin, the Russian Civil War, and, of course, the Bolshevik Cheka: their history, methods, organization, and leadership.

The big question: why did the Bolsheviks impose such a terrifying and murderous institution like the Cheka? How did they tame the vast wilderness of Siberia? And how did the Cheka freeze human beings into literal ice statues?

Looking Back at the Okhrana

In Part 2, we discussed the Tsar’s secret police, the Okhrana. We learned that secret police have existed in Russia for a long time, but the Okhrana distinguished itself by infiltrating revolutionary groups. They were early to adopt the use of fake organizations, like labor unions, to divert factory workers away from radical terrorist groups.

The Okhrana, despite its reputation, wasn’t up to the task of containing the growing revolutionary fervor. Its own rotting culture and systemic corruption made matters worse. Agents like Yevno Azef and Roman Malinovsky made stacks by setting up illegal printing presses, having them busted, and enjoying the cash bonus for their work. Undercover agents even killed government ministers to demonstrate commitment to their revolutionary comrades. Some agents defected, realizing that the revolutionaries were fighting for a worthy cause.

Ultimately, the Okhrana’s incompetence contributed to the collapse of the Tsarist government. There were several overlapping elements that led to Russia’s eventual embrace of Bolshevism.

Russia’s weak leader, Tsar Nicholas II, also played a role, and his heir, Alexei, had hemophilia. Desperate for a solution, the Romanov family turned to the infamous Rasputin for help. Nicholas tried to appease his critics by sharing power with the State Duma, but it wasn’t enough.

Riots broke out in Petrograd, and Nicholas had little support left. He abdicated the throne, ending over 300 years of Romanov rule, but the Tsar and his family stayed inside Russia.

Meanwhile, the Okhrana’s corruption was investigated by a special commission, which revealed rampant abuse of power. Despite the corruption, the Okhrana had laid a foundation for future Russian secret police, including the adoption of forensic and cryptographic technologies. However, outright terror was not part of their operations. The commission concluded that the Okhrana undermined itself and the government, leading to its dissolution in early 1917.

The Provisional Government, made up of ministers from the State Duma, filled the power vacuum. A popular lawyer named Alexander Kerensky eventually led this government.

Kerensky and Lenin were born in the same town and were from the same educated middle class. Kerensky went to law school, practiced law, and became known for his excellent speaking skills. Lenin, also a great orator, avoided a head-to-head debate with him.

For the first time since the Napoleonic Wars, Russia had no secret police force. Some duties were delegated to the Counter-Espionage Bureau, but its focus was on German spies rather than revolutionaries. This brief period saw relative peace between the government and the Russian people. But this wouldn’t last long.

In 1917, the lack of secret police meant that Russians briefly lived without the fear of government repression. But that freedom was short-lived. Red Terror was just on the horizon, as Lenin and the Bolsheviks took power.

To understand why, we need to examine Lenin’s rise to power.

Vladimir Lenin’s Early Life

Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov was born on April 22, 1870, in Simbirsk (now Ulyanovsk), about 500 miles west of Moscow. He grew up in a middle-class family with his mother, Maria, father, Ilya, and four siblings. His father was the Director of Schools for their entire region, and he looked just like Lenin—bald head, bushy goatee, and mustache.

The Ulyanovs were well off, educated, and comfortable within the intellectual class. Yet, despite his privileged upbringing, Lenin passionately advocated for the proletariat.

While Vladimir enjoyed a comfortable childhood, his older brother, Alexander, got involved in a revolutionary group while attending university in St. Petersburg. Alexander was tasked with making a bomb to kill Tsar Alexander III. The assassination plot failed, and Alexander was arrested.

Tragedy struck the Ulyanov family in 1886, when Vladimir’s father died of a brain hemorrhage. Later that same year, Alexander was executed for his role in the assassination plot. These events had a profound impact on young Vladimir, fueling his desire for revenge against the Romanovs.

He left Simbirsk for St. Petersburg to attend law school but did not finish. The Okhrana kept a close eye on him, suspecting that he, like his brother, was a revolutionary. They weren’t wrong. Vladimir was determined to provoke a revolution.

In 1891, a famine swept across the Russian Empire. The Ulyanov family, being financially secure, was largely unaffected. However, Vladimir saw the famine as an opportunity. In his mind, desperate times would push people toward revolution, and the worse things got, the higher the likelihood of toppling the Tsar.

During this period, Lenin became deeply engrossed in the writings of Karl Marx. Marx's critique of capitalism and his vision of a proletariat-led revolution deeply resonated with Lenin.

Marxism

Karl Marx, born in 1818, observed the exploitation of laborers during the Industrial Revolution. Factory workers toiled in dangerous, inhumane conditions, with little to no recourse if they were injured or fired. Labor was expendable, and the wealth inequality was stark. Business owners, or capitalists, controlled the means of production—land, labor, and capital—while laborers owned only their ability to work. Marx believed that this fundamental conflict between capital and labor would lead to a revolution, with the proletariat (working class) rising up to overthrow the bourgeoisie (capitalist class).

Leninism

Lenin agreed with much of Marx’s critique but believed that a spontaneous revolution was unlikely. Instead, he argued that a group of professional revolutionaries, led by someone like himself, needed to seize power and establish a permanent dictatorship of the proletariat. His approach had an air of arrogance. It seemed he thought the proletariat wasn’t capable of organizing a revolution without a strong leader. Despite coming from a privileged background, Lenin saw himself as the champion of the working class, although he shared little in common with them.

Lenin’s revolutionary activities soon caught the attention of the Okhrana. He was arrested for rallying workers and demanding higher wages and shorter hours. After his arrest, Lenin was exiled to Siberia. However, exile under the Tsar was far from the harsh punishment it would later become under Stalin. Lenin’s time in Siberia was more of a quiet retreat, and he was even joined by his partner, Nadezhda Krupskaya. The two married during his exile.

While in Siberia, Lenin wrote extensively, using various pseudonyms to hide his identity from the Okhrana. One of those names, Lenin, stuck—possibly derived from the Lena River in Siberia.

After his exile, Lenin and his wife moved to Germany, where he continued his revolutionary writings without the Okhrana breathing down his neck. The irony is that Lenin used the freedoms of a Western country to advocate for a system that would suppress those same freedoms.

Meanwhile, in Russia, a peaceful protest led by priest and Okhrana agent Father Gapon ended in bloodshed when Tsar Nicholas II ordered his troops to open fire on the protesters. Lenin seized this moment, returning to Petrograd to call for a revolution; however, the riots fizzled out, and Lenin fled to Switzerland to avoid arrest.

The Bolshevik Revolution

The outbreak of World War I cooled revolutionary sentiment in Russia, as the people rallied around the Tsar in the face of a common enemy—Germany. As the war dragged on, the Russian army’s poor performance eroded morale, and discontent again came to a boil. The inept leadership of Nicholas II at the war front made things worse. He was forced to abdicate, and the Provisional Government took power.

Lenin, eager to return to Russia, saw his chance. When he finally made it back, Lenin set sights on Alexander Kerensky, the head of the Provisional Government. However, instead of challenging Kerensky directly, Lenin focused on winning over the masses with the promise of “Bread, Peace, Land.”

The Provisional Government, meanwhile, was struggling to keep the Russian army engaged in the war against Germany. This decision was deeply unpopular, and Lenin used the unrest to fuel the Bolshevik cause. However, suspicions arose about Lenin being a German spy, and Kerensky banned the Bolshevik party.

Lenin, fearing arrest, shaved his signature facial hair and fled to Finland, where he continued to work behind the scenes.

In 1917, General Lavr Kornilov, the commander-in-chief of the Russian army, suspected Lenin and the Bolsheviks of sabotaging the war effort. Kornilov ordered an attack on Petrograd, but this was essentially a military coup attempt. The Provisional Government, desperate for help, turned to the Bolsheviks. Leon Trotsky, Commissar for War, organized the defense of Petrograd, enlisting the Red Guard militia.

Kornilov’s assault failed, and the Bolsheviks gained majority support in the Petrograd Soviet. Sensing his moment, Lenin returned to Petrograd and, on October 25, 1917, the Bolsheviks seized control of key government buildings, stormed the Winter Palace, and narrowly missed capturing Kerensky -- he fled to France.

With the Provisional Government ousted, Lenin now stood at the helm of the revolution. The next morning, he gave a speech announcing the overthrow of the Provisional Government and reaffirming the Bolshevik promise of “Bread, Peace, Land.”

In Petrograd, the Bolshevik takeover was nearly bloodless, but in Moscow, it was a different story, taking about a week before the city fell into Bolshevik hands.

Some historians argue that the Bolshevik seizure of power marked the start of the bloody Russian Civil War. Let’s understand how the Bolsheviks’ wartime needs facilitated the creation of secret police.

Lenin’s new government had a laundry list of problems, including the Germans advancing into former Russian territories in Ukraine and the Baltics, contention with Tsarist loyalists, and economic turbulence. There were widespread food shortages, rising inflation, rising crime, and general unrest. All useful conflicts to exploit when overthrowing the Provisional Government, but now Lenin needed to restore order, and for a while, the Bolshevik hold on power seemed as tenuous as that of the previous government.

On a personal level, Lenin had not yet achieved complete and total revenge for his brother’s death because remnants of the Romanovs still existed—notably Nicholas II and his family.

Lenin’s immediate concern was to organize a Soviet government. They formed a Council of People’s Commissars, performing functions similar to those of the Tsarist Ministers. There were 15 members, with Lenin as chairman. The Bolsheviks still held the support of the army and workers. His backing in the army was key during the revolution because, in order to achieve regime change, you need the guys with guns and military training.

Interestingly, Lenin repealed the death penalty established by Kerensky, albeit reluctantly. Lenin said, "we are not using the kind of terror employed by the French revolutionaries who guillotined defenseless people, and we will not, for we have strength with us."

Lenin made this statement only weeks after seizing power. Despite this supposed suspension of the death penalty, oppression was on the horizon. First, the non-Bolshevik press was suspended. They started by banning right-wing and liberal news outlets. Later, censorship was imposed on Socialist and Anarchist media as well.

Next, Lenin ordered the arrest of the Kadet, a liberal party whose members were later tried by a Revolutionary tribunal.

The Cheka

Lenin then ended Russia’s short stint without secret police. On December 20th, 1917, the Council of People’s Commissars organized a systemic suppression of political opposition by creating the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage—also known as the Cheka:

Всероссийская чрезвычайная комиссия

(sero - seeskeeya | chez - veh - chinaya | kom - ees - eeya |

In a Latinized acronym you get V, CH, KA . . . and from that you get CHEKA.

Their semi-official mandate was to hunt down and eliminate all counter-revolutionary activity and sabotage. Anybody caught in such activities was brought before a Revolutionary Tribunal and faced punishment, according to author Ronald Hingley. But as we’ll soon find out, many suffered fates far worse than death. The Cheka, like the Okhrana before it, was an investigatory body but was initially authorized to impose relatively light punishments like seizing private property or withholding ration cards.

At the onset, the Cheka had only 120 personnel. They wore grayish-green tunics with pronounced collars, sometimes with shoulder insignia depending on rank. Their uniforms were similar in appearance to Soviet military-style tunics. Over the uniform, they wore long, flowing coats or black leather jackets and carried a Mauser pistol on the hip. Multiple sources noted the Cheka’s affinity for black leather, likening them to the Oprichniki.

In Moscow, the Cheka set up shop in the Lubyanka building, formerly occupied by an insurance company. Lubyanka would go on to host the various iterations of Soviet secret police through their history.

The Cheka centralized their operation from Lubyanka. Regional or provincial Chekas were established throughout the Soviet Union—about 400 of them in 1918 alone. Specialized Cheka agents embedded themselves in the armed forces, transportation services, and among Red Army troops fighting the civil war. Historians debate whether the Cheka was Lenin’s brainchild or that of its notorious leader, Felix Dzerzhinsky.

Iron Felix

Felix Dzerzhinsky was born in 1877 in Ivyanets, in modern-day Belarus, into an aristocratic Polish family.

Felix was raised Catholic and he wanted to become a priest. Unfortunately, Felix had poor grades and was expelled shortly before graduation for radical political activity. He was a devotee of Marx and joined a branch of the Lithuanian Social Democrat Party. He was arrested for distributing revolutionary propaganda and sent to Siberia. He was the kind of bad boy you hope your kids don’t get mixed up with.

Felix spent a year in Siberia before escaping and, over the next two decades, he spent more time in prison or exile than time spent as a free man. In fact, he missed the February Revolution of 1917 entirely due to being behind bars. That revolution forced the Tsar to pack his bags and ushered in the Provisional Government, which released Felix from prison. That decision came back to bite them because, upon release, Felix became a committed Bolshevik and helped plan the October Revolution that forced the Provisional Government out of power.

Felix Dzerzhinsky was a staunch Bolshevik, the very picture of incorruptibility; therefore, he was entrusted with the personal security of Lenin and other party leaders. When the Cheka was created, Felix was appointed its first chief. He worked tirelessly to quell opposition, earning himself the nickname "Iron Felix."

The Russian Civil War

In 1918, Lenin’s government tackled some of their biggest challenges. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk signed that March, established peace between Russia, Germany, and the other Central Powers at the cost of massive territorial concessions. France, Britain, and the United States weren’t happy about Russia bowing out of the war. But Lenin had serious internal matters to attend too.

The Russian Civil War was in some ways a clash of political eras: Russia’s past versus its future. Even when the Bolsheviks took power there will still large populations still loyal to the Tsar; three hundred years of Romanov rule wasn’t going to die quietly. Considering Russia’s sprawling landmass, many of the rural areas had yet to be tamed by the Bolsheviks.

The civil war was mainly fought between the Bolsheviks (the Reds) and an amalgamation of anti-Bolshevik forces (the Whites). Geographically, the Reds controlled Russia’s economic heart—Moscow, Petrograd, and western port cities—while the Whites controlled vast rural areas to the east. Adding to the chaos, former republics within the Russian empire, such as Finland, Ukraine, and Poland, were fighting for independence. There were also the Greens, a peasant militia, and the Blacks, an anarchist group. Basically, anyone who didn’t like the Bolsheviks wanted to fight them.

Lenin claimed, “what we are involved in is a systematic, methodical, and evidentiary long-planned military and financial counter-revolutionary campaign against the Soviet Republic, which all the representatives of Anglo-French imperialism have been preparing for months.”

Lenin was essentially saying the West desired to compromise their security and diminished their sphere of influence. The loss of Finland put Petrograd just 250 miles from a foreign border, prompting the decision to move the capital to Moscow.

Supporting the Whites were Great Britain, France, the U.S., and Japan. We Americans actually sent our very best winter warriors from Michigan to Siberia. Not exclusively Michigan natives, but a unit cobbled together from soldiers across the U.S. sent to Michigan to prepare for the Siberian cold.

The Bolshevik’s enemies dubbed Soviet-controlled territory "Sovdepia.” While the Brest-Litovsk treaty cost Russia significant territory, the land they retained was likely the most valuable, giving them a huge advantage in the civil war with its 60 million inhabitants in the industrial heartland. The Reds used this industrial capacity to out-produce their competition in war material.

Logistics relied heavily on railroads for delivering troops and supplies. Some trains were plated with armor, carried cannons and machine guns for attacks. If the rails were captured, nobody wanted to destroy them since White supply lines could later be Bolshevik lines and vice versa. These steel beasts roamed the Trans-Siberian Railway, unleashing death and destruction. Historian Evan Mawdsley describes the civil war as "a three-cornered struggle. Russian revolutionaries fought Russian counterrevolutionaries, but the national minorities resisted both. The Civil War was about what would become of all the peoples of the Empire." Mawdsley estimates about 800,000 military casualties between 1917 and 1922, with millions more civilian deaths from exposure, wounds, and disease.

Lenin’s Red Army answered his cry to action: "The proletariat must first overthrow the bourgeoisie and win state power, then use that state power to gain the sympathy of the working people."

Red Terror

The Red Terror began in September 1918 after an assassination attempt on Lenin. Revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries were no strangers to terrorism. A woman named Fanya Kaplan approached Lenin outside a Moscow factory and shot him several times, leaving him badly wounded but alive. Separately, a revolutionary killed the head of the Petrograd Cheka. This was possibly a reaction to an announcement made by the Soviet government that it intended to unleash mass terror on the bourgeoisie. Lenin once discouraged the Bolsheviks from using violence, unlike the Socialist Revolutionary Party and the Fighting Organization.

One of Dzerzhinsky’s deputies said, “We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class. During investigations, do not look for evidence that the accused acted in deed or word against Soviet power. The first questions should be: To what class does he belong? What is his origin? His education or profession? These questions should determine the accused’s fate. In this lies the essence of the Red Terror.” It’s interesting that both Lenin and Dzerzhinsky targeted people from similar backgrounds as themselves.

Dzerzhinsky himself declared, “we stand for organized terror. Terror is an absolute necessity during times of revolution. The Cheka is obliged to defend the revolution and conquer the enemy, even if its sword does by chance sometimes fall upon the heads of the innocent.” The Cheka’s Red Terror distinguished itself by spilling more Russian blood in five years than the Okhrana or the Third Section did in decades.

They executed their enemies by hanging, drowning, and firing squads. Shooting was most efficient and preferred, but those were the lucky ones. Cheka agents favored shooting prisoners in the back of the head because it disfigured the victim’s face.

Some Cheka agents carried out executions while drunk or high on cocaine to dull the experience of killing. The more sadistic ones shot prisoners piece by piece: wrists first, then elbows, then other body parts to just to prolong the victim’s suffering.

The Cheka’s prisoners were packed like sardines into filthy, pest-ridden cells that stank like a festering sewer in the summer heat. In winter, they remained packed together left to freeze in the biting cold.

Hingley highlights a report describing severe beatings and mutilations to extract information or, sometimes, for amusement -- sticking needles under fingernails was a Cheka favorite. Hingley leaves out other gruesome methods, saying “[they] need not be catalogued here.” We here don’t shy away from the details. I don’t share this for shock value but to remind us of the pain that human beings are capable of inflicting on each other. Some of the torture methods, as described by Sergei Petrovich Melgunov in Red Terror in Russia (1925), might seem too obscene or even unbelievable, but other sources corroborate his accounts.

Dr. Mudrov, a Moscow physician, was accused of conspiracy and locked up in a Cheka prison. During a typhus outbreak in the prison, he became the de facto doctor. One day, he was summoned by Cheka agents. Days later, his cellmates discovered he had been executed by firing squad for seemingly no reason.

Another prisoner was led to a basement chamber. Corpses lay everywhere—face down, many in just underwear. Blood pooled on the floor. A guard barked, “disrobe!” Trembling, the prisoner undressed. “Kneel!” commanded the officer. The prisoner was shoved onto a dead body. The guard grabbed him by the hair, yanked his head back violently, and smiled as their eyes met, towering over his victim.

A woman was brought to an execution chamber where her husband and family awaited. She was forced to watch them shot in the back of the head. The guard turned the gun on her, paused, then read a pardon of her supposed crimes. Instead of killing her, they made her clean up the blood, bits of tissue and bone of her relatives.

Dombrovsky, a schoolteacher, was tortured when the Cheka found an enemy officer’s uniform in his possession. They suspected his wife of hiding valuables and raped her repeatedly, then tortured her for information—crushing her fingers with pliers and cutting her with knives. She was executed in November 1918.

Some prisoners had leather bands tightened around their heads to squeeze their skulls. Others received enemas of crushed glass, while both men and women were subjected to burning candles held beneath their genitals. Some were made to sit on a hot frying pan or beaten with hot irons.

Psychological torture was common, too. One prisoner was forced to dig his own grave in a cell that already had 27 people buried. When he was done digging, the Cheka officers told him he could live another day.

Execution dates were often postponed, leaving prisoners in constant dread. The Cheka might drag someone out without warning, shooting them where the rest of the prisoners could hear. No one ever knew when their turn would come.

Autopsies of Cheka victims revealed gruesome injuries—cracked ribs, mutilation, decapitation. One witness described a corpse with its head flattened into a half-inch disk.

An exhumation of Cheka victims uncovered women with their breasts cut off and their genitals burned; the autopsy revealed charcoal inside the vaginas of each victim. Other autopsies revealed victims with dirt in their lungs . . . they’d been tortured and then buried alive. Some victims were buried up to their heads and left in the ground. The Cheka would return to this grotesque garden of human heads and find most of them unconscious. The agents would dig them up and provide some kind of medical care until the victim regained consciousness, then they were promptly reburied up to their head -- over and over and over again.

In Kharkov, the Cheka forced their victims to strip naked. They were lowered into deep pits, doused with water and left exposed to the Russian winter until frozen like a human ice sculpture. In some areas, the Cheka executed so many that, when blood-soaked snow melted, little streams of blood snaked down hills.

Execution of the Tsar and his Family

In July 1918, the Tsar and his family were being held in the Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg. The Whites were closing in on the city, and it would have been a symbolic victory for them to rescue the Romanovs.

On the night of July 17, 1918, Nicholas II, his wife, and children—Anastasia, Olga, Maria, Tatiana, and Alexei—were woken up in the middle of the night by their Bolshevik captors. They were led to the basement and shot. Young Alexei, suffering from hemophilia, was killed instantly. But the girls had hidden diamonds in their clothes, which shielded them from many of the bullets. Their executioners then stabbed them repeatedly with bayonets.

And just like that, 300 years of Romanov rule came to a brutal end. Lenin finally had his revenge for his brother’s death.

The Red Terror spared no one—men, women, children.

A Flawed Ideology

In my view, Communism is not theoretically authoritarian, but it inevitably leads to authoritarianism. This is because implementing Communism requires so many deviations from market driven economics and representative government that it takes a high degree of organization and social cohesion to accomplish. Franky, Communism takes massive amounts of energy sustain . . . energy in the form of terror. History shows that coercion, intimidation, and death are often used to motivate the masses to the leader’s cause.

Let me share a personal story:

In 2017, my wife and I visited my aunt and uncle in Illinois for Thanksgiving. They live in a small, classic American town where everyone knows everyone. One night, we were drinking wine, discussing family history, and my uncle mentioned that his uncle had been a communist. When I produced the podcast form of The Cheka, I asked my uncle to elaborate on his uncle’s ties to the Communist Party. Here is what he said:

My uncle Mainey and my father Zeke grew up in Brooklyn, in a largely Russian Jewish neighborhood. Their parents' generation had left Russia to escape both religious and political persecution under the Czar. The political opposition to Czarist rule was communist, in various varieties. Mainey's uncle Jake actually went back to Russia to be part of the 1917 revolution. But he was a Menshevik, not a Bolshevik, and so when the Bolsheviks took power he came back to the USA. Jake’s sister never left Russia and was actually elected to the Menshevik parliament, but never took her seat.

The community was so generally left wing as Zeke told me, but in isolating that left-wing spectrum the Socialists were considered on the right side of that spectrum. The far left were the anarchists.

For Zeke and Mainey's generation the politics were important but no doubt a bit theoretical, until 1929, when the stock market crash and the subsequent Depression made it seem as though capitalism as a system was broken.

Communism was an attractive alternative to capitalism, but the Communist Party’s ardent opposition to the rise of Hitler, Franco, Mussolini and fascism was the greatest impulse to join the Communist Party because the Communist Party mounted the only real organized resistance to fascism.

Communism as a system represented absolute social and economic justice. That it notably failed to deliver these things in the USSR was lost on the vast majority of left-wingers in the 30s. Beyond that, Stalin's murders and exiling of opponents to the gulag were thoroughly hidden from view, especially from the (too-rosy) view of American communists who saw the CP as the answer to the rise of fascism. And as a vision of racial equality in the USA. (In terms of civil rights, the United States Communist Party was a generation ahead of the rest of left political parties.)

Mainey and Zeke both volunteered to fight in WWII. Mainey, though he was much older than the average GI, ended up fighting in the trenches in Italy. When the American army reached Rome, his C. O. took him aside and told him he was too old for fighting and assigned him to write for the American Military Newspaper, Stars and Stripes.

After the war, they all remained nominally communist, in the face of McCarthyism, which actively persecuted anyone with even a loose association to the party. That allegiance became increasingly irrelevant anyway, especially as the truth about Stalinism became more and more evident.

For several years in the late 40s Mainey wrote art criticism for the Daily Worker, using a pseudonym. I never got the chance to ask him about the pseudonym: was it so that McCarhy-ite authorities would not get after him? Or was it so that he could write objectively about artists who were his colleagues without getting them furious at him? I suspect it was the former.

Allow me to reiterate what my uncle said about events that were kept hidden. American Communists were completely unaware of the horrors happening inside Russia. Even if American Communists visited the USSR, those kinds of things would never be revealed. Basically, you don’t know what you don’t know. Does it excuse their attraction to what I see as a flawed ideology? Not really. But can I understand why it was appealing? Absolutely. They saw the Communist Party standing up to Fascism, and they thought it could solve social, economic, and racial issues while not knowing unsavory details about the regime.

The horrific methods I described were mostly carried out during Russia’s bloody civil war, where the Reds and Whites were viciously contending for territory. Some unfortunate people were caught in the Cheka’s grip simply because they shared a surname with someone on the Cheka’s naughty list.

Former members of the bourgeoisie were obvious targets. A person’s former employment or social status—being a landowner or associate of the Tsar—could result in death. People were targeted just for being educated or speaking a foreign language..

Hingley emphasizes this, writing, "not that these guidelines were followed with full consistency—otherwise Lenin himself, as a former member of the gentry class, son of a senior Tsarist official, and a tolerable linguist, would have made an ideal political hostage."

As the civil war wound down, concluding with a Bolshevik victory in 1921, the Cheka started shifting its focus. For example, as they spread further into Russia, the Cheka borrowed some infiltration techniques from the Okhrana and embedded agents within rebel groups to help crush opposition.

In March 1921, at the Tenth Party Congress, Lenin proposed the New Economic Policy (NEP), which allowed a degree of free market trade. This was previously banned and labeled as speculative during the Civil War, but they had to allow some form of capitalism to keep people from starving. A large demographic affected by the war was children. Around 4 million kids were orphaned. The Cheka was tasked with building housing for orphans, and some officers volunteered part of their salary to help fund it.

In 1921, a dismal harvest in the Volga region led to a famine that killed an estimated 5 million people. Some turned to cannibalism to survive. The American Relief Administration, under then-President Herbert Hoover, tried to provide food but the Soviet government was suspicious of Western efforts. American relief workers were harassed by Cheka agents who viewed the aid workers as spies.

By late 1921, Lenin decided it was time to rein in the Cheka. Hingley writes, "Lenin was emphasizing the importance of preserving a greater measure of legality in political police operations."

On February 6, 1922, the Cheka was abolished. Their functions were taken over by a new branch within the People’s Commissariat of the Interior, called the General Political Administration, or GPU. Unlike the Okhrana, which was abolished for not being efficient enough at rooting out political enemies, the Cheka seems to have been dissolved for being too effective.

The Death of Lenin

In late 1922 and early 1923, Lenin suffered a couple of strokes that left him mostly incapacitated and confined to a wheelchair. He died on January 21, 1924m, but even before his death he stepped away from the day-to-day operations of the government. Naturally, the death of such a powerful figure left a vacuum, and everyone expected Leon Trotsky to succeed him. Few expected Joseph Stalin rise to take Lenin’s place.

The GPU

Stalin’s rise to power is something I’ll write in greater detail in part 4. For now, I’ll focus on the GPU for now. The GPU existed by name for only about two years until November 1923, when they added the letter “O” for "united" (from Russian), making it the OGPU. This change happened around the same time the country itself was renamed the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).

The OGPU wasted no time setting up concentration camps and filling them with Stalin’s enemies. They also infiltrated their own Soviet institutions, including the Red Army.

Changes came to the Red Army in 1925 when Leon Trotsky was ousted as Commissar for War and replaced by Mikhail Frunze, who opposed Stalin’s conflict with the old Bolsheviks from Lenin’s inner circle. Frunze also tried to protect the Red Army from OGPU infiltration. But conveniently for Stalin, Frunze had to undergo surgery for a stomach ulcer and didn’t survive the operation. Suspicion immediately fell on Stalin.

Frunze’s physician had advised against the surgery, citing Frunze’s heart condition, which made general anesthesia risky. But Stalin convened a committee of “pliant medicos” (Hingley’s term for doctors who were easily persuaded), and not surprisingly, they sided with Stalin and green-lighted the surgery.

This sets a couple of important precedents: first, that the Politburo could enforce medical decisions on its members. Second, according to Hingley, all the doctors treating Central Committee members were also secret police agents. Imagine if your boss had a say in your medical care?

The OGPU also kept an eye on Russian expats abroad. After all, Russians like Lenin had worked from abroad to topple the Tsar, so the OGPU was keen on hunting down foreign opposition.

Take the case of Vasily Shulgin, a former Duma deputy and right-wing politician who escaped abroad after the revolution. He was contacted by a group called the Trust, an anti-Soviet underground organization, and invited on a secret mission through Soviet Russia. Shulgin didn’t hesitate—he crossed into Soviet territory and met Trust members in Kyiv, Moscow, and Leningrad. After his tour, Shulgin left the Soviet Union illegally and published a book about his experience. The problem? The Trust was fake. It was a front created by the OGPU. Shulgin’s whole trip had been orchestrated, and his manuscript was intentionally leaked to discredit him. The OGPU had many similar front organizations all designed to infiltrate and destroy whatever remained of liberal, socialist, or anarchist opposition by the mid-1920s.

By 1928, the OGPU expanded its operations and violence. They spearheaded Stalin’s economic initiatives under the first Five-Year Plan—collectivization and rapid industrialization. Communism apparently had to be imposed by force. Hingley argues that Stalin’s true motivation behind collectivization was political. Peasants who lived in rugged conditions and commanded their own land and crops were organized into classes: poor, middle, and Kulak. The Kulaks, a landowning class, became Stalin’s prime target.

Kulaks were forcibly expelled from their homes and sent to work on collective farms. Anybody could be labeled a Kulak. Later, in 1942, Stalin told Churchill that the Soviets had “dealt with” around 10 million peasants who were removed from their villages through “dekulakization.”

Those who resisted were sent to gulags—prisoners crammed into railway cars for weeks without food or water, exposed to the Siberian cold. Many died from exposure, starvation, or disease.

Some peasants resisted the regime by slaughtering their livestock to prevent it from being taken by the collective farms, but this contributed to the severity of the famine during the winter of 1932-33. Around 5.5 million people starved to death. During that famine, the Soviet Union still exported nearly 2 million tons of grain to countries like the U.S. for cash to invest in infrastructure.

For industrial workers, life wasn’t much better. Workers had to maintain a high level of enthusiasm. Missing even one day of work could get you fired on the spot. Some supervisors were tasked with policing workers’ productivity and reporting faults to the OGPU.

The gulag system was different from anything Russia had seen before, even under the Cheka. Prisoners were forced into labor, and the OGPU controlled production levels—like timber output, for example.

Public works projects, like the White Sea-Baltic Canal, were built by the OGPU’s labor force. Construction began in November 1931, and by August 1933, about 300,000 prisoners completed the project.

The OGPU wasn’t shy about using torture. The standard practice was to stuff as many people as possible into overheated, lice-infested cells. Occasionally, OGPU officers plucked someone out for a brutal interrogation that included a gauntlet of verbal and physical abuse.

Meanwhile, Stalin expelled Leon Trotsky from the party in 1927 then exiled from the Soviet Union in 1929. Trotsky visited several countries during his exile, but the OGPU eventually found him in Mexico City. He was assassinated with an ice axe in 1940.

Party member Martemyan Ryutin circulated a 200-page document calling for Stalin’s removal. Stalin hoped the OGPU would shoot Ryutin, but instead, they referred his case to the Politburo. Stalin was outvoted, but Ryutin was expelled from the party instead. Ryutin and the rest of the Politburo who stood up to Stalin would later face the full wrath of Stalin’s secret police, the NKVD.

Agents Dismissed.

Sources:

The Russian Secret Police. Ronald Hingley. 1970.

Stalin: Paradoxes of Power. Stephen Kotkin. 2014.

The Russian Civil War. Evan Mawdsley. 2005.

The Life of Lenin. Louis Fischer. 1964.

Vladimir Lenin: The Founder of the Soviet Union. Biographics.

Holidays in Russia

https://russiatrek.org/about-russian-holidays

Felix Dzerzhinsky

https://alphahistory.com/russianrevolution/felix-dzerzhinsky/

Princess Stories: The Secret of Anastasia