What the archive quotes

Vladimir Lenin · 11 August 1918

The Penza hanging order

Comrades! The uprising by the five kulak volosts must be mercilessly suppressed. The interest of the entire revolution demands this, for we are now facing everywhere the “final decisive battle” with the kulaks. We need to set an example. 1. You need to hang (hang without fail, so that the people see) no fewer than 100 of the notorious kulaks, the rich and the bloodsuckers. 2. Publish their names. 3. Take all their grain from them. 4. Appoint the hostages — in accordance with yesterday’s telegram. This needs to be done in such a way that the people for hundreds of versts around will see, tremble, know and shout: they are throttling and will throttle the bloodsucking kulaks. Telegraph us concerning receipt and implementation. Yours, Lenin. P.S. Find tougher people.

Archive RTsKhIDNI, f. 2, op. 1, d. 6898. English text as published from the Library of Congress exhibit Revelations from the Russian Archives. A follow-up telegram of 19 August 1918 calls Penza’s inaction criminal.

Vladimir Lenin · Early September 1918

Prepare the terror

It is necessary, secretly and urgently, to prepare the terror.

Note to Nikolay Krestinsky, early September 1918, published in documentary editions of Lenin’s secretariat papers and quoted in the standard histories of the Red Terror.

Grigory Petrovsky · Early September 1918

End the tenderness

There must be an immediate end of looseness and tenderness. All Right Socialist-Revolutionaries who are known to local Soviets must be arrested immediately. Considerable numbers of hostages must be taken from among the bourgeoisie and the officers. At the least attempt at resistance or the least movement among the White Guards, mass shooting must be inflicted without hesitation. Not the least wavering, not the least indecision in the application of mass terror.

Circular telegram of the people’s commissar for internal affairs, about 2–4 September 1918. Text reproduced in documentary readers of the Red Terror, including the Alpha History translation of the contemporary communication.

Council of People’s Commissars · 5 September 1918

Decree on Red Terror

The Council of People’s Commissars finds that in the present situation it is essential to safeguard the rear by means of terror; that it is necessary to protect the Soviet Republic from class enemies by isolating them in concentration camps; that all persons implicated in White Guard organizations, plots and insurrections are to be shot; and that the names of those shot, and the reasons, are to be published.

The decree is what makes “concentration camp” a Bolshevik administrative term in 1918, fifteen years before the Nazi camps existed. The later German system was not a copy of the Cheka. The word and the practice of locking up a class without trial were already policy here.

Sovnarkom decree On Red Terror, 5 September 1918, signed in the Soviet record by Petrovsky, Dzerzhinsky, and the people’s commissar of justice (Kursky in the usual published text). This archive paraphrases the operative clauses closely; the published Russian decree is the authority for exact legal wording.

Martin Latsis · 1 November 1918

Do not look for evidence

We are not carrying out war against individuals. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class. Do not look in the materials of the case for evidence that the accused acted in deed or word against Soviet power. The first questions you ought to put are: to what class does he belong, what is his origin, what is his education and profession? These questions ought to determine the fate of the accused. In this lies the significance and essence of the Red Terror.

Krasnyi Terror, the Cheka periodical, 1 November 1918. Translated from the text quoted by Sergei Melgunov in The Red Terror in Russia (1924) and reprinted across later scholarship. Translations differ by a clause; the instruction is stable.

Martin Latsis · About 1920

It does not judge, it strikes

The Cheka is not an investigating commission, a court, or a tribunal. It is a fighting organ on the internal front of the civil war. It does not judge, it strikes. It does not pardon; it destroys all who are caught on the other side of the barricade.

Latsis’s writings on the Cheka, about 1920, as cited by George Leggett and in standard quotation of the period.

Felix Dzerzhinsky · 1918

Organized terror

We stand for organized terror — this should be frankly admitted. Terror is an absolute necessity during times of revolution. Our aim is to fight against the enemies of the Soviet Government and of the new order of life. We judge quickly. In most cases only a day passes between the apprehension of the criminal and his sentence.

A 1918 statement reproduced in histories of the Cheka. George Leggett’s The Cheka: Lenin’s Political Police is the book to check it against. Graded testimony rather than archive because printed editions do not all point at the same newspaper issue.

Leon Trotsky · 1920

Repression is a question of expediency

The question of the form of repression, or of its degree, of course, is not one of principle. It is a question of expediency. In a revolutionary period, the party which has been thrown from power, which does not reconcile itself with the stability of the ruling class, and which proves this by its desperate struggle against the latter, cannot be terrorized by the threat of imprisonment, as it does not believe in its duration. It is just this simple but decisive fact that explains the widespread recourse to shooting in a civil war.

Graded as a decree-level primary text because it is the war commissar’s own published doctrine, not because it is a statute.

Leon Trotsky, Terrorism and Communism (1920), chapter 4, “Terrorism.” Full text published by the Marxists Internet Archive from the 1920 edition.

Leon Trotsky · 1920

The sacredness of human life

As long as human labor power, and, consequently, life itself, remain articles of sale and purchase, of exploitation and robbery, the principle of the “sacredness of human life” remains a shameful lie, uttered with the object of keeping the oppressed slaves in their chains.

Leon Trotsky, Terrorism and Communism (1920), chapter 4.

Leon Trotsky · 1920

A weapon against a class

The Red Terror is a weapon utilized against a class, doomed to destruction, which does not wish to perish. The White Terror is the weapon of a historically reactionary class.

Leon Trotsky, Terrorism and Communism (1920), chapter 4. The second sentence is his contrast, included so the quotation is not clipped into a slogan he did not finish.

Nikolai Krylenko · 1918

A reported remark on executing the innocent

We must execute not only the guilty. Execution of the innocent will impress the masses even more.

Cited by Richard Pipes from contemporary accounts of Krylenko as chairman of the revolutionary tribunal. Not a signed decree. Use it as a reported statement with a historian’s name attached.

The Cheka’s own daily · 1918

Stop talking about terror and carry it out

Let us abandon all long, fruitless and futile speeches about the Red Terror. The time has come, not by words but by deeds, to carry on the most pitiless, sternly organised mass terror.

Early issue of the Cheka press, 1918, as anthologized in documentary readers of the Red Terror.

Joseph Stalin · 27 December 1929

Eliminate the kulaks as a class

We have passed from the policy of restricting the exploiting tendencies of the kulaks to the policy of eliminating the kulaks as a class.

Stalin, speech at the Conference of Marxist Students of the Agrarian Question, 27 December 1929. Collected works; contemporary Soviet press.

USSR Central Executive Committee and Sovnarkom · 7 August 1932

The law of spikelets

Theft of collective or cooperative property was made punishable by shooting, with confiscation, or in “extenuating circumstances” by ten years’ imprisonment. Gleaning grain left in a field — taking spikelets — was prosecuted under it. The popular name “law of five ears of grain” or “law of spikelets” comes from that use.

Decree of 7 August 1932 on the protection of the property of state enterprises, collective farms, and cooperatives. Soviet statute book. The paraphrase here is of the penalty, not a speech.

Joseph Stalin and Vyacheslav Molotov · 22 January 1933

Stop peasant flight

The directive ordered party and police organs to stop the mass departure of peasants from Ukraine and the North Caucasus, to return those already on the move, and to arrest “counter-revolutionary elements” among them. Hungry people were to be put back onto the territory that was starving them.

Central Committee and Sovnarkom directive, 22 January 1933, published from the archives and discussed in Anne Applebaum, Red Famine, and in the Stalin–Kaganovich correspondence (Yale Annals of Communism).

Nikolai Yezhov, with Politburo approval · 30 July 1937

NKVD Order 00447

The order launched the “operation for the repression of former kulaks, criminals, and other anti-Soviet elements.” Category 1 was death by shooting. Category 2 was eight to ten years in a camp. Each region received a number. The numbers could be raised by request. Troikas — three officials, no defense counsel — decided the names.

NKVD Order 00447, 30 July 1937, approved by the Politburo the day before. Published from FSB and party archives in the 1990s. English documentary treatment: J. Arch Getty and Oleg V. Naumov, The Road to Terror.

Joseph Stalin, as Central Committee · 10 January 1939

Physical methods are permitted

A cipher telegram in Stalin’s name told regional party secretaries and NKVD chiefs that the Central Committee had permitted “methods of physical pressure” in NKVD practice from 1937, as an exception against “obvious enemies of the people” who refused to name accomplices. It defended the practice by saying bourgeois intelligence services did worse.

Cipher of 10 January 1939, published from Russian archives. Discussed in Getty and Naumov, The Road to Terror, and in subsequent documentary editions. The wording above is a close summary of the operative claim, not a full diplomatic transcription.

Mikhail Tukhachevsky · 12 June 1921

Chemical weapons against Tambov rebels

Order No. 0116 instructed forces suppressing the Tambov rising to use asphyxiating gas against bandits who would not leave the forests, to make the gas cloud cover the woods thoroughly, and to combine this with clearing operations. Hostages and mass shooting were already part of the same campaign’s written orders.

Order No. 0116, 12 June 1921, published from Russian military archives. The fact of the order is archival. The number of deaths caused specifically by gas is not settled.

Politburo of the Communist Party, on Beria’s proposal · 5 March 1940

Shoot the Polish prisoners

The decision approved the shooting of Polish officers, police, landowners, and others held in camps, as enemies of Soviet power, to be decided by an NKVD troika. About 22,000 people were killed at Katyn, Kalinin, Kharkiv, and related sites.

Politburo protocol of 5 March 1940, published by Russia in 1990–92 and in Katyn: A Crime Without Punishment (Yale, 2007), edited by Cienciala, Lebedeva, and Materski.

Nikita Khrushchev · 25 February 1956

The Secret Speech admits torture

Khrushchev told a closed session of the Twentieth Party Congress that confessions in the purge had been extracted by “brutal” means, that Stalin had personally directed the terror, and that innocent party members had been destroyed. He did not treat the civil-war Cheka, the famine, or the shooting of non-party peasants and priests as the scandal. The scandal, for him, was what the party had done to itself.

A primary document and a limited one. Use it as the regime’s own partial confession, not as the outer boundary of the dead.

Khrushchev’s report “On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences,” 25 February 1956. A State Department text reached the West later that year. Russian stenographic publications followed in the glasnost period.

Gareth Jones · March 1933

A Welsh journalist walks out of the famine

Jones, who had been an adviser to Lloyd George and had interviewed Hitler, entered Ukraine and walked through villages after a short official tour. His articles reported hunger on a mass scale, empty cottages, and peasants saying the cause was grain taken by the state. He was denounced by Walter Duranty of the New York Times, who wrote that there was no famine while conceding in private correspondence and in a hedged article that conditions were bad.

Gareth Jones’s press articles of March–April 1933 (Manchester Guardian and other papers). Duranty, New York Times, 31 March 1933, “Russians Hungry, But Not Starving.” Jones was murdered in 1935 in Japanese-occupied Mongolia, in circumstances still argued; the articles do not depend on how he died.

Malcolm Muggeridge · March 1933

The Manchester Guardian reports the famine

Muggeridge, the Guardian’s Moscow correspondent, evaded a travel ban, rode into the famine districts, and filed that peasants were starving as a result of official policy. The paper printed the series. Soviet authorities had already confined most correspondents to a system of minders and denied visas to those who would not cooperate.

Malcolm Muggeridge, Manchester Guardian, late March 1933. Later reflections in his memoirs are secondary to the articles themselves.

Vladimir Lenin · 19 March 1922

People are being eaten. Take the church property now.

Now and only now, when people are being eaten in famine-stricken areas, and hundreds, if not thousands, of corpses lie on the roads, we can (and therefore must) pursue the removal of church property with the most frenzied and ruthless energy and not hesitate to put down the least opposition. The greater the number of representatives of the reactionary clergy and the reactionary bourgeoisie that we succeed in shooting on this occasion, the better, because this audience must precisely now be taught a lesson in such a way that they will not dare to think about any resistance whatsoever for several decades. The Shuya trial, he wrote, should end with the shooting of the very largest number of the most influential clergy, and if possible not only there but in Moscow and other church centers. He asked Molotov to circulate the letter to the Politburo that evening, without copies, and to collect each member’s note of agreement.

Lenin to Molotov for members of the Politburo, 19 March 1922. RTsKhIDNI, f. 2, op. 1, d. 22947. English from the published text of the Russian original (Library of Congress electronic text; Richard Pipes, ed., The Unknown Lenin).

Leon Trotsky · 9 June 1918

Woe to the kulaks while the children die

In our country there are places where the most terrible of Tsars reigns — Tsar Famine. The main enemies of the town and of the rural poor are the kulaks, who are hiding away in their bins and their barns hundreds and thousands of poods of grain while in towns and villages the workers and peasants are starving and dying of hunger-typhus, and their children are dying too. Woe to all kulaks, woe to all speculators who withhold grain surpluses while the workers’ children are dying of hunger-typhus. If the latter will not give it up voluntarily, then all stocks of grain must be taken by force.

Report at a public meeting in Sokolniki, Moscow, 9 June 1918. Published in Leon Trotsky, How the Revolution Armed, volume 1.

Winston Churchill · 1919–1920

The worst of the tyrannies

Of all the tyrannies in history, the Bolshevist tyranny is the worst, the most destructive, and the most degrading. Earlier that year, at the Mansion House, he described the Russian armies then in the field as fighting against the foul baboonery of Bolshevism. In the House of Commons on 4 November 1920 he said the disasters in Russia were solely due to the Bolshevists, and solely due to a very few men.

Aldwych Club, London, 11 April 1919; Mansion House, 19 February 1919. Robert Rhodes James, ed., Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches, vol. 3. House of Commons, 4 November 1920.

Sergei Melgunov · 1924

The Red Terror in Russia

Melgunov, a historian and Popular Socialist who was himself imprisoned and then exiled, compiled Cheka announcements, Bolshevik newspapers, and witness statements into the first major indictment of the terror. He quotes Latsis in full, lists provincial killing, and records methods described by survivors and by White investigative commissions: beatings, mock executions, mutilation, sexual violence, and mass shooting in cellars. He is a participant-enemy of the regime. He is also, for many episodes, still the book later archival historians have to go through rather than around.

S. P. Melgunov, The Red Terror in Russia (1924; English editions exist). Read with Leggett, who checks him against other evidence.