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Public archiveOctober Ledger

Institution

The Cheka

The All-Russian Extraordinary Commission to Combat Counter-Revolution and Sabotage was created on 20 December 1917. It was the regime’s political police: arrest without the ordinary courts, hostages, and shooting. Every later Soviet security service was a rename of this idea.

What it was for

Lenin’s government did not trust the old courts, and it did not intend to be judged by the socialist parties it had just pushed aside. The Cheka answered that problem. Felix Dzerzhinsky, a Polish revolutionary, was put in charge. In theory it investigated sabotage, speculation, and armed resistance. In practice, by the summer of 1918, local commissions were shooting people, and in September the government told them to.

Martin Latsis, a Latvian member of the collegium, wrote the sentence that removes the ambiguity. In the Cheka’s own paper, on 1 November 1918, he said the struggle was not against individuals but against the bourgeoisie as a class, and that origin, education, and profession — not evidence of an act — should decide the prisoner’s fate. He also wrote that the Cheka does not judge, it strikes. Both lines are in Documents.

Dzerzhinsky’s widely reproduced statement of 1918 — “We stand for organized terror — this should be frankly admitted” — matches the decree. The specialist book is George Leggett, The Cheka: Lenin’s Political Police. Sergei Melgunov’s The Red Terror in Russia (1924) is the contemporary compilation of methods and local killing. Melgunov was an enemy of the regime. Leggett is the cross-check.

The names it used

People say “KGB” for the whole history. The KGB is late. The killing this archive is about was Cheka, OGPU, and NKVD.

  1. Vecheka / Cheka1917–1922Extraordinary Commission. Dzerzhinsky. Outside ordinary courts.
  2. GPU1922–1923State Political Directorate, folded into the interior commissariat. The “extraordinary” label was retired. The police was not.
  3. OGPU1923–1934United across the new Soviet Union. Menzhinsky, then the rise of Yagoda. Solovki and the early camps.
  4. NKVD1934–1946Yagoda, Yezhov, Beria. Order 00447, the national operations, wartime deportations.
  5. MGB, then KGB1946 onwardRenamed again. The archive stops at Stalin’s death, not because the police stopped.

Who staffed it

The early leadership was multiethnic, in a multinational empire. Russians, Latvians, Poles, Jews, and others sat on the collegium and ran city commissions. Latvians were conspicuously overrepresented in the armed detachments, because Latvian rifle units had already separated from the old army and would fire on crowds that Russian peasant-soldiers sometimes would not. Jews were overrepresented relative to their share of the population in parts of the early apparatus, as they were in the party leadership, and for the same social reasons: literacy, cities, and a state that had already excluded them. They were not the majority of the Cheka, and they were not the majority of its victims.

By the Great Terror the pattern had changed again. The NKVD chief who signed Order 00447 was Nikolai Yezhov, an ethnic Russian. His successor, Lavrentiy Beria, was Mingrelian. The 1937–38 “national operations” shot people for being Polish, German, Latvian, or Korean. A story in which one ethnicity secretly owns this institution cannot survive the institution’s own payroll or its own shooting lists. The numbers and the caution are on the guide.

What it did to bodies

The ordinary method was shooting, often in a cellar, sometimes after a list was published in the press. Hostages were policy. Camps were policy from the September 1918 decree. Torture — beatings, cold, sleep deprivation, sexual violence, and, in southern commission reports, mutilation — is documented as testimony from the civil war and, for “physical methods,” as a Central Committee telegram in January 1939. Those two layers are not the same kind of proof. They are separated on the record, which is the page to read before repeating a list of techniques.

Latsis published execution statistics for the first two years that later historians treat as a fraction of the real toll. An institution that tells its officers not to look for evidence will also under-count what the officers did. Use his article as a confession of method. Do not use his table as a census.

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